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Device42 vs ServiceNow Discovery comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Device42
Ranking in IT Asset Management
6th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management Databases (2nd), IP Address Management (IPAM) Tools (3rd), Data Center Infrastructure Management (3rd)
ServiceNow Discovery
Ranking in IT Asset Management
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (2nd), Cloud Resource Discovery Services (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the IT Asset Management category, the mindshare of Device42 is 6.0%, down from 6.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow Discovery is 4.8%, up from 2.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Asset Management
 

Featured Reviews

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.
RISHI GUPTA - PeerSpot reviewer
Valuable relationship building that discovers and auto-builds to make cleanup easy
Proof of concept for the solution doesn't make much sense. It totally depends on the capability of your partner. Choose the partner very carefully while you plan to use the solution. If you get a very competent and capable partner, then life will be easy. If you have a partner who only does technical implementations, then that won't help you. You need to have CMDB and CSDM experts on the team because the solution is for CMDB and CSDM. If you don't design your data model really well, then the solution will not give you much result. The solution is not fully automated so you still need to make some effort. You have to go through the complete remodeling cycle for non-useful data elimination whenever you add a new LAN segment or new mid-server on a new data center or service. It is a little bit of effort, but it is worth the effort. Based on the necessary but important effort, the solution is rated a seven out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"I like the tool's agentless discovery feature. The tool configures the devices based on the documentation provided. I am also impressed with its auto-discovery feature. The tool also keeps on tracking and finds whatever is in the environment."
"The solution's agentless approach to asset discovery is very important for us because installing agents on physical or virtual devices is not easy in our company. We have to escalate these kinds of things to different levels of security. Not having to install agents makes it easy for us."
"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 Insights+ component is useful for us because it does business application mapping and helps us visualize it. It saves us time because we don't have to hunt for data."
"The auto-discovery is brilliant. You can have it scheduled to run on a regular basis, and the infrastructure is always getting updated within the platform. I would rate the asset discovery very highly. It's very comprehensive. It covers quite a lot of different methods for doing discovery and it supports a lot of different types of hardware as well."
"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."
"The most valuable part is the ease of use. There's no training involved. It's pretty simple and straightforward."
"We can scale the solution."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"It's pretty robust, and it's agentless for the most part. So, you don't need to deploy agents, which makes it a lot easier to stand up."
"This solution provides excellent insights."
"The most valuable feature is its integration with CMDB, as it collects all the data."
"Most fields on our forms are auto-filled, reducing manual maintenance for our infrastructure team. Post Discovery implementation there is hardly any maintenance."
"The best thing about Discovery is maintaining all the CIs in one place. I can sort the data, export it to Excel for manipulation, and build reports like how many computers or servers we have and their capacity."
"Discovery enables us to get an accurate inventory that's updated daily. It eliminates human error and the need for people to update configuration changes manually. We have not implemented them yet but plan to set up alerts on CIs that are being audited to see if there are any changes."
 

Cons

"It was hard to know which assets I'd already looked at because if I looked up another asset with a similar name, they would still pop up. I would have to make sure I was looking at the right asset. The search function should be improved."
"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."
"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."
"If they could make it so their remote connector could do as much as 10,000 devices, that would be better."
"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."
"The product must provide AI features."
"I would like to see API management as an additional feature in the tool's future versions. It will give more API security."
"A con for Device42 is that Kubernetes integration is lacking. You pay for 10,000 spot licenses and if you're spinning up a Kubernetes cluster, or four or five or six Kubernetes clusters like we do, you're going to have 5,000 or 6,000 nodes in each of those, doing different types of business things."
"ServiceNow Discovery could improve the interface. The navigation bar could improve. It would be helpful to have a landing page to go to find all the elements in one place."
"When you switch versions, for example, when you go from Paris to Quebec they will introduce many new things and occasionally things break when they do that."
"In my opinion, it's quite slow compared to other tools, like Device42. Also, there are predefined fields in Device42 that are not available in ServiceNow. These are the basic things I think can be improved here."
"It creates quite a bit of duplication, so that needs to be fixed."
"Debugging is a bit tough in ServiceNow Discovery, so debugging should be made very easy."
"The solution needs to improve the cost of the solution. There are a few different solutions and they do act the same and have the same types of capabilities, however, the cost is quite high."
"Discovery, while a bit pricey, integrates well with other tools and offers a centralized discovery solution. These aspects could be enhanced in the new release."
"Application discovery could be improved. And, right now, ServiceNow needs to be coupled with another solution in order to verify information."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"The product cost is low. It is quite cheap."
"The problem with using other vendor, like BMC, is the pricing. The price is so horrible and nobody wants to pay this money."
"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."
"Our licensing costs are on a yearly basis."
"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."
"It's in the top-three most expensive solutions in terms of cost, but it has all the features that are needed."
"As per a general discussion I had with the stakeholders, I figured out that it is a costly tool. There is a need to make additional payments apart from the licensing fees for better support services from ServiceNow."
"ServiceNow Discovery is expensive, but the company has a monopoly and we need to use the solution. We use it because we do not have a choice."
"This solution is a paid option within the ServiceNow framework."
"ServiceNow Discovery has very broad pricing, so it becomes costly. It would be better if it had a pay-as-you-use licensing model because the total cost of ownership is quite high."
"Setting up and licensing for ServiceNow can be expensive, especially for enterprise service management."
"The price could be better. It's a bit on the pricey side."
"If the product is not deployed properly, it can be very expensive."
"It is an expensive product with a price that depends on the models that you wish to purchase."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Healthcare Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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.
What do you like most about ServiceNow Discovery?
The solution can prioritize the discovery of IP ranges. The product automatically places all Discovery CIs into the correct class within the CMDB.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ServiceNow Discovery?
The product pricing is fair and reasonable for the value it provides. However, it is important to factor in the ongoing maintenance costs, as the system requires professional upkeep to ensure optim...
What needs improvement with ServiceNow Discovery?
The continuous improvement in the quality and customization of the product features would be beneficial, particularly as more customers rely heavily on its capabilities.
 

Learn More

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Computershare, Concur, Doosan, Fitch Ratings Inc., Fujitsu, HomeAway, Jasper Wireless, Mercedes-Benz, Square, Twitch, UCSB, Zayo Group Inc.
York, National Grid, DXC Technology, experian, BEACHBODY
Find out what your peers are saying about Device42 vs. ServiceNow Discovery and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
823,875 professionals have used our research since 2012.