Who Are The Top ServiceNow Competitors?

The latest data indicates that ServiceNow currently holds an 11.2% share of the enterprise service management (ESM) market and caters to a minimum of 20,930 companies in the United States and beyond.

In response to the impressive growth trend in this market, the other players have intensified their efforts to compete with ServiceNow. In fact, some ServiceNow competitors have already successfully positioned their products as formidable alternatives to ServiceNow's offerings.

So if you have been wondering whether there are worthy alternatives to ServiceNow, this guide presents them.

We begin with a brief look into why ServiceNow sits clear at the top of this market, often miles ahead of the closest ServiceNow competitors.

What has contributed to ServiceNow becoming so popular?

With its wide range of ITSM solutions in the market, ServiceNow has proven outstanding in these 6 key areas:

1. All-in-one solution: Besides managing IT-related tasks, ServiceNow unites all organizational departments by integrating their functionalities into a single system. This way, IT professionals and managers from different departments can seamlessly interact and automate processes and various operations.
2. All-size business solution: ServiceNow is ideal for businesses of all structures and sizes. It offers a single-user portal where you can manage all internal and external teams, each with their profile, with no limit to its scalability.
3. Security and compliance: Besides the HTTPs and provisional encryption plugins, ServiceNow also offers resolution insights and ensures compliance.
4. IT Asset Management: Users can send enquiries from any device anytime through self-service portals within ServiceNow. 
5. Quality IT services: ServiceNow ensures that your IT investments align with your goals and encourages faster adoption of IT technologies for a streamlined operation, including efficient handling of service requests.
6. User Interface: ServiceNow offers an intuitive user interface that simplifies complex IT tasks, making it easier for IT professionals to manage services.

Also read: The Main Benefits of ServiceNow

The leading ServiceNow competitors

At IT Companies Network, we identified and analyzed top ServiceNow competitors based on comparable common products, customer experience, customer satisfaction and public reviews. The list is based on specific products that ServiceNow offers, and not necessarily the companies behind the products.

Based on this criteria, the following emerged as the leading ServiceNow competitors for this list:

• Jira Service Management
• SAP Solution Manager
• BMC Helix
• Freshservice
• Cherwell Service Management
• Zendesk
• Manage Engine’s Service Desk Plus
• SolarWinds service desk
• Ivanti Neurons for ITSM
• SysAid ITSM

Related: The Top ServiceNow Partners

We deemed it prudent to incorporate a section providing an overarching overview of user feedback regarding each of these ServiceNow competitors. This particular section aims to offer insights into the strengths and weaknesses of these alternative platforms or products in comparison to the ServiceNow platform.

1. Jira Service Management (JSM)

JSM is Atlassian's ITSM solution designed to assist organizations in managing and optimizing their service desk operations. Through JSM, IT and service desk teams can receive, track, manage, and resolve customer requests and service requests efficiently.

Key features

• Sophisticated service management software: JSM’s integration with Jira software makes it easy for service desk teams to escalate software-related tickets.
• Automation: The automation suite makes it possible to automatically assign new tickets to the agent with the most bandwidth. All resolved issues are closed off and an automatic resolution alert is sent to the customer, providing a clear ticket board.

Pricing

The pricing structure includes a free option, along with paid plans including the Standard, Premium, and Enterprise. Costs are determined based on the number of agents. The free plan is limited to accommodating only up to 3 agents, whereas the other plans have a specific price associated with each.

What users say about JSM in comparison to ServiceNow

• Ease of use: Most users find JSM simpler to set up and configure, thanks in part to its user-friendly user interface, compared to ServiceNow.
• Service management: The reporting and analytics capabilities of JSM are often regarded by most users as limited, compared to the more detailed and elaborate features offered by ServiceNow.

2. SAP Solution Manager

SAP Solution Manager, also called SolMan, is an integrated central support and application life cycle management suite by SAP SE. It is designed to help organizations manage and optimize SAP and non-SAP systems from design and implementation to operation and maintenance.

Key features

• End-to-end life cycle management: SAP provides project, requirements, business processes, testing, change and release management capabilities as a single suit, enabling easy collaboration, development and ongoing maintenance..
• Comprehensive documentation and knowledge management: SAP supports system configuration, knowledge transfer and troubleshooting.

Pricing

SAP solution Manager comes in handy with all SAP systems, making it free of charge for license holders.

What users say about SAP Solution Manager in comparison to ServiceNow

• Performance: ServiceNow meets most business needs compared to SAP Solution Manager.
• Ongoing customer support: ServiceNow’s customer support is considered better by most users.
• Product feature updates and maintenance: Most users consider SAP Solution Manager’s maintenance and feature updates better than ServiceNow’s.

