ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus offers ITIL compliance, billing capabilities, mobile apps, and reporting features. It's cost-effective and continuously updated for improved functionality, meeting user demands despite minor limitations.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus | 1.2% |
| ServiceNow | 10.7% |
| JIRA Service Management | 6.0% |
| Other | 82.1% |
ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus is designed primarily as a ticketing system to facilitate helpdesk and customer service operations, managing issues, incidents, and demand management. It replaces traditional email systems with a streamlined ticket system and records hourly rates along with technician time on tickets, maintaining a comprehensive ticket database. While mobile management is possible, development and configuration require significant resources. Efforts are focused on enhancing automation and simplifying reporting by centralizing data in one location, reflecting a customer-focused approach.
What are the most valued features?In industries like IT support and service management, ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus acts as a robust ticketing and helpdesk system, managing incidents and support requests efficiently. Its mobile app capability, though resource-intensive, is beneficial in sectors requiring flexible operations. Efforts in enhancing automation will further strengthen its application across diverse sectors, from service management to tech-focused organizations.
Brickman Group, SVP Worldwide, Chicago Tribune, Sodexo, Constellation, Lowcost Holidays, Telesur, PayEx, Quintiq, Moblize, Oman Air, Intelligent Hospital Systems
| Author info | Rating | Review Summary |
|---|---|---|
| VP of IT at a aerospace/defense firm with 51-200 employees | 2.0 | I use ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus as a ticketing tool, but it lacks automation and integration capabilities. While cost-effective and functional, it requires manual processes. Other tools like Atlassian and ServiceNow offer better automation for workflow management. |
| IT Support Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees | 3.5 | I found ManageEngine good for a stable, scalable help desk once configured, processing many tickets. However, its low cost is misleading; it lacks a GUI, requires significant expert development, and has terrible support, leading to high hidden costs. |
| Managing Director at CYSOFT | 4.0 | I value the product teams' responsiveness and continuous improvement, making this a highly customizable and scalable solution. Support is great, but I'd like more templates for immediate use. I rate it an 8 out of 10. |
| Head of Information Technology and Systems at a consumer goods company with 1,001-5,000 employees | 4.0 | I have used ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus for five years. Its reporting, stability, and support are very good. I recommend it, though I wish it had project management. Setup was average. |
| Pre-Sales Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees | 4.0 | I find ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus a stable helpdesk solution with valuable ITIL compliance and billing features. My main concern is the lack of a cloud version and scalability limits, earning it an 8/10. |
ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus works fine as a help desk software and is relatively inexpensive. Our company has had it for a while. It does what we need it to do, despite some limitations. It provides a database for all tickets.
ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus could improve on workflow automation features. Currently, everything is very manual, and there's no automated resolution of tickets. The emails ingested to create tickets are messy. It would be beneficial if it had more chat features, like bots to create tickets. The system lacks integration capabilities.
I have been with the organization for about eight months, however, the solution was already in place before I joined.
It seems to be fine and hasn't crashed or experienced major stability issues.
I believe it is a scalable solution and does not have scalability issues.
Their tech support has been talking to us about expanding features like integrations with Microsoft Teams. They've been helpful in changing the portal's buttons and moving things around.
Neutral
I have used ServiceNow, Atlassian products, PagerDuty's solution, Microsoft Service Manager, and Remedy by BMC. Atlassian offers more workflow automation and bots. ServiceNow, while requiring a lot of configuration, provides greater automation.
The solution was already set up before I joined, so I don't know much about the initial setup process. It was already integrated with emails to ingest tickets.
Having a ticketing system prevents confusion, however, it doesn't really automate anything and just holds data.
ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus is cheap, around two or three on a scale where ten is the most expensive.
We just use it because it's more trouble to rip it out than to replace it with a more expensive tool. I would not recommend this product to others. If budget is a concern, it might be suitable but it doesn’t excite. Hence, I would rate it a four out of ten.
We use ManageEngine for our help desk. I believe ManageEngine has the ability to do mobile management, but it is underdeveloped in that area. There is no GUI. We were a bit interested in the potential to go down that path later on. It was cheaper than other solutions and we would already be using ManageEngine for the help desk. It did not end up panning out for use as a mobile management solution.
