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Freshservice vs OpenText Service Manager [EOL] comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Automation Anywhere
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
668
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (2nd), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (2nd), Process Mining (1st), Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) (1st), Agentic Automation (1st), Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (2nd), AI Legal & Compliance (1st), AI Finance & Accounting (2nd), AI Procurement & Supply Chain (1st)
Freshservice
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (6th), Project Management Software (14th), Cloud Management (18th), IT Asset Management (7th), IT Service Management (ITSM) (7th), Configuration Management Databases (5th), IT Alerting and Incident Management (14th), AI IT Support (6th)
OpenText Service Manager [EOL]
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
48
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

Venkat Sivaprakash - PeerSpot reviewer
Management Consultant at Accenture
Has significantly improved document-driven workflows and reduced processing time across finance and HR functions
Automation Anywhere has evolved significantly and upgraded itself to provide agentic AI and AI-based automation solutions for document automation. The product has matured considerably over time. We can create workflows that can call an API. We can include prompts in particular workflows for ChatGPT-related functions, connecting to an LLM and RAG to perform tasks. For document automation, modern features are available to train documents, ensuring high accuracy and repeatability over time. The system is very easy to use. I recently completed a course in document automation, typically designed for people involved in coding and technical aspects. Though I understand coding comprehensively, I don't do actual coding. The course was very accessible. Currently, extensive coding isn't necessary due to the hybrid model incorporating GenAI aspects, low-code, no-code capabilities, APIs, and numerous pre-built objects in Automation Anywhere. The features include GenAI-driven prompting methods and workflow creation capabilities. In these workflows, we can create decision boxes and call APIs without coding. We simply pull objects, drop them, connect them, and add minimal coding when needed. The most crucial aspect isn't coding but rather sizing the automation and fleshing out the details. Automation Co-pilot takes notes and performs automated analysis. It can extract details from videos, summarize conversations, and provide detailed information. During calls, it identifies instructions and performs tasks such as preparing reports and reconciliation. Automation Anywhere can also connect with Microsoft Co-pilot. Through Co-pilot, real-time operations can be executed, allowing direct interaction between vendors and automation through this component.
Raja Farrar - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Service Delivery Manager at Symposiam
Automation and AI have transformed our service delivery and have made IT support faster and more efficient
I always keep up with Freshservice's roadmaps and new features. Freshservice has been very good at listening to feedback and adding those feature requests into their next iterations. I wish they would offer more granular data export options for utilizing in Power BI, along with predictive analytics for capacity planning and SLA breaches to enable more proactive support management and reduce firefighting. While the dashboards are effective, some users find custom reporting limited compared to ServiceNow or Jira. I would also appreciate deeper integrations, especially for niche apps requiring development coding work to enable advanced orchestration. Native integrations for DevOps pipelines such as GitHub Actions and Jenkins, along with stronger API flexibility for complex workflows, would enhance functionality. Although the CMDB and asset management are solid, they do lack advanced dependency mapping compared to other enterprise tools. My wishlist includes automated impact analysis for changes and improved visualization of asset relationships, enabling quicker resolutions from an agent's perspective when alerts come in. I acknowledge that Device42 may enhance this, but it is an extra cost beyond what we already pay. While Freddy AI is excellent for triage and suggestions, some users desire more proactive automation, such as predictive ticket routing based on historical patterns and AI-driven capacity forecasting. Lastly, the pricing tiers might seem rigid for mid-sized teams, so a more granular add-on option for features such as Device42 or pay-per-use for orchestration workflows could be beneficial.
MEKKAB Raouf - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Technology Service Manager & Technology Integration DevOps at Djezzy
Excellent pricing with great change management and service management capabilities
We started with version 9.3, and now we're on 9.6 with the full solution, including the CMS. They have lots of options. They propose a full solution for technology and IT service management. We are a telecom company. We are a leader in the market, and therefore, we need to have all details about our own environment and assets. So far, Micro Focus answers all our needs. I'd advise new users to go directly to the SMAX solution, the last, last version of Service Manager. If they are a technical company or information technology company with engineers and developers, they can use it on-premise. If they don't have such competence in the company, they can ask for the solution on the cloud. It is easily available on Microsoft, Amazon, or Google clouds. I'd rate the product nine out of ten.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"I am confident that we are saving several million dollars as a result."
"Comparing Automation Anywhere with other tools for RPA, in my opinion, it is better because it is easier to use for both the final user and the developer."
"It has helped us to save a lot of FTEs for our solutions that we have provided to our companies. Suppose a job which was done by a group of eight to nine people on a daily basis for 24 hours was taking a lot of time, so we created a bot with Automation Anywhere. It was done with a bot working 24/7. It reduced the numbers of guys required to do that process."
"In some of our use cases, people were spending more than three hours per day just generating reports, and then we created an automation for this and it reduced the time to 30 minutes."
"Automation Anywhere improved our organization since it saved us a lot monetary value."
"Automation is very important if you want to grow your business to the next level because of the transparency, speed, and scalability for any organization."
"We get a significant ROI even though the licensing cost is higher than average. The gains we realize from the initial development make up for it. In the last three years, I estimate we have saved around 2,200 hours of labor. To date, we've saved almost $6 million."
"The overall developer client has an easy-to-use UI."
"Freshservice is very user-friendly and easy to customize."
"We really like the Freshchat widget that allows people to engage with our FAQs on any kind of webpage or web property."
"Freshservice's best feature is its user-friendliness."
"The most valuable feature is the sandbox, which allows me to test new configurations, automations, and workflows before taking them live on the production system."
"The overall functionality of the product is excellent."
"Freshservice has automated a lot of our tasks, including ticket responses and call assignments, which has sped up our operations considerably."
"What I have seen in Freshservice is there's no room for customization. Which works as an advantage in some cases and it works as a disadvantage in others. If you are someone that starts managing your IT services, it is a great solution, because there's no way to go out away from the direction of the system. You have to follow the process as it was intended for the designers of a solution because there's no room for customization or configuration."
"The solution has been very helpful engineering insights into the client's environment. We have been able to manage calls and incidence very efficiently which provides us with a clear understanding of the system warranty and the actions that we might need to take in terms of insights. The system is very dynamic and prevents any kind of over sides which is yours that there is smooth contract management. Also we can easily uphold SLAs and deliver enhanced services without breaching any agreements."
"Its flexibility and ease of customization are its most valuable features."
"The initial setup is easy."
"We mostly use it as a platform for our service desk to streamline and optimize."
"The interface is good, I like it, it's easy to use, it's intuitive and it does go to the mobile app for verification and approvals and it's easy to use on the mobile app."
"The design has been revamped in terms of GUI. The current interface is quite easy to read."
"The return on investment is unquantifiable; I would have thought we have made our money back now in the way it has streamlined processes."
"This is now completely organized and standardized in one workflow, and people work on one ticket, so there's full transparency, no confusion anymore, time to market is much faster, and the email traffic is less."
"Service Manager gives us a single system where everything is centralized in one base."
 

