Cherwell ends 31 December 2026.
We'll help you decide what comes next.
Ivanti has confirmed that Cherwell Service Management reaches end of life on 31 December 2026. After that date there are no more security patches, no more bug fixes, no more support. If you are still running Cherwell, you need a plan.
Picture a CIO walking into a board meeting next February having not yet moved off Cherwell. Every question about risk, compliance, cost — they get asked first, and they don’t have clean answers. That’s the situation we’re helping people avoid right now.
CIH Solutions has worked with Cherwell since its early days in the UK. We know where it fits, where it strains, and honestly, where it’s worth keeping for as long as you can. We are also vendor-agnostic, which means our interest is in getting you to the right place, not selling you our flavour of ITSM.
This page is a straight read on what needs to happen before December 2026, and how we can help. Grab the Cherwell Exit Guide, or book a 30-minute call — whichever suits.
- Cherwell
Why acting now matters
A December 2026 deadline sounds like plenty of runway. It isn’t, once you factor in what a migration actually involves.
Cherwell is already on limited support. Once EOL arrives, any vulnerability found in the platform goes unpatched permanently. For organisations in regulated sectors like NHS, local government, financial services and education, running unsupported software on business-critical systems is a direct compliance exposure.
Migrations also take longer than people expect. Scope the current configuration, build the business case, evaluate platforms, migrate the data, rebuild integrations, test, train, go live. Done properly, that sequence is six to nine months of work. Start in Q3 2026 and you are already under pressure.
And every Cherwell customer in the UK is facing the same deadline at the same time. Implementation partners, including us, have finite capacity. The organisations that move early get better attention, better timelines, more options. The ones that leave it late compete for whatever is left.
What your new platform needs to cover
Cherwell does a lot. Organisations that have used it for years have built up processes, workflows, and integrations that run quietly in the background without anyone ever fully mapping them.
Before you evaluate a single replacement, work out what Cherwell is actually doing for your organisation today. These are the capabilities to assess and carry forward.
Unified service desk
A service desk with a shared CMDB is the baseline. Confirm integration across modules is genuinely native, not bolted together.
ITIL process coverage
Cherwell was PinkVERIFY-certified across 11 ITIL processes. Assess how much configuration each candidate needs to match your current maturity.
Incident and request management
Your highest-volume process. Document existing workflows, categorisation, SLAs and escalations. They all need a home in the new platform.
Change management
CAB workflows, approvals, standard versus emergency change, CMDB integration. Test candidates against your actual process, not the demo.
IT asset management
ITAM and ITSM are often intertwined in Cherwell. Check whether replacements offer them as one product or separate tools. That affects cost and complexity.
Configuration management and CMDB
The shared CMDB is one of Cherwell's most valued features. Migration is a chance to clean and rationalise, not just replicate.
Workflow automation
Cherwell’s One-Step Actions let you build complex workflows without code. Automation depth varies a lot between platforms. Test replacements against your real workflows, not a vendor demo.
Knowledge management
Your existing knowledge base took years to build. Confirm any replacement can import it cleanly, and that the interface is simple enough that agents and end-users will actually use it.
Reporting and dashboards
Reporting is under-scoped until day one of go-live. Catalogue active reports and dashboards, confirm who uses them, and replicate them from the start.
Self-service portal
Evaluate the portal from an end-user’s perspective, not an administrator’s. A portal users find confusing will not get adopted. Ticket volumes will show it.
Enterprise service management
If your Cherwell spans HR, Facilities or other departments, be explicit about scope. Some replacements do ESM natively; others need significant work to extend.
How CIH Solutions supports your Cherwell migration
We have worked with Cherwell since its early years in the UK market. We were the first UK and Ireland Managed Multi-Tenant Programme partner for the platform, and have administered, configured, and integrated Cherwell environments across dozens of organisations in financial services, the NHS, education, local government, and manufacturing.
That means we understand what Cherwell actually does inside a real organisation, not what the product page says. We know where the complexity sits, where the risk lives during a migration, and what good looks like on the other side.
Because we are vendor-agnostic, we partner with all the main Cherwell replacement platforms: Halo ITSM, Freshworks, ServiceNow, and Ivanti. Our recommendation is always based on what fits your organisation: size, complexity, budget, and how it actually works. Not on any commercial preference of ours.
