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BMC Helix Discovery vs Device42 comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

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

BMC Helix Discovery
Ranking in IT Asset Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Device42
Ranking in IT Asset Management
8th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management Databases (3rd), IP Address Management (IPAM) Tools (4th), Data Center Infrastructure Management (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the IT Asset Management category, the mindshare of BMC Helix Discovery is 9.0%, up from 8.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Device42 is 6.4%, down from 6.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Asset Management
 

Featured Reviews

Shirish Kamalapurkar - PeerSpot reviewer
Very stable, fast, and powerful with valuable inventory management features
Our company uses the solution as an inventory tool for customers. The solution discovers your infrastructure and lets you know what servers and network devices are on it. It gives you details about applications, hardware, and software such as how they are connected and the dependencies between…
Krishna Gopal Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
Good reporting and discovery capabilities, and helpful for understanding device dependencies and asset management
Its price needs to be improved. It is more expensive than some of the other tools out there. Their support is good, but their knowledge base should be better. There should be a common area where we can search and find solutions for our queries or issues. We don't always need to raise a ticket with the Device42 support team. Currently, if you want to ping devices, you need to log into Appliance Manager. This feature should be available on the Device42 side. You should be able to use the ping utility without logging into Appliance Manager. The features that are there in Appliance Manager should also be available on the main Device42 server so that you have more control on one screen. You don't need to switch to another portal, but it is not something critical.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that it is easy to install and deploy."
"I like the artificial intelligence and machine learning that it uses in the solution. Because once the solution discovers all the assets, all the infrastructure, and all the dependencies between services, it learns how it works. So, it learns to predict when a problem is going to happen. It becomes predictive in an autonomous way."
"The initial setup is simple."
"The solution is very stable and powerful."
"Accuracy and clarity are vastly improved for the service lines."
"It is a scalable solution."
"The data models are the most useful aspect of the solution."
"It is agentless, which means you don't have to install anything on all the different pieces of hardware that you are looking to discover."
"The solution has some very good relational capabilities that show us how certain devices relate to each other and how some of our environment actually works together."
"The import/export for bulk operations is a valuable and good feature."
"Device42 has everything in one place and links it altogether. This helps when you need to figure out where things are going wrong, where things are happening, or how everything is linked together."
"The topology layout is the most valuable feature."
"The way the solution’s automatic IT asset discovery and inventory functionality works is you set up a discovery job, then you can schedule it to run. I schedule all of the runs daily at different times so nothing is interfering with anything else. It's nice to know that you can set up the scan, schedule it, and sit back. You can check them every day and make sure everything ran, making sure nothing had errors, then you're good to go. Anything new is going to automatically be discovered, which is nice. It takes some of the stress off because you don't have to know, "If this team opened new servers, we need make sure now it will automatically pick them up." It is one less thing to worry about. It gathers a lot of data points."
"The asset inventory is great because previously we had devices all over the place. We have been able to do multiscans to find devices that we didn't know about, which was great."
"Previously, our company had a lot of issues keeping track of all the data centers and the inventory, as well as the purchase orders. All of these were managed by other tools. The good thing about Device42 is that it can be used for all this together. We don't need to spend time checking many other tools and files."
"One of the most valuable features in my experience is the precise tracking of hardware devices and their locations registered in the solution. The solution allows to determine the exact placement of assets based on the building maps and the room details. This feature has allowed us to gain upper hand on the customers and provide them with a great satisfaction because they can visually see the arrangement of their assets within the organisation or building."
 

