No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Espressive Barista vs ServiceNow comparison

Why PeerSpot?
Sponsored
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 3, 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

Automation Anywhere
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
670
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (2nd), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (2nd), Process Mining (1st), Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) (1st), Agentic Automation (1st), Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (2nd), AI Legal & Compliance (1st), AI Finance & Accounting (2nd), AI Procurement & Supply Chain (1st)
Espressive Barista
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (37th), AI-Powered Chatbots (9th), AI-Agents for HR (4th)
ServiceNow
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
231
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (1st), IT Asset Management (1st), IT Service Management (ITSM) (1st), Rapid Application Development Software (4th), No-Code Development Platforms (1st)
 

Featured Reviews

Nadeem K. - PeerSpot reviewer
Rpa Developer at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
Automation has freed teams from repetitive finance and supply tasks and supports global operations
In the current organization, we had trouble initially because I think the documentation and support could be better than what it is now. This is one difference between Automation Anywhere and other RPA tools such as UiPath. In UiPath, if you have an issue, you go to the UiPath website and search for it, and you get lots of help materials. In Automation Anywhere, you do not get exactly what you are looking for. You get a very large number of results when you search for something, and from this large result set, you have to filter out what you need, or only partial information will be available. User handbooks are available for each product. In that regard, I would say Automation Anywhere is lagging compared to other RPA tools. It is difficult to get hold of their customer support team. I want to clarify that it is not a matter of us building logic on Automation Anywhere and it failing. When it is a product-related issue, they have to give us support because we only know how to develop within Automation Anywhere. We do not know how to fix Automation Anywhere itself. Whenever we have an issue, trying to get in touch with them always takes three to four business days.
Jim Lobao - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager for End User Support Services at Five9
Has helped enhance our support ability, reduced our resolution time, and reduced our service desk costs
Espressive Barista's natural language processing and conventional AI still have room for improvement. We haven't yet found anything that resembles true AI that can learn autonomously without human intervention. However, Barista does help us identify and address some of these areas, allowing my team to step in and create intents and responses to questions. When a user asks a question that Barista doesn't immediately understand, we can recognize the pattern, capture it, and link it to a common intent. This is highly beneficial for acquiring such data, but it's a reactive approach and still requires curation. Natural language processing still has some way to go. One of our challenges is that our internal employees haven't yet adopted a natural way of interacting with Barista. Getting people to be concise and to the point, rather than being verbose as if they were interacting with a human, has been an ongoing challenge. While they may feel comfortable being conversational in Slack, expecting a human-like response, Barista is a different entity. Barista isn't interested in their recent vacation; it just wants to know they're locked out of their account. So, some users may assume Barista understands their intent when they say, "I'm back from vacation and locked out of my account." Barista, however, may interpret this as a request for the holiday schedule. Therefore, we're gradually educating our users to adapt their communication style for better success with Barista. Conversely, we desire Barista to adapt its behavior based on the interaction, the language used, and the way people communicate. I wholeheartedly desire an AI that can continuously learn and adapt to our organization's evolving needs. This is the most challenging aspect, as it involves understanding our organization's terminology, procedures, and toolsets. We've made significant progress in this area. However, from an NLP standpoint, we still face challenges with our nearly 3,000 Slack channel users, each with their unique communication styles. People ask questions in various ways, and sometimes there are misunderstandings. They want to interact with us naturally. However, we still struggle with natural language processing. People don't always realize that the bot is a virtual agent designed to be concise and efficient. Sometimes, less is more. It's been a difficult transition for people to grasp that they're conversing with a virtual agent, not a human. They still expect human-like interactions, such as discussing their weekend or holidays or simply pasting screenshots of errors. However, the bot can't interpret screenshots. If they provide the error code and some context about the application, the bot can better understand the issue. So, the key challenge is bridging the gap between human expectations and the bot's capabilities in terms of natural interaction.
