ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus vs Instatus: Which is a better fit?

Kiel H.: My name is Kiel, and I am a MIS director with Children's Hope Alliance. We are a children's healthcare, foster care, and adoption nonprofit. We have about nine locations throughout Western North Carolina. My position revolves around managing the IT department and strategy, making decisions on software and where we're going as a company with technology, as well as maintaining the infrastructure throughout the organization. And I would give ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus a five on a rating of one to five. Before using ManageEngine, we were using a combination of tools. One of the big ones was Spiceworks, which ends up having free and paid-for version. And we found that either paid-for or free, it was limited in its functionality and the scope of what it could do, the types of tickets that it could take, the connectivity into other data sources, and the way that you took tickets, you ingested tickets, and it ended up causing us issues with workflow, taking longer than expected to get information on tickets. And the interface we found was slow occasionally. When I came on board, we decided to move to ManageEngine to resolve those issues along with just the wide range of functionality, the additional functionality that it provided and the integration with both additional first-party and third-party applications. We chose ManageEngine. I've used them previously with other products, not specifically ServiceDesk Plus, but a couple of their other products. And I found that when it came to cost, and features, and functionality, and the ratio between the two, they always had a good value in them. But beyond being a value product, they also had just fantastic customer service and support. We always got responses even if occasionally they took a little bit to get back to us. Researching, they were always accurate in the things that they came back to us on and were willing to go the extra mile and follow up. And their products, we've found work together well. So if you have additional ManageEngine products or you've used them before, they do a very great job of integrating and allowing you to work in other products while in a different product, which saves a lot of time and energy when you're trying to make changes on the network or do things to users that you can do it directly from a ticket. That integration right there, since we had already purchased ManageEngine products, I think, was key to our purchase of it and has really stepped up our game and reduced our time to resolve on our tickets significantly. Yeah. Getting started on ManageEngine was very easy, not only from getting quotes and the back and forth that it takes when it comes to pricing and questions, but after we decided to make the purchase and committed to that, they essentially assigned us an account manager, and they were very willing to talk with us about what deployment looks like and gave us a bunch of resources on getting started. They really helped us at the beginning figure a few things out because there was a lot to it. Beyond that, the documentation was great on their support sites. Walking you through exactly what you need to do from beginning to end to deploy the product, how to configure it, and for us, being a small IT team in a decent size nonprofit, having that assistance, that support really made it key in us getting this system off the ground and into production as quickly as possible. All right. If you're thinking about getting ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, my suggestion with it is look at some of the other places in your organization first where you might need some tools and see if there are comparable ManageEngine tools that you could do buy with it. I think that ServiceDesk Plus by itself as a ticketing system is fantastic, and the fact that it has some additional things like Change Management, Project Management were great for us because we were able to bring a lot of those tools together in one pane of glass. But I think that the thing that made it go from a good ticketing system up to just a fantastic tool all around these every day is the integration with other things. Every piece of additional software that you're buying with them, it just snaps into that interface, and they talk together and you're now not having to go to yet another tool to resolve a problem. And that was a piece that integration that really kicked us over the edge and really upped our game. And if you are deploying, the other thing I'd say beyond that is you will want to really dial in on the licensing, really get an idea of what it is you need for your organization and talk with them about it, about your needs to find the right one because I think for us that had we not had some discussions, we might have gotten a lower license than what we actually need, and you can always upgrade, but I think right out the gate, choosing the fit that fit best made it so that we didn't have any problems and we didn't come up short when we deployed.