Freshservice vs Atlassian Jira Service Desk - the low touch IT Service Management product war

The world of IT Service Management products is quite polarized. The product landscape is grouped into two distinctive bands. On one end of the spectrum, there is the low touch, quick setup and quick time to value products like Atlassian Jira Service Desk and Freshservice. On the other end of the spectrum are the more complex, high touch, so called serious ITSM products, the prime example of which is ServiceNow, which also the undisputed leader for the segment. Both these categories of products cater to very different customers. While the complex ITSM tools are meant for the typically large organizations with complex but mature IT environments and processes, the quick setup, relatively simpler tools are targeted at the midmarket and SMB customers, with relatively simpler processes.

In this post, I will compare at a high level the two pre-eminent contenders of the quick start ITSM tools market, namely Freshservice developed by Freshworks, and Jira Service Desk developed by Atlassian.

First, the user experience

With Freshservice, the Menus, especially the Admin Menus are well laid out, a flat structure and legible. The navigation is intuitive. However, they should start thinking about sub-menu designs, given how complex an ITSM product may become (take a look at ServiceNow).

The Dashboard is intuitive, providing a view of Open tickets by priority and status, as well as providing leader-boards and achievements.

The tickets page has filter options, but not very configurable. New tickets are very far away on the top right. The form builder and workflow editors are also easily navigable. However, more complex conditional logic such as on association objects cannot be done.

With Jira Service Desk, the menu navigation is not as smooth as Freshservice. However, the filters follow the same basic construct as the rest of the Atlassian applications, such as Jira issues tracker, and therefore, is more feature complete. The workflow and form-builder functionality is rudimentary as compared to FreshService.

Functionality.

In terms of functionality, Freshservice is ahead of Jira Service Desk, with well developed, Problem Management and RCA, Change Management and Major Incident Management, Task definitions. FreshService is 6 ITIL process Pink verified compared to (FreshService additionally includes asset management and service catalogs on top of Jira Service processes – incident management, change management, problem management, request fulfilment). While that is not the right way to compare things, we should look at customer value after- it still means that customers are missing out on Catalogs definition, a consumer centric approach to IT Service.

In terms of performance, I did not find issues with either product, and they can both scale quite well.

Clearly the sophistication level of Jira Service Desk in terms of feature options is lower than Freshworks. However, Jira marketplace is much more active than Freshworks. This is a big advantage for Jira, as is other Jira product ecosystem integrations. Does additional features correlate to additional benefits? It depends, and I will discuss that in the conclusion.

Price

Price point for Jira Service desk is much lower than FreshService, with list price for Jira Service Desk starting for $20 per analyst license per month, compared with FreshService (with the most desired features, such as catalogs and SLA’s) coming in at 40/month, all figures for the cloud version. Jira has tried to infuse machine learning into the equation, in order to gain some quick differentiation, however, I think that would be a wrong track to take in their current product state. They are clearly not setting the right objectives.

Conclusion

Jira Service Desk Product team really needs to pull up their socks and bring in their A game, if they have to compete for larger market share. They are currently acquiring customers based on the popularity of Jira issues tracker and their synergies, as well as their price point, but this may not last long. Specifically, what is missing is a very solid, comprehensive understanding of ITIL processes and their applicability and usefulness. There should be a way for customers users to look for additional IT service optimization opportunities, once they outgrow the current set. Jira just does not provide that option. The ultimate goal of the IT Service Management products is to build a low touch product that provides similar functionality and corresponding benefits as a ServiceNow does. Freshservice seems to be on the right path here.