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

Espressive Barista vs ServiceNow comparison

 

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

Espressive Barista
Ranking in Help Desk Software
36th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
AI-Powered Chatbots (8th), AI-Agents for HR (3rd)
ServiceNow
Ranking in Help Desk Software
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
228
Ranking in other categories
IT Asset Management (1st), IT Service Management (ITSM) (1st), Rapid Application Development Software (2nd), No-Code Development Platforms (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Help Desk Software category, the mindshare of Espressive Barista is 0.8%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow is 11.7%, down from 23.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Help Desk Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
ServiceNow11.7%
Espressive Barista0.8%
Other87.5%
Help Desk Software
 

Featured Reviews

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

"Given the out of the box content for common industry applications, we got good value out of the solution right from day one."
"The bot is pretty easy to update and keep up to date. Espressive itself is pretty easy to work with."
"This is one of the few tools that live up to the sales reps' hype when it comes to integrating with ServiceNow."
"The most valuable feature is its scalability."
"I like Expressive Barista's integration with Microsoft Teams."
"With respect to its natural language processing capabilities, it recognizes things that you wouldn't think it would recognize. Even in cases where it doesn't, it's pretty easy to go in and make the adjustments that are needed."
"Given Barista's out-of-the-box content for common industry applications, the value is pretty good right from day one."
"Our department received about a 70% deflection rate, so that was really great."
"The solution has good stability."
"ServiceNow was the first true enterprise to service management platform."
"With it, I can do everything, so I think only our imagination can be the limit of ServiceNow."
"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."
"It's serving our end-user community, making it simple for them to order products, get service from our incident help desk, and perhaps even helping everyone across the globe because we have to stay connected somehow, and ServiceNow does that for us."
"The product's integration functionality in the change management module has significantly improved efficiency in our organization."
"In 12 years, I've rarely seen a failure of their cloud hosting, if ever."
"It is a very promising product, they have a new release every six months, they're investing quite a lot, and you can do many creative things with the product."
 

Cons

"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."
"There aren't very many things that this product needs improvement on."
"Espressive Barista's natural language processing and conventional AI still have room for improvement."
"The reports provided by the solution are not customizable."
"The knowledge management could definitely be improved."
"Although they've done some work on their metrics dashboard, there is some fine-tuning to do for people that just want to go in there at a glance and see their metrics."
"Although they've done some work on their metrics dashboard, there is some fine-tuning to do for people that just want to go in there at a glance and see their metrics."
"I find the way you need to attach things like screenshots and stuff is a bit gimmicky."
"The solution should offer better security when it comes to storing data."
"The Project Management with Resource Management feature is an area with room for improvement."
"ServiceNow is such a complex piece of software. It's trying to be everything."
"The licensing needs to be divided into tiers in order to attract lower-level users."
"This solution needs to be improved for global use."
"Integration capabilities can improve."
"There is a need to learn scripting because as in the case of all the ITSM tools, scripting is needed for customization. If you're not very comfortable with scripting, then you may feel that you cannot do everything in ServiceNow without learning scripting."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is expensive. It's not a cheap thing."
"The solution is affordable."
"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 price for the licensing is fair."
"They could be more competitive with their licensing."
"ServiceNow tends to be a little bit more expensive as compared to BMC Helix ITSM."
"I'm not aware of any additional costs. I'm pretty sure that the current client is paying just the licensing fee per user. I do know that they've got some support agreement with ServiceNow, but I don't think that is broken out or specific to Project Management. It is just inclusive."
"For the modules we use, we found it competitive. I can't think of any costs in addition to the licensing fees."
"$230 per user."
"It is an expensive platform."
"The solution is expensive."
"The license model is based on a number of fulfillers (active users who play some role within the ServiceNow functionality). Therefore, you can serve as many end-users as you want, without additional costs."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Help Desk Software solutions are best for your needs.
890,088 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Healthcare Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business55
Midsize Enterprise35
Large Enterprise171
 

Questions from the Community

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 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.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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: April 2026.
890,088 professionals have used our research since 2012.