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Appium vs ServiceNow comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Appium
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
30
Ranking in other categories
Mobile Development Platforms (7th), Regression Testing Tools (6th)
ServiceNow
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
223
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (1st), IT Asset Management (1st), IT Service Management (ITSM) (1st), Rapid Application Development Software (2nd), No-Code Development Platforms (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

Appium and ServiceNow aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Appium is designed for Mobile Development Platforms and holds a mindshare of 3.1%, down 5.2% compared to last year.
ServiceNow, on the other hand, focuses on IT Service Management (ITSM), holds 16.6% mindshare, down 24.9% since last year.
Mobile Development Platforms Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Appium3.1%
OutSystems12.0%
Mendix10.4%
Other74.5%
Mobile Development Platforms
IT Service Management (ITSM) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
ServiceNow16.6%
JIRA Service Management7.6%
BMC Helix ITSM6.0%
Other69.8%
IT Service Management (ITSM)
 

Featured Reviews

AS
Independent consultant, at OpenText
Efficient mobile testing with intuitive emulation capabilities and a user-friendly interface
Initial setup for Appium (especially for iOS) is not beginner-friendly.Consumes too much of your host machine's resources, potentially slowing down the machine.Appium Inspector often lacks deep insight or crashes with certain app builds. Improve test flakiness by intelligently selecting robust self-healing locators,simplified installers, better documentation, GUI-based config management,smart wait mechanisms and better failure logs.
SP
General Manager at sPerception IT
Adopting flexible workflows with customized automation delivers measurable benefits
There are things that I would like to see improved in ServiceNow, such as the pricing, as it is a very costly solution compared to other tools. Additionally, its presence in the local market is very limited; in Pakistan, for example, I don't see any vendor or distributor of ServiceNow available. They need to increase their sales spectrum globally so people can easily access them and engage them for client meetings and more. From a functionality perspective, the features in ServiceNow are acceptable as, at the moment, the ITSM modules rank highly, being 13 plus Pink Elephant certified, which is a good aspect to have. When providing advice to users, I would suggest they consider making strategic decisions about their per user pricing since it is very high. In our region, people normally start with 5 to 10 users, but the per user price is quite steep. Moreover, ServiceNow does not charge based on data uploaded or downloaded, so they should reconsider their pricing and data policies to align better with the financial capabilities of the region.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The solution helps with test automation. We focus mostly on Java."
"It's an open-source solution with a very large community and available documentation."
"The automation part is extremely helpful in streamlining our processes."
"The most valuable feature is that it's easy to launch applications. Appium has everything that Selenium has. So many good tools support Appium. We can take some Excel sheets and use them to fill out the text box that's in there. We can also take screenshots of failures."
"Appium's wide support of programming languages is valuable."
"It runs completely flawlessly and seamlessly every day."
"Appium's best feature is that it supports multiple frameworks."
"It can be used with different programming languages."
"ServiceNow is great. You can download the data into Excel and you can basically create reports. It's very flexible."
"ServiceNow is easy to use."
"I have seen ROI from ServiceNow, as the client I mentioned earlier is achieving ROI for adopting this cloud-based technology."
"The impact of ServiceNow's self-service portal on IT staff dependency levels has shown a dramatic improvement."
"It has more extensive features as compared to the other competitors."
"Will give us better control over asset management and technical debt once we can centralize all contract information."
"We consider the integration capabilities of the solution with other tools to be a valuable feature."
"ServiceNow offers a range of ITSM, IT incident management, and PRCPs."
 