Cons

"Queue management is still missing from the latest version which is a barrier to using the platform to start implementing complex cases where you have parent and child transactions going through multiple stages."
"Better use case management to prevent each development from scratch would be an improvement."
"There are occasional bugs in the system but technical support is quick to address them and deliver solutions, patches, and upgrades."
"They should improve process discovery features."
"IQ Bot requires a significant improvement for its data detection and data retention, mainly from the previously trained documents: regarding the document's format, layout, data contained within the document, the type of data that needs to be extracted."
"I would like them to add OCR features. This would help us deal with unstructured data and we can get more data out of images."
"We'd like to see more AI features."
"Had we had access to the RPA bots in advance, we would have practiced before fully implementing."
"They can improve the search. While searching the inventory, when I cancel a selected category, the search box disappears, and I have to reload the page. It is a small glitch. Currently, we can have only one plan per subscription. All users have to be on the same plan. We can't have two users for plan A and five users for plan B. It might be good if there was an option to have different plans within one subscription so that you can assign each agent to the corresponding plan."
"Freshservice's technical support has issues with delays and translations."
"The analytics could be better."
"You can't implement a complicated delivery workflow. We don't have the same problems with incident and change workflows. It's only for delivery workflow. They have a mechanism for modifying your incident or change workflow. There's a visual interface for that, so there's no reason not to have the same function for request management."
"While the dashboards are effective, some users find custom reporting limited compared to ServiceNow or Jira."
"The only thing I would have against it right now is that the workflow automation is not as granular as we would like it to be, at least for the size of our organization."
"A chat bot needs to be added to the portal."
"The product should look at BCM or ServiceNow and see if there are features that would make nice additions. It would help them stay competitive."
"We aren't able to take emails that come in and turn them into tickets, especially when it comes to attachments. When an email has an attachment, like a screenshot, it is a very cumbersome process, and it does not work very well. I shouldn't have been paying technicians to cut and paste attachments from an email into the ticketing system. It should do that automatically. Other solutions are able to do that. This is something that needs to be improved. Test manager and knowledge management areas are probably amongst the worst parts of this solution. We try to use this solution for knowledge management, but it is not user-friendly. Therefore, it has limited ROI as you need to spend time to try and fully capitalize on the knowledge management system."
"The interface could be better. It's hard to integrate as there's no interface in place for the solutions to interface with each other."
"The user interface was not really good, but they improved it a little bit."
"The stability could be better."
"Same, it wasn't always stable. Actually, I wouldn't call it stable now either."
"I think one area which is the most painful from my point of view is if you need to integrate a lot of the tools, and being able to make that a lot more seamless."
"The product's technical support services need improvement."
"There's a lot of manual work, which is error prone and time consuming, in how the code gets transported from one system to the other."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The current pricing for Automation Anywhere seems a little higher compared to competitors Power Automate or UiPath. Automation Anywhere is perceived as pricey due to the support model charges ranging from 20% to 30% based on the plans."
"We have established a CoE and we take our bot opportunities based on their ROIs. The best ROI opportunity goes to development first. Our ROI opportunities are compliance, profitable growth, productivity enhancements, productivity gains, number of hours the productivity saved, and resources not available that the work can be done by the bot. However, the single most important criteria that we use to measure ROI is how much time does the bot cut down from an analyst's work, as this has the best ROI. E.g., if an analyst is spending a 100 hours of work that a bot can do in one hour, we calculate the 99 hours saved as ROI."
"It is subscription-based. They have different schemes. The price depends on how you negotiate with the local partner or local representative in your country."
"There is a free trial so that they can get an overview, and there are different licenses that are very affordable and can suit every business model."