Our Cherwell migration support covers the full piece: scoping your current configuration and integrations, mapping what your replacement needs to do, shortlisting and evaluating candidates, building a realistic migration plan, and supporting the implementation through to go-live. We can also continue to administer your existing Cherwell environment throughout the transition, so current service delivery does not suffer while the migration is under way.
Our Migration Approach
Getting off Cherwell before December isn’t the hard bit. The order you run the migration in is where most programmes come unstuck. These five steps are how we keep the exit from becoming the emergency. No rip-and-replace. No vendor-driven timelines.
Scoping and discovery
We start by understanding exactly what your Cherwell environment is doing today. That includes your active workflows, One-Step Actions, integrations, CMDB structure, custom configurations, and any non-IT use cases. Most organisations discover things at this stage they had forgotten they built.
Requirements definition
With a clear picture of today’s environment, we define what the replacement platform needs to do for you. We separate what genuinely has to carry forward from what is legacy complexity this migration is an opportunity to leave behind.
Platform evaluation
We shortlist the platforms that best fit your requirements and evaluate them against your real processes, not vendor-selected use cases. We run structured assessments and help you ask the right questions of each vendor.
Migration planning
We build a realistic migration plan that accounts for data migration, integration rebuilding, user acceptance testing, training, and go-live. We give you a timeline you can actually hit, with a buffer before the December deadline.
Implementation support
We stay on the project through go-live and beyond, with the same team that scoped your requirements at the start.
Frequently asked questions
When does Cherwell Service Management actually reach end of life?
Ivanti has confirmed that Cherwell reaches end of life on 31 December 2026. After that date, the product is no longer supported — no security patches, no bug fixes, no official help. If you are running Cherwell in production beyond that date you are accepting the associated risk knowingly.
How long does a Cherwell migration actually take?
Honestly, it depends — but a realistic range is four to nine months for a mid-sized organisation with a reasonably clean Cherwell deployment. Longer if you have heavy customisation, complex CMDB data, or multiple integration points. Starting now gives you room; starting in Q3 2026 does not.
Do we have to pick one of the platforms you partner with?
No. We’re vendor-agnostic. We work with Halo ITSM, Freshworks, ServiceNow and Ivanti because they’re the platforms we’ve seen hold up in serious ITSM environments, but if your evaluation points elsewhere, we’ll run the migration against whatever you’ve chosen.
What is included in the Cherwell Exit Guide?
A straight read on what needs to happen before December 2026, written for IT directors and service management leads who haven’t moved yet. It covers timeline pressure, evaluation criteria, data migration considerations, and a no-nonsense checklist of decisions to make in the next 90 days. No vendor pitch — and you can read more alongside it at our Cherwell EOL hub.
Can we speak to a real human before committing to anything?
Yes. Book a 30-minute conversation via the button at the top of this page — no hard sell, no scripted demo. Just an honest conversation about where you are, where you need to be, and whether we can help.
Powering next-gen companies
CIHS Support
As an experienced Cherwell partner, we’ve been so successful in integrating Cherwell with complementary technologies that we’ve established formal partnerships with a number of the vendors.
Jira
One of our most popular integrations is Cherwell-to-Jira, which is a true two-way communication.
This mApp now keeps Cherwell and Jira in sync and provides advanced features such as approvals in one system to progress workflow in the other and visual updating of processes in Cherwell.
Check out our video to watch us practice what we preach with our own Cherwell-Jira integration for our Virtual Admin agreement.
Teams Integration
KIA is our Service Management platform agnostic Virtual Agent using Natural Language Recognition and dozens of pre-defined Service Management topics.
The familiar Microsoft Teams interface makes KIA a one-stop shop for internal and external customers to interface with your ServiceDesk.
Handle IT, HR and Facilities requests, knowledge searches, approva
Heed
Messaging across your business allows you to leverage Cherwell as an Enterprise Service Management toolset beyond IT.
Experience state-aware messaging for your Incidents, Problems, Requests, Changes and Approvals.
Dynamic messaging saves time and reduces your overflowing mailbox.
Next step
Pick whichever feels right. Short call if you want to talk it through, or the Exit Guide if you want to read first.
Prefer to talk it through?
A 30-minute call to map where you are and what the realistic options look like from here.
Want the detail first?
Pop your email in and the Cherwell Exit Guide lands in your inbox. No follow-up unless you ask.