Configuring the product is a lot of work and we spent a lot of money on training our own people to get it done. Sometimes we would even hire contractors to make it work the way we wanted. We ended up deciding to move away from using the product for mobile management and just went with the Microsoft solution.
We use several different instances of SupportCenter Plus. We are taking steps to automate everything. We were very people-heavy in some of our business processes. Instead of email — which a lot of departments had been using in the past — we moved to ManageEngine to have a ticket system and so that everything is in one place. Before working with this solution, our poor admins had to go through months and months of emails trying to put together a sit-rep (situation-report) on a particular action item. Now they simply search for the ticket number and they are good to go.
So the use case is as a ticketing system. The capabilities are there for using it as a device manager, but the dev and training/education for our own people to get it to be a true enterprise solution would have been exponential.
So far, we have only really been using it for a help desk. There are some other things that it can be used for but at this point, we have not deployed additional functionality.
The business model for ManageEngine is to rely on low cost as a means to lure customers. Their product does not cost as much as their competitors, but the reason being is they expect you to either pay them or pay somebody who's been educated in their classes to get the job done. It is cheap for a reason, and the reason is their business model. They are appealing to businesses that are bottom dollar businesses.
The problem with that business model is that it can build unrest in the development department because the tech crew will not know how to use the tool. Then a boss will tell them to figure it out. It all happens because it is cheap rather than because it solves a problem. Ultimately you are going to either pay more money for a good product in the end or you are going to have people getting frustrated and leaving the company because they could not get the work done. ManageEngine, in my experience, fosters that type of environment. It doesn't have an "easy button," a graphic user interface, ease-of-use, and ease-of-dev —the product does not have any of that. You get locked into finding an SME (Subject Matter Expert) to develop it out for you. One way or another you end up paying more and taking longer to get it done.
Our head sysadmin guy was the one that really got into the product first. His feedback was that there was no GUI and everything was pretty much done on the command line. The support stunk because they either did not give you the information you needed or they just did not bother to answer. He had a hard time with it.
What I think ManageEngine really needs to add to make the package more valuable are free, automated classes. They will not do it because of the business model. But if they would make it easier to access the training, I think you would see a lot more use of their products.
At the company, our main system admin brought ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus into the company at the end of 2019. I do not know the exact date because I was not part of bringing in the solution or developing it. I am just using it. We expanded use to other departments after development reached a certain point. We have only been using it for nine months, tops.
When using it predominantly for a help desk solution, it seems like an absolutely fine product. We really put it to the test. In eight months, we probably have processed 80,000 tickets. We are killing it with volume. We use it for everything where we require a help desk solution. We have separate instances for a few different things. The IT ops instance spans several departments. So we have IT ops interaction as well as support for end-users. One thing we do not have is an issue with stability.
Really, I think that the thing could be scaled forever and ever. That is one of the beauties of the product. But again, you are limited by the level of education your SME has in developing the solution or the amount of time the person you assigned to take care of it has to build it out for you.
Rating the technical support on a scale of one through ten where ten is the best, I would have to give it less than five. The head sysadmin guy had nothing nice to say about the technical support team and made it clear that he thought it was a very, very poor service. Honestly, I would go as far as to rate it a one or two maybe. Two is probably the right rating because rating it as one would mean tech support just does not even make an effort to interact with you. It is a step above that.
ManageEngine is always going to be the lowest priced product in the categories they compete in. That is their business model. You are never going to find what they can do for you for cheaper because their business model is to price low. That is their whole shtick.
The reason why the mobile management component of ManageEngine is so cheap compared to its competitors is that you kind of need to have an expert on staff or pay ManageEngine to do it for you. That is where they make up their money. In the end, we are now kind of a mixed bag of different assets because ManageEngine was difficult to work with. Instead of feeling it out, our company has been expanding Microsoft 365 usage since COVID hit. Going toward 365 was one of those "easy button" solutions. It is a little bit extra money, but it gives us everything we need and we know it is enterprise-ready. That coupled with Microsoft's compliance center, or their blueprint center, basically everything is done for you. You just need somebody to walk through the steps depending on the direction you want to go. The Microsoft API has worked with everything. They make it easy for you and we love it.
