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IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs JIRA Service Management comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk
Ranking in Help Desk Software
27th
Average Rating
7.6
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
JIRA Service Management
Ranking in Help Desk Software
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
78
Ranking in other categories
IT Service Management (ITSM) (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Help Desk Software category, the mindshare of IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is 0.7%, down from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of JIRA Service Management is 11.1%, down from 12.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Help Desk Software
 

Featured Reviews

Jose Pedro Muñoz - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 22, 2018
Helps standardize our workflow, track client tickets, and it's very flexible
Helps configure workflow. It's good, it's a very flexible tool. It's very valuable for us Standardization of our work process, and the tracking of all tickets from all the clients. The most valuable are its flexibility and agility. It's quick to change it, to adapt it to your needs. That's the…
Shambuling-Doni - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 22, 2023
Easy to use, offers good stability and visibility for operational efficiency
We use Jira Service Management (JSM) to manage tickets.  It enables us to track, monitor, and manage user requests from initiation to resolution. We use it for the end-to-end process. We can add comments, and close requests., so our primary use case for JSM is ticketing.  The interface is good and…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The brand name is the most valuable aspect of this solution for me. It's IBM. It's a global company that supports this product, it's not something open source or something like that."
"The solution is very easy to work with."
"The most valuable are its flexibility and agility. It's quick to change it, to adapt it to your needs. That's the most important for us."
"A feature I found most valuable in IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is the service request. Another feature I like most about the solution is IT asset management, which tells you who owns a specific asset in the company and from which date."
"What I like about the Control Desk is that everything is centralized. You have all the requests in one place, you know which ones are for whom and who is working on them."
"SLA integrations, reports, and integration with other applications are the most valuable."
"The workflow capability is useful. It's not a manual helpdesk operation. It's fully automated, even when an alarm has occurred. It covers the complete cycle of initiation to resolving the events. This is its most strong feature that is easily integrable with a monitoring solution. It creates tickets, and the workflow feature is the most important one."
"The solution has been stable."
"Service Management is great if you're an Atlassian shop already using JIRA for the development team and you want another tool for help desk ticketing. When it's all under the same umbrella, I can easily take a ticket from the help desk and move it to the development team. You can't beat that integration between two products."
"Easily integrates with other tools."
"We can track, monitor, and get all the details we need from the end-user's point of view for any service request."
"The most valuable features of this solution are Incident and Request Management."
"I think one of the most valuable things is that it's all integrated."
"One of the best things about JIRA is that it searches for answers while questions are being typed so some tickets do not need to be submitted."
"This is the most complete and versatile enterprise task management product and issue tracker."
"The customer portal with connection with our knowledge base has been most valuable."
 

Cons

"The time calculations can be improved. While working on reports, it was taking the time only in seconds, which was hard for me to work out. While creating some dialogs in the service portal, you have to use certain data types in some fields. It was very tricky to make them work. I was testing a certain type of input, and it didn't work. It didn't show me the domain that the fields have to show. I had to make the change to the database, and only then it worked. It was a tricky thing to make them work with the dialogs. Their technical support can also be improved in terms of response time."
"The main issue that we hear from our customers is that the self-service user interface is a little bit old, possibly due to the fact that IBM is such a large enterprise company. People say that they think they're in the year 2004, because you can very clearly see that the technology is lagging behind modern trends."
"It could use more facility or flexibility for reporting, and business intelligence in the tool."
"The user interface is not very interesting. If you look at other products like JIRA and ServiceNow, they have made it much easier for the end-users. Maybe not ServiceNow, but JIRA is quite flexible. From a presentation point of view, IBM should make more user-friendly interfaces."
"Overall the user experience, as opposed to the system and databases, could be improved. It does work as it should and it's good, but they should invest more in the user interfaces to be less data oriented and more appealing for the user."
"The solution lacks a graphical user interface."
"The reporting in relation to updating could be improved upon."
"Support has been the biggest problem for us. I understand that because we use the product of a global company, some changes are not quick to deploy."
"Jira Service Management should be more user-friendly."
"Lacks an interface where the customer can report issues."
"Every time there's a problem with JIRA Service Management, you have to have a look at how to solve it, and there's always a feature request or the feature request on the solution is too large and the development cycles are too slow."
"There is room for improvement in the user interface and the queues."
"It would be beneficial if we could turn comments into subtasks or other JIRA tickets directly."
"​SaaS version for large organizations (more than 2000 users) is not available."
"I would like to see improvement in the ability to filter completed tasks."
"If we can have an easier way to deploy this solution without the help of a consultant and a more reliable way of deploying procedures, it would be quite helpful."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's basically for a big company because of the costs. A small company can't afford the licensing cost. For medium and large companies, it's the best product. The price of the license is on the higher side compared to others."
"The licensing we have for IBM Control Desk is on a yearly basis. They have a concurrent license and an administrative license. And with these, you get all the products. There aren't any additional fees for extra add-ons or anything like that."
"The license for IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is paid yearly and is on a per-user basis. You buy the product and pay for its license yearly. IBM is changing the licensing structure, but for now, it's a yearly license. There's no additional cost. It's just the license that you need to pay for to use IBM SmartCloud Control Desk."
"JIRA Service Management's pricing is pretty decent compared to competitors. I rate the pricing an eight to nine on a scale of one to ten."
"Do not forget to calculate add-on costs. These cost a percentage of the JIRA purchasing costs and are based on the number of JIRA users."
"It depends on the number of users but it starts at $20 per month per user. I would rate them a three out of five for pricing."
"Jira Service Management has affordable license fees. It's $12 a month per person."
"Right now, there are only two of us who are both agents on the help desk and developers. We might be on the free version because we're less than three agents or users. I'm looking at Zephyr tests, which have a $10 a month flat rate, so right now, it is $10 a month. There are lots of add-ons. They do a free version, a standard version, and a premium version. In the last company, we started on $50 a month. By the time I left, we were paying $4,500 a month. That was mainly because we had 100 users on Confluence. I bought an add-on for Jira software for which we had 10 users, and that was $5 per user per month. It was costing me $500 a month, whereas it should only be $50 a month. I don't know if licensing fee has changed. I'd like our whole company to use it, but the big problem is the licensing because the Confluence side is what is really useful, but if I add 30 users to Confluence and then buy an extension for Jira software, I've got to pay for 30 licenses, even though I've only got two users in Jira software. It is the one big disadvantage of cloud software. You always have to pay for the number of seats regardless of which product you are on. This will probably severely limit how many people would use it because I'm not going to start paying $10 per user per month for a Jira software add-on when there are only two people using it."
"The price for JIRA Service Management is reasonable and cheaper than other ITSM solutions, but the licensing model is different, so you cannot compare it with other solutions. Overall, the pricing for the solution is acceptable."
"Actually in Iran we don't have copyright or intellectual property, so we can use JIRA for free."
"JSM's pricing is one of the best, starting at around $10 per user, per month, with volume discounts available."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Healthcare Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What do you like most about JIRA Service Management?
JIRA Service Management is a very user-friendly solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for JIRA Service Management?
The pricing for Jira Service Management is reasonable and not expensive. It feels fair because there are opportunities for discounts through resellers.
 

Also Known As

SmartCloud Control Desk
JIRA Service Desk
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

St Vincent's Health Australia, Kalibrate Pty. Ltd., Cognizant Technology
mgm technology partners, Telestream, Build.com, Zend Technologies, OfficeDrop, PGS Software, American Diabetes Association, NEPTUNE Canada
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs. JIRA Service Management and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.