Hemanthreddy Vakiti - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Structured workflows have improved SLA compliance and now support prioritized incident handling
I think the licensing and pricing of ServiceNow is quite expensive compared to other tools. For large organizations, it is acceptable, but specifically for small and medium organizations to track incidents or change requests, ServiceNow is quite expensive. Sometimes performance can be slow when workflows and integrations are configured for complex tasks. For advanced customizations or advanced features which we rarely use, the documentation is not up to standard. The documentation needs to be improved for advanced customization features. However, the platform is stable overall and the features are quite good. The user experience and performance concerns I mentioned are areas I want to be improved. When many workflows and interactions are configured, performance is slow. For the features it is providing, it is quite expensive. If these performance features are improved, we can easily pay that price and get the return on investment.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The flexibility of Automation Anywhere's truly universal orchestration in integrating with different systems and models has been great for us because we are new to the mission tools and had our data scattered in Salesforce and Oracle Analytics, yet Automation Anywhere has smooth integration with those apps and about ninety percent of our apps are supported, integrating particularly well with Salesforce where our client data and service requests are managed."
"The bot automation and workflow management features make our team's day-to-day work easier."
"I have some metrics at the top of my head, but they're a little abstract. Accomplishing what we've done so far with the bots in production would take 40,000. It's not a direct correlation of full-time employees because that's all work that would not have gotten done because they don't have time for that kind of nitty-gritty work."
"The automation of data entry is the most valuable feature for us."
"My clients have seen tremendous value when it comes to automating business processes, and the robust nature of the application allows them to scale their business processes pretty quickly."
"The immediate impact is administrative tasks which were traditionally done manually are now being done by robots. This reduces the workload for people."
"It has saved us a lot of hours, manual effort, and we can focus on more important tasks, which helps us with our ROI."
"Automation Anywhere offers better value and is more effective for organizations seeking cost-effective solutions."
"Our developers have used the Barista Control Center to extend the platform by adding content, and they've found it fairly easy to do and manage"
"When it comes to neutral language processing and conversational AI, it's very good, very solid... We all have different ways of speaking or writing in English and the application does a very solid job of recognizing what's being asked regardless of how it's being asked."
"The most valuable feature is its scalability."
"This is one of the few tools that live up to the sales reps' hype when it comes to integrating with ServiceNow."
"Its ability to recognize phrases has gotten smarter over time."
"Given the out of the box content for common industry applications, we got good value out of the solution right from day one."
"I like Expressive Barista's integration with Microsoft Teams."
"The bot is pretty easy to update and keep up to date. Espressive itself is pretty easy to work with."
"I would say one of the best things on ServiceNow platform is the way how you can quickly automate delivery of services or goods to the end-user."
"If you can afford it, this is the premium Service Management suite out there."
"By automating processes it has increased efficiency and productivity."
"Discovery is super advantageous and has gotten us away from the manual work of walking the floor to find assets, while Automatic Workflows are a big deal that helps streamline processes and interconnect incident management."
"If you are looking for something that you can bring into your organization to be more than just a single purpose, if you are looking to truly transform your organization with the tools that you are using, ServiceNow is the go-to."
"The Workflow feature is the most valuable."
"We recently moved to ServiceNow from HP Service Manager about two years ago and it's been leaps and bounds just better than what we had before."
"Your time-to-market, or TTM, becomes faster when you use ServiceNow, and even individuals that are not tech-savvy can quickly change processes and workflows in it, which can make the organization as a whole more agile."
 

