Centreon vs ServiceNow IT Operations Management comparison

Centreon and ServiceNow are both solutions in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category. Centreon is ranked #22 with an average rating of 7.3, while ServiceNow is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.5. Centreon holds a 2.9% mindshare in IM, compared to ServiceNow’s 2.3% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of Centreon users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of ServiceNow users who would recommend it.

Centreon

Read 28 Centreon reviews

4,581 Views
2,889 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

ServiceNow IT Operations Ma...

Read 40 ServiceNow IT Operations Management reviews

3,304 Views
2,571 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Centreon

ServiceNow IT Operations Ma...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

Centreon and ServiceNow IT Operations Management compete in the field of IT monitoring and service management. ServiceNow appears to have the upper hand due to its comprehensive suite and strong integration capabilities.

Features: Centreon provides scalability and flexibility, allowing monitoring of unlimited devices, easy setup for monitoring, and integration of third-party modules without extra licensing costs. ServiceNow IT Operations Management offers advanced discovery, service mapping, and an end-to-end IT service management and automation suite.

Room for Improvement: Centreon users seek better API functionality, enhanced UI responsiveness, and improved cloud monitoring. They also desire more insightful reporting and integration options. ServiceNow users call for improved scalability of Discovery and Service Mapping features and expanded AI and automation capabilities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Centreon's deployment is mainly on-premises with hybrid options. It has mixed technical support reviews and calls for 24/7 support for critical issues. ServiceNow offers flexible cloud deployment and strong integration. It receives suggestions to improve the discovery process, with robust support despite a higher cost.

Pricing and ROI: Centreon is cost-effective for smaller organizations, leveraging an open-source model with optional premium modules. It yields good ROI through reduced mean time to resolution. ServiceNow is more expensive, appealing to enterprises for its comprehensive features. Its price is justified by the integration and functionality it offers to larger deployments.

To learn more, read our detailed Centreon vs. ServiceNow IT Operations Management Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Centreon vs. ServiceNow IT Operations Management

March 2025

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Helped 842,767 peers since 2012

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

Centreon

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

22nd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (25th), Cloud Monitoring Software (18th)

ServiceNow IT Operations Ma...

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

10th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Event Monitoring (1st), Cloud Management (9th), AIOps (4th)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Centreon is 2.9%, up from 2.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow IT Operations Management is 2.3%, down from 2.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

IT Infrastructure Monitoring

Featured Reviews

Caulson Chua

Technical Services Manager at ATS

With fewer staff resources, we can identify and address issues before the system goes down

Centreon's most valuable features are preventative maintenance and cost-efficiency. Everything is monitored, and we get a log before the system fails. We have an opportunity to fix the issue and avoid downtime. The dashboard is user-friendly, and the solution provides good reporting and visibility. The layout is straightforward. You can click on the drop-down list to select the server you want. The anomaly detection feature helped us reduce our average resolution time by 30 minutes to an hour.

Read full review

RichardG

Account Manager at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

Effortlessly blends management systems for comprehensive infrastructure insight

ServiceNow IT Operations Management brought together Intune and SCCM or MECM really well. It provided out-of-the-box integrations, requiring only minimal effort, typically a couple of days, to massage those systems into a seamless operation. Additionally, the performance analytics of ServiceNow was especially beneficial for setting thresholds, aggregating, and correlating infrastructure data.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I really like the filtering capabilities of it. You can easily tell what's critical next to what's okay, the state of the services. It's very easy to get the whole picture quickly."

"The most important feature is that it permits us to receive alarms if there is an incident within the infrastructure. The feature I love the most is the reporting feature, the MBI (Monitoring Business Intelligence) which permits us to send advanced reports to our customers in PDF format or in Doc format. We also deploy Centreon Map which gives our customers intuitive views of their information system."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to build an abstraction of service visualization. You can add services to an entity called Business Activities and you can see the state of these activities."

"The most valuable feature is that we can manually configure everything we need. After it comes inside the interface of Centreon, you can display it. Because the interface is quite user-friendly, you can manually configure the configuration very deeply, which is very pleasant and useful because you can monitor and see everything on your service list, dashboard, or MAP. The most useful feature for me is that you can create your own plugin and monitoring query."

"The single-pane view provides us a view of all of our network infrastructure, and it is one of the most important tools that we use to see the status of our customers' networks."

