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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
34th
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
224
Ranking in other categories
IT Asset Management (1st), IT Service Management (ITSM) (1st), Rapid Application Development Software (2nd), No-Code Development Platforms (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 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 12.9%, down from 24.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Help Desk Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
ServiceNow12.9%
Espressive Barista0.8%
Other86.3%
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.
MT
Manager of Security Engineering & Architecture at a outsourcing company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Seamless data integration and advanced automation improve service delivery efficiency
I think that nothing needs to be improved with the product; you just need the user to commit and spend appropriate time to overcome that learning curve. Once that is done, the product itself is pretty wonderful. I've seen a very nicely built interface with ServiceNow, and I've also seen the ugliest version that feels outdated. ServiceNow does allow that team to exist. They should modernize their fonts and their layout, the UI friendliness. They did introduce AI, chatbots, and AI on the back end, so that's wonderful and extremely useful if you train it. If you don't train it, it's pretty useless. Assessing the impact of ServiceNow's automation on service delivery times is complicated. The engineers who operate on ServiceNow find it isn't straightforward because the data set is accessible by everybody. The problem is that understanding how to manage that data set requires an enormous amount of engineering skill set to run the product. I would not hand the key to the customer; I would highly recommend that ServiceNow take control of that. Instead of offering support for the software, they should offer administrative support for the software. They should provide professional service or some kind of support system that allows us to use their product at a faster pace. I'm sure they offer something, but it's often outrageously expensive, or they rely on another company to resell their product and offer professional service. It makes no sense in my opinion, and they should offer the team at the front to help customize the product to fit each company's needs, as every company has different demands and forms of submitting a request that need adjustment over time.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Its ability to recognize phrases has gotten smarter over time."
"We have the ability to alter phrases, create new phrases, or enhance phrases, or change paths. From the dashboard, we are able to get a lot of information we need about what people are asking, where they are dropping off from conversations, and where they do not get the information they need."
"The bot is pretty easy to update and keep up to date. Espressive itself is pretty easy to work with."
"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."
"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"
"The solution is available to support us instantly as required."
"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."
"I like Expressive Barista's integration with Microsoft Teams."
"The most valuable aspect of the solution is the possibility of the application development cap so that we can digitize workflows."
"It's more about the ease of use of ServiceNow. Plus, everything is there in a single platform. If you need any additional functionality, you just need to enable the plugins without even installing anything on the servers"
"The thing that I like most about it is the easy integration with the CMDB. I'm able to look at the CMDB for applications and develop my assessments and attestations based on the application and point them at that application owner. So, I can really automate the whole thing."
"Makes ticket information easy to access."
"The solution integrates well with other products."
"Creating a ticket is much simpler in this tool. That is one big advantage. Also, the simplicity and ease of use are much better. I've used HPSM and it is very complex in comparison to ServiceNow."
"The solution is stable, scalable and easy to use."
"I like that in ServiceNow creating workflows is simpler than that in HP Service Manager. Also, I really like the customization feature. It allows us to customize the service portal and permits us to do a lot of customization per business needs."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"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."
"The reports provided by the solution are not customizable."
"I would like to see improvement to the out-of-the-box verbiage, with the questions going to the right place."
"Espressive Barista's natural language processing and conventional AI still have room for improvement."
"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 would like to see the continued expansion of all of the automation capabilities."
"From an HR standpoint, if users can have a very integrated onboarding or offboarding process between ServiceNow and Workday, then it can give a very good employee experience."
"The level of complexity and the level of discovery are the two areas that can be improved. Its UI needs to evolve. They focus a lot on cool colors and other little things, which don't bring value in terms of functionality. They need to focus less on presentation and more on the functionality within the UI. Its discovery mechanism should be improved. There is a component in ServiceNow that discovers the assets, but it doesn't do an immediate discovery, and there is a lag. If I want to open a ticket for a laptop or an asset, that asset needs to exist within ServiceNow for me to be able to say that I need to have its disk space or memory increased. It is referred to as a CI or configuration item in ServiceNow. Sometimes, ServiceNow doesn't discover these items, and as a result, I cannot open a ticket and tag that system or asset. If a system was introduced to the environment last week and it is still not listed, it becomes a problem. I will either have to wait or manually enter that system or asset. So, if I have a laptop with only 8 GB of memory and I want to request 16 GB of memory, I won't be able to do that in ServiceNow because my system or asset hasn't been discovered yet. Discovery is not immediate, and there is a lag."
"I have enjoyed all the features. There is not any feature that I have missed or didn't have."
"The pricing of the solution could be better. It's a bit high."
"Complexities in the organization made the initial deployment complex."
"There is a need for bug or error tracking in ServiceNow."
"The interface requires an upgrade."
"We find it good in general. Obviously, there are areas of improvement for every capability. As they evolve more, if they keep on adding more intelligence into the capabilities, it will improve. The improvement areas are more integration across the landscape and more intelligence for the overall capability of the solution."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"User-based licensing has been working well for us, and we believe we are deriving significant value from it."
"It is expensive. It's not a cheap thing."
"The price for the licensing is fair."
"The solution is affordable."
"The platform offers a free trial, by providing a free developer instance once you sign up."
"The pricing is on the high side, but if you look at the stability and option to work, it's kind of justified."
"While the option exists to pay for a monthly license, we are dealing with large enterprises and these typically involve multi-year licenses of ten or five years, at a minimum."
"The solution is expensive."
"I know that it's not too bad because people continue to use it and they are happy to renew up their contract."
"The setup cost is high compared to others, especially when the scope is not fixed."
"Some time ago it was expensive, but large companies have special contracts. It's enterprise prices, and we're talking about millions per year."
"It is an expensive platform."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
22%
Retailer
10%
Healthcare Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
8%
 

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 Enterprise166
 

Questions from the Community

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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: February 2026.
882,260 professionals have used our research since 2012.