There is reporting built-in with the compliance center, too. Everything is automated. You just need somebody to develop it once and it just goes out to the right people. It is fantastic. I have been using Microsoft 365 for years before I was in this position. When you are dealing with small businesses, your job is to pretty much work yourself out of business via automation. That is what I did with Microsoft 365. In all the small businesses I serviced, I ended up putting in the Office 365 solution. Then we went from on-prem stuff to where we did not need it anymore and got everything on the cloud. Microsoft does everything for us.
So we evaluated the advantages of ManageEngine and Microsoft for device management and made the decision that made the most sense for us to get up and running without a lot of trouble. We still use ManageEngine, we just do not see the point of using it for everything it is capable of.
On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate ManageEngine on the whole as a seven. You can not really beat the price. Once it is developed, it is reliable and it is scalable. It is everything you need it to be once it is developed. You have just got to develop it correctly and it is not easy to do.
The advice that I would give to others looking into developing ManageEngine for themselves is either to educate yourself before you initiate taking on the solution or give yourself plenty of leeway time if you have to promise deadlines. In our experience, there were lots of surprises, and that is a part of the development you can depend on.
The product teams are continuously on the products trying to improve them. If, for example, I ask for a change to be done in the software, the chances are in the next release it's going to be done and incorporated. It's this personal touch that I like. They take care of each and every customer.
ManageEngine is pretty good with support. They're pretty good but there's always room for improvement. There should be more templates that users can utilize immediately.
We have been using ManageEngine for five years.
It is stable but it's software, it's written by people and it's bound to have bugs. There's a support team there to deal with them.
It's scalable. I've seen it deployed on small installations and I've seen it on larger installations.
It's being used daily.
We work with all sorts of sized customers. They have small, medium, large, government, and non-government.
Their support is very good.
We've used CRMs in the past which we weren't happy with because they were not at all customizable.
We deployed it internally. I have an engineer.
It's simple to install. It takes a day or two depending on the installation. It's the customizations and the workflows that take time. If the customer can't convey to you how he perceives his workflows, then you have an issue there. That will delay you.
Know what you were want to do with it. ManageEngine has two or three solutions similar to SupportCenter. Therefore you must know your workflows and what you want to achieve. That's the most important advice I would give to someone considering this solution.
I would rate it an eight out of ten. An eight because there is always room for improvement.
In the next release, I would like to see more templates so customers who don't have the money to go to a consultant can start utilizing it immediately. They should have more templates and more ready-made situations that can be deployed immediately.
We are currently using the 2014 version of the product. We use ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus to handle issues, incident management, and demand management.
We have found the reporting in this product to be very useful. Also, the configuration is very easy.
I would like to see some kind of project management or portfolio management in a future version.
We have been using ManageEngine Support Center Plus for about five years.
ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus is a very stable product.
Their technical support has been very helpful and is very good.
The initial setup was about average. It was not easy, but not very complex either. The setup took about 10 days to complete.
I would rate ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus an eight out of ten. I would recommend this product very highly.
Our clients use this solution to implement their helpdesk and customer service.
The most valuable features are the ITIL compliance and billing.
You can record the hourly rate and how much time is spent on each ticket, along with the technician that worked on it.
All of the ManageEngine products have mobile applications.
There is no cloud-based version and it would be helpful if it were available.
Insurance and banking features need to be improved.
I have been using ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus for almost two years.
This is a very stable product.
This solution is scalable to a point. Having more than four hundred technicians will cause some delays.
The technical support for ManageEngine is good enough.
The initial setup is straightforward. If you need any help with installing the tool then you can find instructions on the website.
The deployment can take between three weeks and a month, maximum. It depends on the customer requirements including the workflow and the service form.
Sometimes, after installing, the clients will figure out things that they didn't realize in the beginning. This requires going back and making changes to the configuration.
Between two and three technicians are suitable for deployment and maintenance.
The licensing fees depend on different criteria, including options and sizing.
I evaluated Freshservice and I found ManageEngine to be better for customers who want a simpler interface.
I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.