"I can't point to one valuable feature. All of Centreon is good."

"What I like most about Centreon is that it is very flexible and customizable, based on the user and/or business needs. Centreon is very flexible when it comes to monitoring parameters. We can use scripts found on the internet or scripts created by our infra/apps team. Also, the data visualization features are very simple and straightforward, yet very informative."

"We use the remote server functionality on some customer sites, because you can see an independent view and are not dependent on a single connection. If you have branch offices or bigger office outside your headquarters, you can use remote servers because if the connection is broken or disrupted, then remote server will obtain a view of your environment and server availability. This is a good point against using other solutions. Because with other solutions, you don't have this feature. Then, you will be blind if you have this type of a situation."

More Centreon pros

"ITOM communicates information about incidents and maintains them. It handles tickets change, manages service networks, and reduces IT service downtime for the organization."

"The most important features of ServiceNow IT Operations Management are the discovery service mapping and orchestration."

"I like the tool's CMBD connection with Discovery. The solution is also flexible."

"The auto remediation feature has been most valuable. They have also introduced an AOP feature of ServiceNow that we are keen to explore."

"ServiceNow IT Operations Management is beneficial for the discovery of all CIs in our environment."

"As a product, ServiceNow IT Operations Management is pretty strong, and it can discover non-IP devices."

"The most valuable features of ServiceNow IT Operations Management are ease of use, intuitive design, and ease of management, and its based on IT practices which are good."

"It provided out-of-the-box integrations, requiring only minimal effort, typically a couple of days, to massage those systems into a seamless operation."

More ServiceNow IT Operations Management pros

Cons

"Centreon is very bad with auto-scanning. It's very monolithic software. It doesn't have microservices and it only has basic clustering. You cannot, for example, have six or seven nodes for Centreon's cloud processes."

"Release management and quality of testing need improvement, because with each major upgrade we have many issues coming in. Then, it takes several minor upgrades to get rid of them."

"The most important issue is the capability to interconnect with other systems. It already exists for some of them. For example, the Stream Connector is something we use to populate data in another system. This kind of facility for connecting should exist for all products that it makes sense to have connected to a monitoring solution."

"I would like to see a better UI, one which is more responsive."

"I went through a few things with them to do with Centreon MAP, to do with active polygons, being able to draw an area and make that active. The functionality was in the older version of Centreon MAP and in the new version, which was a complete rewrite, they dropped it."

"I would like them to improve their documentation. When I faced some issues, I was looking for more documentation on the Internet. There is official documentation on Centreon's website, which sometimes is useful. Sometimes it is not very useful, as you cannot find the information or enough examples of configuration. The answer for me was to contact the support, who helped me, but I was not able to find all the information by myself on Centreon's website. A Centreon community or blog would be helpful."

"Sometimes, when the GUI and some of the search fields are being reset, and I return to the page, then I have to set them again. Therefore, some improvement on the UI and the filtering is needed."

"The Home view could be improved by adding customization functions that allow users to change the size of the widgets for a more uniform layout."

More Centreon cons

"Regarding ServiceNow, there is room for improvement in terms of customization, particularly in the area of self-customization."

"ServiceNow could be more prescriptive on how customers can leverage some of the benefits."

"I would like more manual issues to have automated report-facing options."

"We are facing difficulties with service mapping of CIs from the end users, and are seeking help from third-party vendors."

"It should have better integrations with other solutions."

"The out-of-the-box reporting feature is not as user friendly as other tools."

"There are not enough apps in the app store to expand functionality. There should be more made available."

"The setup and deployment could be simplified, and the pricing could improve."

More ServiceNow IT Operations Management cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Centreon is an open source product. Thus, there is no need for licensing."

"You purchase a package. You have a support contract (there is also a platinum support contract) and it is per module. That means you have to pay, e.g., for the MBI module or the BAM module. Or, if you want to save a lot of money, you can pay for IMP, which is the complete package."

"The pricing is acceptable."

"The pricing works out well for us, given our environment and where we are."

"It's quite expensive when you use the Enterprise version, but if you compare it to other providers, it's more like a middle-of-the-line product. It's always good to have a price that is lower, but I would say the price is okay because we get very good support and if we have any other issues we can always contact them. There has never been a time when I didn't get help from them."