Cons

"The product is not totally stable."
"Scalability has been a pain point; the scalability is there, but there are ongoing operational issues with it."
"One of the things that the product should have is to add more advanced level developer capabilities into the platform. I know it is easy for business, non-technical people. However, for the developers, there should be some more features within the product so they can build advanced level use cases much faster."
"One thing about it that we have not found to be exceptionally useful are the built-in bot analytics, the Bot Insights. From our own extensive experimentation, as well as from what we've understood from other people using this solution, we've been able to come up with better solutions using our own in-house analytics and our own systems than through theirs."
"Automation Anywhere could assist in this transition."
"Copilot is an area with a lot of scope for improvement. It's the number one thing to improve."
"We would like to have a better debugging facility."
"There are occasional bugs in the system but technical support is quick to address them and deliver solutions, patches, and upgrades."
"Expressive Barista could improve by adding native integration with WhatsApp, one of the top communication channels in South Africa. When we're trying to sell Barista to customers, we have to tell them that the solution doesn't have out-of-the-box support for WhatsApp. We can develop it, but then we need to have a conversation about how much that will cost."
"There aren't very many things that this product needs improvement on."
"I would like to see improvement to the out-of-the-box verbiage, with the questions going to the right place."
"The knowledge management could definitely be improved."
"I would like to see the continued expansion of all of the automation capabilities."
"What would make things easier is more detail, out of the box, about what is helping out of the box. We're struggling a little bit to get that data. We want more information about what Barista has brought in that the employees are using, out of the box. We want more visibility into the things that we ourselves haven't done the interaction for."
"Espressive Barista's natural language processing and conventional AI still have room for improvement."
"My only comment would be if they wanted to use this as an IT service management tool, maybe they could think about Barista making tickets and having change management and problem management capabilities."
"We don't have a huge amount of password reset requests, but the minimum package of resets that ServiceNow offers is much more than we need."
"Probably the backlog organization could be a little bit easier in terms of transversality between different squads."
"ServiceNow has a user interface that mimics a web-base and is easy on the eyes however, it is too fluid."
"Its setup is tough. It takes a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience."
"The installation and deployment of ServiceNow can be a bit challenging. One major issue I've encountered is that ServiceNow doesn't provide the same mobile responsiveness or features that we used to enjoy with other tools. For example, with Splunk, our response times were about five minutes, and we could manage alerts and incidents directly from our mobile devices."
"It's very expensive, and if care is not taken, competitions can quickly come and take over the space by offering better pricing."
"The discovery of assets could be improved; right now they only allow for one domain."
"Customer Service: 8/10 - the vendor used to be really good, but with the massive growth of product use it’s deteriorated. Technical Support: 4/10 - the vendor used to be really good, but with the massive growth of product use it’s deteriorated."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing cost of Automation Anywhere is better than UiPath and Blue Prism."
"We have seen the tangible benefits of taking monotonous work off people's plates, creating capacity, and cost reductions."
"We are not receiving the right information about their features, e.g. Automation Anywhere University, or anything that they are selling. They need to improve their documentation."
"It is reasonable and affordable. If you consider the tasks that we can get done using this, the pricing is reasonable and affordable."
"It saves on the quality of work, because the quality can be bad when somebody's doing it. If a bot does the work, it's faster and comes with good quality. These are two important things along with the cost saving in the long run. That's where the value is."
"This is a comprehensive automation offering with a scalable architecture and flexible pricing models."
"The pricing that we received from Automation Anywhere in the beginning was very economical for us. We've seen a lot of benefit from what we spent to what we're receiving. From the beginning, it's been a very low-cost implementation for us."
"Automation Anywhere is flexible in terms of costing and licensing."
"The price for the licensing is fair."
"It is expensive. It's not a cheap thing."
"User-based licensing has been working well for us, and we believe we are deriving significant value from it."
"The pricing isn't overly burdensome. It's going to be interesting to see how new models come in with new capabilities but, as it is, as a base system, it's pretty good."
"The solution is affordable."
"ServiceNow pricing is an art, not a science. The deal depends on how commercially savvy you are, which does make it something that is quite difficult to get right. It is most definitely an opportunity area for ServiceNow to improve and have more visibility around pricing of the different products within the platform."
"Certainly, from a product-platform perspective, the price is not too bad."
"I know that it's not too bad because people continue to use it and they are happy to renew up their contract."
"The mandatory minimum is US$ 20,000 for licensing."
"ServiceNow tends to be a little bit more expensive as compared to BMC Helix ITSM."
"Getting the solution up and running is expensive."
"The price of the solution is comparable to industry standards. For the features that we received, it is reasonable."
"The platform offers a free trial, by providing a free developer instance once you sign up."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Help Desk Software solutions are best for your needs.
921,714 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Construction Company
10%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Construction Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business163
Midsize Enterprise86
Large Enterprise566
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business57
Midsize Enterprise35
Large Enterprise179
 

Questions from the Community

How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It depends on your use case. Is it simply to automate a couple of processes? Is it to augment a human team? AA is ver...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
From my experience using AA tool, it depends on the applications that you want to automate, because there some applic...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It is a highly preferred RPA tool. You can check my Automation Anywhere Review to know more.
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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 t...
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 ...
What is the cost of implementation and maintenance of ServiceNow?
Nobody can give you a clean percentage without knowing your license tier, but here’s how I’d budget it, based on what...
 

Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise, Agentic Process Automation System (Now Certified for WorkSpaces)
No data available
No data available
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
Information Not Available
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    
Find out what your peers are saying about Espressive Barista vs. ServiceNow and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
921,714 professionals have used our research since 2012.