3. BMC Helix ITSM

BMC Helix ITSM is a service management platform that leverages AI and automation to drive agile service experience across multi-cloud platforms through a centralized service desk.

Key features

• Comprehensive knowledge management: BMC provides life cycle knowledge management articles and built-in knowledge-centered service (KCS).
• DevOps Service Management: BMC provides improved quality of service and agility with the help of ChatOps, integrated agile swarming dev tools such as Azure DevOps.

Pricing

Pricing details are available on request, but they also offer a free trial.

What users say

• Features: BMC Helix ITSM can automate a wide range of tasks. However, it is difficult to scale, integrate with other systems and is quite unstable, as reported by most users. ServiceNow, in comparison, is stable and highly scalable.
• Pricing: Most users agree that BMC Helix is quite expensive than ServiceNow, yet ServiceNow offers more intuitive capabilities.
• ROI: While ServiceNow users are pleased with their ROI, BMC Helix ITSM users do not mention their ROI.

Also Read: Service Desk vs HelpDesk

4. Freshservice

Freshservice is a service management platform that automatically updates the CMBD of hardware, software and SaaS solutions by offering a real-time view of the IT infrastructure.

Key features

• Integration: Pre-built integrations with popular tools like MS Teams, Jira and Slack, making it a complete suite.
• Comprehensive SaaS management: You can track usage, cut expenses and avoid siloed SaaS subscriptions with usage tracking and unified discovery.

Pricing

The pricing includes a free trial and a paid option. The free trial offers 60% faster ticket resolution with virtual agents and 59% deflection in tickets with the help of AI bots.

The paid options include Starter, Growth, Pro, and Enterprise packs. All the packages are charged per agent and differ in the scope of services included in each.

What users say

• Performance: Freshservice's analytics reports update after a certain period, making it difficult to pre-build reports until the data you need is available. This is contrary to ServiceNow, a one-stop–shop for IT professionals to automate their tasks and workflows based on real-time analytics.
• Ease of use: Freshservice’s simple user friendly interface is considered easier to use, set up and customize than ServiceNow.

5. Cherwell Service Management

Cherwell Service Management is an advanced service desk solution verified for eleven ITIL processes.

Key features

• Codeless architecture: A drag-and-drop functionality allows for easy customization and workflow automation.
• Seamless Integration: Users can easily share extensions, enhancements and custom applications without altering the system’s main functionalities.

Pricing

The pricing plans include a bundle that is exclusively designed for AWS, where you can choose between Tier 1 (50 concurrent users) and 2 (100 concurrent users), with a 30-day free trial.

For the private offer, you can request flexible payment terms.

Also Read: Strategies for Optimizing Costs in AWS Cloud

What users say

• Documentation: ServiceNow’s documentation is more detailed and knowledge-driven than Cherwell’s. ServiceNow offers robust reporting, documentation tools and knowledge-sharing tutorials.
• Customer support: While Cherwell offers customer support via online messaging, ServiceNow’s support is more reliable as users can make enquiries through multiple messaging channels with centralized management.
• Pricing: Cherwell ITSM is regarded as cheaper, hence more suited for small businesses.

6. Zendesk

Zendesk is an award-winning customer service management platform that provides SaaS products related to sales, support and communications. It connects agents and customers through a centralized platform.

Key features

• Diverse customer service channels: You can meet customers wherever they are, from social media, through AI-powered chatbots, to email engagements.
• 360-degree customer view: Zendesk offers visibility into a customer’s journey, stories and interactions. 

Pricing

Zendesk has two pricing models (Zendesk for service and Zendesk for sales). Each model comes with a free trial and a paid plan. The paid plans include Team, Growth, Professional, Enterprise and customized plan (enterprise plus) packages.

The Team and Growth plans do not support any add-ons and have quite a limited number of features compared to the Professional, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus packages.

What users say 

• Communication channels: Zendesk’s customer support is more effective as it integrates social media with email support into a centralized support solution. ServiceNow offers no social media support integration within its support ecosystem. 
• Ticketing features: Zendesk’s ticketing system is more efficient than ServiceNow as it allows service agents to create a defined set of solutions to common problems, shareable to all colleagues.
• Learning curve: Zendesk is more flexible than ServiceNow as it offers Android and IOS versions of the solution besides the cloud version, while ServiceNow supports Windows and cloud versions.

7. ManageEngine Service Desk Plus

ManageEngine Service Desk Plus is a comprehensive asset management and service desk solution. It offers an integrated console from where IT teams and managers can monitor and manage their assets and customer requests.