"Open-source solutions like this can be very cost effective for an organization looking for a product that they can quickly implement, as there is no initial cost and there are no license renewal fees. However, it is important to take into consideration some of the related costs that may come along as needed, such as training, support, and product enhancements."

"The solution is very effective, despite the low price."

"If you need basic monitoring without dashboards, just monitoring, the plugins are very useful and really cheap. If you want a more complete solution with dashboards and reporting, the EMS solution is great and it is not that much more expensive. It's a good value. Really good."

More Centreon pricing and cost advice

"There are additional costs, you have to pay more for everything."

"ServiceNow IT Operations Management is a costly solution. I'd rate the price at ten, on a scale from one to ten with one being the lowest and ten being the highest price. Some clients do have a problem with the price, but most find that the solution is worth the cost."

"It is expensive. It is around 10 Euros per server per month."

"While not entirely sure, I believe the solution costs at least a million dollars annually."

"We obtained discovery licenses at about seven dollars Australian per unit, which we found to be reasonable and competitive."

"The solution offers yearly licenses and a subscription model for add-on features."

"The cost of ServiceNow is much higher."

"This solution offers good value but comes at a very high premium. Pricing could be reduced by 10 to 20%."

More ServiceNow IT Operations Management pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

19%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

10%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Centreon?

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Centreon?

The tool is cheaply priced.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Centreon?

The issue my company has with the tool stems from the fact that it didn't give an on-time response to us. The product collects the information, but it fails to send them via SMS, WhatsApp or Telegr...

See all answers

What do you like most about ServiceNow IT Operations Management?

From my perspective as an asset manager, the most valuable feature of the solution is the configuration management portion, where I can actively add something to the database.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ServiceNow IT Operations Management?

We obtained discovery licenses at about seven dollars Australian per unit, which we found to be reasonable and competitive. The pricing model offers scaling where not everything consumes a license ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with ServiceNow IT Operations Management?

There is room for improvement in service mapping within ServiceNow ITOM. When we have more time, we'll look to extend that and apply it to business-critical services like email.

See all answers

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Compared 9% of the time

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Compared 6% of the time

IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus vs ServiceNow IT Operations Management

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Centreon

March 2025

Download Centreon product report

Buyer's Guide

ServiceNow IT Operations Management

March 2025

ServiceNow IT Operations Management report

Download ServiceNow IT Operations Management product report

Also Known As

No data available

ServiceNow ITOM

Overview

Centreon is an all-in-one IT monitoring solution that is a network, system, applicative supervision, and monitoring tool. It is free and open source, and one of the most flexible and powerful monitoring softwares on the market.

Centreon Features

Centreon has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Supervision of hybrid infrastructures, from one end to the other
Open and flexible architecture
Open-source solution, downloadable for free
Filtering capability in GUI interface
Proactive end to end monitoring
Easily configurable and simple to handle
Dedicated dashboard widgets
Scalability
Independent application for monitoring
End to end reporting with actual logs

Centreon Benefits

There are several benefits to implementing Centreon. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Single platform, multi-user rights & access: Centreon is designed with built-in ACL, allowing enterprise users access to the monitored data on a need-to-know basis.

Smart data-mapping for customized macro & micro views: Centreon provides real-time custom views in multiple screens with graphic-rich data mapping, which also enables monitoring operators to act and troubleshoot from a distance.

Ready monitoring intelligence & reporting: With Centreon, you can easily generate reports of essential operational KPIs by using pre-configured templates, and add reports as needed by exploiting the dedicated monitoring data warehouse.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by Centreon users.

PeerSpot user Thor M., CEO at a tech services company, says, "The single-pane view provides us a view of all of our network infrastructure, and it is one of the most important tools that we use to see the status of our customers' networks. It provides a nice benefit when it comes to helping align IT operations with business objectives. The top-down views, dashboards, and business context reporting are things that are nice to have because you want to be able to show the customer that everything is working, that problems have been addressed, and that you're providing value.”

Thomas C., Managing Director, Canada at Eva, comments, “The most valuable feature of the solution is the flexibility, the ability to integrate all kinds of equipment. As long as something has an IP you can monitor it. What we try to achieve all the time is not only saying a company's system is available, but to give additional data on the performance of the equipment. So the flexibility is what matters the most to us, where we can script everything. Centreon has a lot of Plugin Packs, meaning they support, by design, a lot of devices. And on top of that, we have the ability to add our own scripts and do whatever we want and display the data as we want in the central dashboards.”