Cons

"There are certain limitations in the mapping feature of the solution."
"I would like to see the ability to scan some of the newer cloud platforms. I know that BMC has them on the roadmap, and they are coming soon, but they can't come fast enough. Being able to scan more of GCloud, Alibaba Cloud, or whatever the public clouds that our customers are buying, we need to make sure that Discovery can find them as well."
"If the dependency maps can go live and we can work through the process with a click, we're reaching the stage where issues are identified and mitigated. It would be ideal if we could utilize it to reduce vulnerabilities or address any other feedback."
"The support from BMC Helix Discovery can improve, it takes a long time before we receive any feedback. It can take days to months sometimes."
"What would make BMC Helix Discovery better is if it had more client-side discovery features, for example, printers and desktops. Right now, it's focused more on data center discovery, so if it had additional features focused on the client-side discovery, that would be great. In the next release of BMC Helix Discovery, I'd like more client-side discovery features such as desktop discovery, printer discovery, and other IP-based client-side discovery features. The solution can discover desktops and printers, but there's still room for improvement on the client side."
"The CMDB could be improved. Getting data from the CMDB is the greatest challenge."
"The solution's scalability is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are needed."
"The monitoring tools could be more stable."
"My biggest problem with the product is the upgrades. First, we have to do them manually and second, not this last time but the time before that, we actually had to build a new VM to deploy the solution again. We had to back it up and then restore it to the new version. That was inconvenient."
"Configuring rPDUs in the data center for Device42 required us to add multiple discovery jobs. The rPDUs were referred to the ISPDUs and daisy-chained. They would automatically assign a unique SMP port, but Device42 didn't allow SMP ranges, so we had to create a discovery job for each rPDU individually. We submitted a feature request to mitigate that."
"Device42 is a main part of our processes. We need reliability, not only in terms of the data but with the solution itself. It's really difficult when we have 10 minutes of Device42 downtime because none of our teams can work for those 10 minutes, and it's more time lost if there is longer downtime. An improvement would be to have a cluster implementation of Device42 to have high-availability and ensure that we don't have downtime in case of failure."
"The architecture is a bit old-fashioned. Device42 is on one server, appliance, virtual machine, or guest. We are loading more into Device42 than it can hold. Overloading Device42 with REST API calls or tasks will directly impact every aspect because the server will be too busy to answer requests."
"When servers have two network adapters, automatically discovered will be only one network card because the other one is a backup. Device42 has some problems to find the other connection."
"The only thing which I have noticed so far that is not good is that we had an issue with some reporting from the tool, reporting we had to export. We couldn't do it in the way we wanted to, so we tried to reach out to their support but it took pretty long until we understood how we can manage the reports. We still haven't received a complete explanation of what we need to do and how to do it."
"If I want to delete an asset from a cabinet it does take a while. And if I'm doing it in bulk — say, for example, if we have one cabinet that has 20 servers in — if I want to remove all 20 servers, I have to do them individually, which is a bit time-consuming. If there were a way that I could just bulk-remove everything from there, that would definitely save some time."
"The resources table needs a few tweaks. We've raised a feature request for this. When you click on resources, it opens up the entire CMDB or the entire data stored in Device42. If that could be customizable, it would be good. We should be allowed to add our own columns to that by writing a script or something like that. There should be an option to add or limit whatever we want."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I've heard that the solution was expensive earlier but is now much cheaper than its competitors."
"The licenses are very complex and quite costly."
"Operating cost is actually high compared to other products, actually. It's a little expensive only, but it's very good than other products."
"It's not a cheap product. But the benefits it delivers is that it's a fair price."
"BMC is available for a reasonable price compared to ServiceNow — it's half the price."
"We are on a three-year agreement with BMC Helix Discovery to use the solution. There are not any additional fees other than the standard license."
"You need a license to use BMC Helix Discovery. The license is paid yearly, though I have no idea how much it costs."
"We have a perpetual license for the solution."
"The product cost is low. It is quite cheap."
"On a yearly basis, our licensing is $10,000. However, our license is now nearly full with devices. We need the next bigger license with 5,000 devices, which will cost us $19,000. We pay for a set of licenses, a maximum number of devices, and a maximum number of IP addresses. We have the smallest amount of features, which is enough for us at this time."
"We pay $100,000 per year."
"It's in the top-three most expensive solutions in terms of cost, but it has all the features that are needed."
"Functionality-wise, Device42 is on par with industry standards, but price-wise, the solution is expensive. I'm rating the pricing for the solution as eight out of ten."
"I am not involved in its pricing, but I have seen their plans during a discussion with the customer. For 500 servers, they were asking 50,000 USD. The cost of BMC Discovery was less than half. For the same thing, they were charging only 10,000 USD. Its pricing needs to be improved. As compared to other discovery tools, such as BMC Discovery and ServiceNow Discovery, its price is a little bit higher."
"Our licensing costs are on a yearly basis."
"The problem with using other vendor, like BMC, is the pricing. The price is so horrible and nobody wants to pay this money."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
17%
Energy/Utilities Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about BMC Helix Discovery?
I like the artificial intelligence and machine learning that it uses in the solution. Because once the solution discovers all the assets, all the infrastructure, and all the dependencies between se...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BMC Helix Discovery?
I would rate the pricing around four out of ten. It is quite expensive.
What needs improvement with BMC Helix Discovery?
The improvement I want to see is a reduction in duplicate records. In comparison with SCCM, SCCM does not have any duplicate records, which is a significant advantage. Discovery should adopt a simi...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Device42?
Based on the use case for Device42, I found the solution a bit expensive. However, when you look at the support and the industry standards, Device42 was on par with the industry. Device42 is a litt...
What needs improvement with Device42?
The product must provide AI features. It would be very useful if I could create datasets or queries from an AI interface.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Discovery, ADDM, Atrium Discovery & Dependency Mapping
No data available
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Windstream Communications, News UK, Mercator Group, Wageningen University and Research Centre (WUR)
Computershare, Concur, Doosan, Fitch Ratings Inc., Fujitsu, HomeAway, Jasper Wireless, Mercedes-Benz, Square, Twitch, UCSB, Zayo Group Inc.
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC Helix Discovery vs. Device42 and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,158 professionals have used our research since 2012.