Key features

• Built-in project management: Service Desk Plus provides a coordinated and collaborative environment for service agents and project teams. They can easily escalate project enquiries within the ITSM and project management integrated space.
• Advanced automation: You can easily automate routine tasks and workflows with the help of automation scripts, task templates and rule-based workflows.

Pricing

The pricing includes a free trial and paid options for cloud and on-premise. The paid options include Standard, Professional and Enterprise packages.

The standard package accommodates IT helpdesk only, the professional package accommodates IT helpdesk and asset management tools, and the enterprise package accommodates IT helpdesk, asset management, change management, and project management.

Also Read: Cost Comparison Between Cloud and On-Premise

What users say

• Ease of use: Compared to ServiceNow, ManageEngine Service Desk Plus is easier to set up.
• Features: Service Desk Plus is more user-friendly and flexible. But the ServiceNow features, including scalability, stability, change and problem management, offer a better experience.
• Support: ServiceNow’s support team is more knowledgeable and effective.

8. SolarWinds Service Desk

SolarWinds Service Desk is an AI-powered IT service management platform. It’s designed to meet employees where they work, delivering a self-service and employee-focused resource utilization, sharing and tracking platform.

Key features

• Simplified site reporting: SolarWinds provides a global ticketing trends view. This allows a regional performance view of each team and encourages teams to learn from each other’s success.
• Internationalization and localization: SolarWinds supports over 40 languages globally, allowing organizations to customize their service desk operations based on locations for a personalized experience.

Pricing

The pricing options include a 30-day free trial and paid options. The paid options include an Essentials package for growing teams, an Advanced package for mature IT organizations, and a fully customizable Premier package.

The subscription fees are billed annually at the start of the contract.

What users say

• Ease of use: SolarWinds is easier to install, configure and customize than ServiceNow due to its codeless automation and user friendly interface.
• Features:SolarWinds' analytics and reporting feature is considered shallow compared to ServiceNow, which offers detailed reporting for quick analysis.

9. Ivanti Neurons for ITSM

Ivanti Neurons for ITSM is a process-driven service management solution. It provides enterprise-capable request fulfillment and end-to-end service management throughout the service delivery cycle, with automated messaging services.

Key features

• Ivanti Neurons for ITSM agent: Combines Knowledge management, mobile support, self-service portal and virtual support assistant to provide automated responses and personalized experiences to end users.
• Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) integration: Provides comprehensive visibility into configurations, issues and endpoint devices through a unified view of ITSM and UEM data.

Pricing

Ivanti Neurons offers a 30-day free trial and a paid plan whose pricing details are available on request.

What users say 

• Ease of use: Ivanti is user-friendly to IT professionals and end users, while ServiceNow is more inclined towards IT professionals.
• Limitations: ServiceNow functionalities are quite complex for small-size businesses with limited ITSM requirements, while Ivanti is quite limited for enterprise-level businesses.

10. SysAid ITSM

SysAid ITSM is an IT service management solution that helps organizations to gather data from diverse sources, analyze and classify it to drive ticketing, asset management, incident management, service requests, and IT service automation.

Key features

• Industry benchmarks and the SysAid community:  SysAid provides a resource-laden online community where you can weigh your ticket management performance against other SysAid customers worldwide.
• Diverse communication channels: SysAid supports email, chat and self-service portal.

Pricing

Based on ITIL's best practices, SysAid offers various subscription-based pricing plans for Help Desk, ITSM and ITSM AI, plus a free trial. The individual costs are based on the scope of services that the user organization would like to utilize.

What users say 

• Features: Functionalities and capabilities such as reporting and analytics are too limited for enterprise-level business, contrary to ServiceNow.
• Ease of use: SysAid ITSM is easier to install, configure and use. Its user interface is designed for ease of use, allowing quick access to key functionalities.
• Affordability: SysAid is more affordable than ServiceNow.
• Customer support: The customer support’s responsiveness for SysAid and ServiceNow are satisfactory.

ServiceNow competitors: conclusion 

Even in a market where there is a clear dominant player, it’s possible to find alternatives that suit your needs and budget. This is the case for this market. ServiceNow is no doubt far ahead of the rest of the competitors. But this does not mean that the other players have nothing good to offer. As we have seen, these ServiceNow alternatives can compete with and even outperform certain products offered by ServiceNow.

Start by defining your needs and budget, as this will lay the foundation for evaluating the different players in the market, including ServiceNow.

Ultimately, your decision should be driven not by popularity alone, but by the level of alignment to your unique environment.