Marcilio L., President at ITS Solucoes, expresses, "The dashboards are valuable because they ease troubleshooting and viewing. It becomes easier to locate the source of a problem... The dashboards make it easier to communicate with our clients. They don't want to see the alert console, they want to see a beautiful dashboard representing their network and their business and to watch it in case something is wrong in their environment."

Florent Q., Network Engineer at a computer software company, mentions, "The most valuable feature is that we can manually configure everything we need. After it comes inside the interface of Centreon, you can display it. Because the interface is quite user-friendly, you can manually configure the configuration very deeply, which is very pleasant and useful because you can monitor and see everything on your service list, dashboard, or MAP. The most useful feature for me is that you can create your own plugin and monitoring query."

Centreon

ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM) is a cloud management and infrastructure tool that facilitates the administrative and development process of creating, planning, and operating digital services, technology, application requirements, and components for organizations. Service Now ensures effectiveness, performance, and availability throughout an organization's processes and services.

ServiceNow ITOM will help organizations facilitate consistent policies with regard to deployment, support, and services to ensure trustworthiness and quality of service (QoS). ServiceNow ITOM will ensure that all applications, services, and infrastructure are consistently available and stable.

ServiceNow IT Operations Management Features

Help Desk: ServiceNow ITOM help desk enables IT and operations administrators to better communicate issues concerning managing data latencies, controlling the monitoring of user profiles, executing disaster recovery plans, and any other problematic incidents.
Device and server management: ServiceNow ITOM will ensure IT operations teams can better handle general maintenance, upgrading, and patching for server-related concerns. The solution will also help to maintain the health of organization devices such as laptops, phones, tablets, mobile devices, and desktops.
Infrastructure maintenance: ServiceNow ITOM helps organizations set up remote access networks, maintain network security, regulate communication with external servers and firewalls, and also monitor and manage internal telephone systems.

ServiceNow IT Operations Management Benefits

Improve DevOps: ServiceNow ITOM improves the ability to inspect microservices, which enables DevOps and SRE teams to improve incident response.
Improve data control: The solution will help to manage the entire digital lifecycle, and will also enhance the organization's configuration management database (CMDB) to enable a more robust data foundation.
Problem-solve: ITOM is able to proactively identify anomalies before they become issues/problems with tremendous accuracy. ITOM helps organizations minimize outages and reduce the negative impact to end users so that they do not experience any downtime or service degradations. ITOM will also use artificial intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) along with machine learning (ML) to reduce the possibility of false positives, saving time and increasing productivity.
Automate workflows: ITOM offers a pre-designed workbook and no-code/low-code workflows to reduce redundant tasks and improve recovery times. ITOM provides intuitive workable processes to be shared easily with all teams throughout the organization.

ServiceNow ITOM enables organizations to become robust, strategic operations able to successfully anticipate issues before they have an impact on the organization. Organizations that use ServiceNOw ITOM will be able to easily automate workflows and improve how their IT teams communicate and work together to deliver successful outcomes and maintain productivity and profitability 24/7.

Reviews from Real Users

“With this solution, operational costs will be reduced. Your maintenance cost will be reduced when you use the item model. You will deliver a fast solution to the customers. If something happens on the server-side or router-side, it will be immediately caught. Efficiencies are improved. “ - Rupesh J., Solutions Architect at Globant

“It has been very useful for tracking. It has evolved a lot over time, and there is a single pane of glass where you can track and see everything.” - Uday T., Project Manager at MindTree

ServiceNow

Sample Customers

Airbus, Bollore, BT, Canal Plus, Kuehne Nagel, Limagrain, LVMH, Oberthur Technologies, Orange, Darty, Addax Petroleum, Plastic Omnium, Auchan, Valeo, Saint Gobin, Clarins, Hugo Boss, JC Decaux, French Government (Defense, Justice, Environment, Agriculture), OptiComm, Thales, Zeiss.

servicenow, TransAlta, NATS, Symantec

Buyer's Guide

Centreon vs. ServiceNow IT Operations Management

March 2025

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