Cons

"It breaks down."
"An application developed on the Unity platform, such as a gaming application, objects are moving in that case. Interacting with those elements is still lacking in Appium. Appium doesn't have the internal library to play with the Unity platform. That is a huge lack right now."
"One thing which can be really helpful is that there is some kind of a recorder made available rather than scripting everything."
"Appium has problems with automated validations following iOS updates, causing us to have to validate manually."
"I rarely use Appium nowadays because I'm now at the managerial level, but the last time I used it, whenever I selected and clicked on an element, Appium was very slow. I tried to debug it, but I still couldn't find the problem, so this is an area for improvement in the solution. Another area for improvement lies with the connector and server. For example, the effort to get into the local machine sometimes causes the emulator to become slow, which then leads to failure in testing, and this is the usual issue I've encountered from Appium. An additional feature I'd like added to Appium in its next release is being able to do automation in iOS without using XPath and the name of the element. In Xcode, you can use previous UI tests for detecting elements, but in Appium, you have to use Xpath and the element name instead of being able to directly put the X-UiPath, which is what you can do in Xcode. In iOS as well, sometimes the element doesn't have a name or a path. Sometimes, there's also no element."
"It needs to accommodate applications that use React.js and AngularJS."
"We need some bug fixes for nested elements."
"If it had more facility for configuration it would be a spectacular solution."
"There is a need for bug or error tracking in ServiceNow."
"It's a little expensive compared to other tools."
"There is inherent complexity with this tool because of the number of things that it can do."
"There are Virtual Task Boards in the tool in the latest releases. There are many of them in the Scaled Agile Framework. There is some room there for improvement. It's really quite promising but, at the same time, it could be improved and I believe it will be improved soon."
"Data access is a bit difficult, where you sometimes wish you had a relational database for some queries. The flexibility of data access in general is a bit on the low end. Of course, there is flexibility in some ways, but when I need a certain combination of data for some report, it can become a challenge."
"The product’s standard user experience is not the best."
"Its setup is tough. It takes a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience."
"It's moving at a very fast pace. It is difficult for developers or engineers to keep up with it. That's the only issue."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's open source, so it's completely free."
"The price is good for people to be able to make a favorable decision for the value."
"The solution is open source so it is free."
"We found out that we could explore features of the solution for 30 days trial. We can switch to a permanent license later if we want."
"The pricing of Appium is fine."
"Appian is open-source, which is not licensed."
"Appium is free and open-source."
"It's completely 100% free, and there are no hidden fees."
"The solution is priced for medium to enterprises sized businesses. However, it is expensive compared to competitors."
"They could be more competitive with their licensing."
"It is very expensive because it is a big organization. You have to pay for additional things."
"Some time ago it was expensive, but large companies have special contracts. It's enterprise prices, and we're talking about millions per year."
"The product cost is higher than that of other vendors."
"It is fairly expensive."
"In Tunisia, the companies find the licensing costs to be expensive."
"Isn't pricing always too much? We really do chafe at the ITIL licensing. ITOM is also pretty expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise19
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business55
Midsize Enterprise35
Large Enterprise164
 

Questions from the Community

Do you recommend Appium?
I do recommend Appium. It is an open-source solution and completely free of charge. We use Appium and Appium Studio as our base for any type of mobile automation for testing. It has a great interfa...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Appium?
My experience with Appium from a pricing perspective is favorable due to it being open source, making it a cost-effective option.
What needs improvement with Appium?
The deployment process and configuration are quite complex and require improvement. Additionally, the wait time functionality could be enhanced as I experienced failures with longer wait times.
Which solution is better for developing non-ITSM applications: OutSystems or Service Now?
The short answer is that OutSystems is far better for 2 main reasons. Firstly, with Service Now you are locked into that platform for good. The business model is to lock in and then keep pumping th...
Would you choose ServiceNow over Microsoft PowerApps?
Hi Netanya, I will choose ServiceNow because ServiceNow is a very good tool compared to Microsoft PowerApp. Because ServiceNow has a very strong module (Performance Analysis) reporting which will ...
What do you like most about ServiceNow?
The solution has a user-friendly interface.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nuvizz, Coupa Software, Eventbrite, Evernote
AAA, AstraZeneca, Becton, Dickinson and Company, Broadcom, Christus Health, Epicor, Equinix, GE Capital, Intuit, KPMG, Loyola Marymount University, OshKosh, Quantas, RedHat, Royal Bank of Scotland, Swiss Re, U.S. Department of Energy, Safeway, Yale University, and Zillow    
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