"The price of Automation Anywhere is a little higher than some of the competition, such as UiPath. However, depending on the use case and other factors we are able to receive some discounts."
"They recently launched a Community Edition, which is okay, but they should have done this a long time ago."
"Automation Anywhere has an advantage in terms of licensing. It is more cost-efficient compared to all other RPA platforms. It is a recommended solution when clients need a cost-efficient automation tool to perform unattended automation."
"If you look at the capital expenditure, Automation Anywhere is number two to UiPath. But if you take a long-term view, on a scalable model of a large number of bots coming out, it slowly goes on to become the costliest tool. There is something they can do about that. The capital expenditure goes out right at the point of buying the tool. For Automation Anywhere, I would need to spend $20,000. UiPath can give me something for $6,000, while Blue Prism will come in at $300,000."
"I can't recall exactly how much we pay, but it is somewhere in the middle compared to the rest of the market. The more we purchase, the cheaper it becomes, and I think the solution offers good value for money."
"The cost at the current timing is very reasonable but as the product gains popularity, I anticipate it might become expensive. Fortunately my customers have been offered a generous discount making it more affordable for me and satisfying both my needs and customers requirement."
"It is good for the price you pay. It has different plans. If you need all features, you need to go for a higher plan. Currently, with the second tier plan, you cannot completely separate the group of agents. So, the agent in each group can see another person's ticket. You also cannot modify the rules based on the viewable, readable stuff and cannot have a custom role in this plan. If you want to do that, you have to go for a higher plan. It works in our case because it doesn't matter if the other group can see our ticket because it doesn't contain anything sensitive. We also didn't need the project or change management features. That's why we didn't go with a higher plan."
"The pricing information is on their website. It's my understanding that their Pro Plan, for example, is around $89/month."
"It is $34 per license, per agent. Currently, we don't see any add-ons at extra fees."
"We're basically paying about $100 USD per agent per month."
"Freshservice's licensing costs are pretty good, and it has different categories of pricing based on what modules and features you choose, which gives a lot of flexibility."
"The solution has an annual licensing model."
"The license is not cheap."
"I would say that identify your requirements and pay for the support to implement and test those requirements, and then hope that you did a good job because the cost of their service is fairly expensive."
"HP Service Manager has moderate pricing."
"Micro Focus Service Manager is a little cheaper than other options. You have to pay a monthly subscription fee."
"I pay for Service Manager on a yearly basis, and the price is reasonable - I would rate it five out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Construction Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Construction Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business162
Midsize Enterprise86
Large Enterprise565
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise16
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise38
 

Questions from the Community

How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It depends on your use case. Is it simply to automate a couple of processes? Is it to augment a human team? AA is ver...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
From my experience using AA tool, it depends on the applications that you want to automate, because there some applic...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It is a highly preferred RPA tool. You can check my Automation Anywhere Review to know more.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Freshservice?
I cannot comment much on the pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Freshservice as it was already preset up in my co...
What needs improvement with Freshservice?
I believe Freshservice can be improved by offering more advanced features and customizability. In terms of improvemen...
What is your primary use case for Freshservice?
In Freshservice, I typically use it for day-to-day tasks. A quick, specific example of how I use Freshservice in my d...
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Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise, Agentic Process Automation System (Now Certified for WorkSpaces)
Flint
Micro Focus Service Manager, HPE ITSM, HPE Service Manager
 

Interactive Demo

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
Sinclair Broadcast Group, Western Carriers, Judson University, Golf Canada, Travix, Proxama, Paymentez, Ready Auto Transport
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