IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs ServiceNow comparison

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between IBM SmartCloud Control Desk and ServiceNow based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Help Desk Software solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs. ServiceNow Report (Updated: October 2024).

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs. ServiceNow

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Helped 814,649 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

Ranking in Help Desk Software

27th

Average Rating

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

ServiceNow

Ranking in Help Desk Software

1st

Average Rating

8.4

Number of Reviews

214

Ranking in other categories

IT Asset Management (1st), IT Service Management (ITSM) (1st), Rapid Application Development Software (4th), No-Code Development Platforms (1st)

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 ServiceNow is 25.3%, down from 26.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Help Desk Software

Featured Reviews

Jose Pedro Muñoz

Director of operations at Vetasi

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…

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Fabio QUINTANILHA

IT4IT Manager at L'Oreal

Jan 29, 2024

A stable and scalable solution that has excellent features and is useful for collecting data and building KPIs

I use the solution to collect data to build KPIs. We promote and foster the usage of workflows in the company We use the data to compare and review situations, propose improvements, and promote action items. SPM and ITSM features are the most helpful. The product’s standard user experience is…

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"In the early stages of our company, all requests were done in notebooks, and none of it was centrally managed. But now we have a central tool which is an entry point for all requests that come in."

"The solution is very easy to work with."

"SLA integrations, reports, and integration with other applications are the most valuable."

"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."

More IBM SmartCloud Control Desk pros

"Straightforward tool."

"In my experience, ServiceNow's most valuable feature is its flexibility. If you have a DevOps or development team, you can customize it to meet your specific needs. The tool's dashboard categorizes incidents, making managing it much easier."

"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. If you know how it works, you can have stricter rules in the product."

"The Idea Portal and the PPM platform are most valuable. Their out-of-the-box dashboards and reporting are fantastic. I use them almost on a weekly basis. I have developed a couple of PMO dashboards for reporting. It is user-friendly. Everything is done through a navigation bar, and it makes things a lot easier that way."

"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."

"It facilitates the monitoring of major incidents and provides insights into the effort expended to resolve each incident."

"Your time-to-market, or TTM, becomes faster when you use ServiceNow. Even individuals that are not tech savvy can quickly change processes and workflows in it. This can make the organization as a whole more agile."

"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"

More ServiceNow pros

Cons

"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."

"The reporting in relation to updating could be improved upon."

"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."

"What needs improvement in IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is its graphical interface because it needs to be more user-friendly. IBM is a big company, but this solution is a little bit outdated. The most common comment I get from customers is that IBM SmartCloud Control Desk looks old and needs a refresh. Its frontend needs a little bit of work. The solution needs to be more modern. In the programming world, you see a lot of new technologies, but this particular solution is still on Java. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk isn't like web-based service request tools, and that's an area for improvement. What I'd like to see in the next version of the solution is a more upscale technology. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk has small issues with document links and attachments, and those could bother you when you're using it for a long time. A more user-friendly GUI is also another improvement I'd like to see in the next version of the solution, plus a better user experience, and it would be great if IBM could resolve the current issues I've noticed in IBM SmartCloud Control Desk."

"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."

"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."

More IBM SmartCloud Control Desk cons

"The major area for improvement for our needs would be monitoring the metrics of the times to acknowledge and resolve issues and escalations."

"An area for improvement would be the accessibility of downloaded and compressed files."

"ServiceNow's mobile app should be seamless and it is not right now."

"The interface is not user-friendly."

"Currently, we are finding it a bit difficult to monitor the subscriptions that are being used. The reporting feature related to this can be improved. Its ITOM functionality can be improved. BMC does a better job than ServiceNow in terms of capturing utilization and other such things."

"The solution could improve by making the CMDB integrate with a CI better to allow it to be seen across multiple platforms."

"It's not very secure, it's web-based, and I prefer Remedy. Both the security and the web interface could be improved."

"We would like to have an Asset Management and/or Project Management feature enabled in this version and in the IT Service Management edition."

More ServiceNow cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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 solution is expensive."

"I am from Brazil. For Latin American markets, ServiceNow is very expensive as compared to other vendors, such as VMware."

"It is fairly expensive."

"I rate the solution's pricing a six out of ten. The pricing for ServiceNow is based on a SaaS platform with annual contracts. However, it may not offer much flexibility for adjusting usage in the short term."

"It has a higher cost compared to local/regional solutions."

"There are licensing fees."

"The pricing is on the high side, but if you look at the stability and option to work, it's kind of justified."

"I have found the solution very expensive."

More ServiceNow pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Help Desk Software solutions are best for your needs.

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814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Healthcare Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Educational Organization

25%

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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...

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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 ...

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What do you like most about ServiceNow?

The solution has a user-friendly interface.

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Comparisons

No data available

BMC Helix ITSM vs ServiceNow

Compared 9% of the time

Microsoft Power Apps vs ServiceNow

Compared 9% of the time

Pega Platform vs ServiceNow

Compared 8% of the time

IBM Maximo vs ServiceNow

Compared 5% of the time

Appian vs ServiceNow

Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

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Also Known As

SmartCloud Control Desk

No data available

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IBM

Overview

IBM Control Desk on Cloud offer an access to a user friendly self-service, automated service management, and seamlessly-integrated, best-practice based service desk capabilities. IBM Control Desk provides the IT service management (ITSM) needed to simplify support of users and infrastructure. It also offers a unified IT asset and service management software provides a common control center for managing business processes for both digital and physical assets and enables control, governance and compliance to applications, endpoints and assets to protect critical data and prevent outages. Control Desk is IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)-compliant, accessible through mobile devices and integrates with social media and development tools.

ServiceNow is a cloud-based task-management platform that specializes in IT operations management (ITOM), IT services management (ITSM), and IT business management (ITBM). ServiceNow allows users to manage their teams, projects, and customer interactions using a variety of different plugins and apps with which it easily integrates.

ServiceNow offers prebuilt applications to support any process, as well as a framework and tools that allow you to build your own.

ServiceNow’s service management solutions include change, request, incident, problem, and cost management, as well as HR, IT, field service, and facilities management solutions. They also cover business management solutions such as vendor performance management, financial management, performance analytics and project portfolio suite, as well as governance, risk, and compliance.

“The Smarter Way to Workflow”

ServiceNow’s activities, processes, and tasks are overseen as part of a comprehensive managed workflow that supports such features as real-time collaboration, communication, and resource sharing. ServiceNow’s suite of products allow for operation using serverless computing, and include the categories of Business Apps, Customer Service, HR, IT, and Security.

ServiceNow can be used to support most workflows because of the wide range of tools it offers. These include on-suite ticketing tools, predictive modeling to manage workflows, and benchmarking for the tracking of progress. ServiceNow can assist with artificial intelligence and machine learning processes and can be used to organize the cases of a help/service desk as well as for instance management and problem management. It also smoothly integrates with many legacy systems.

ServiceNow offers service management software for industries including:

Cloud services
Education
Financial services
Government
Healthcare
Manufacturing
Telecommunications

Reviews from Real Users

PeerSpot users prefer ServiceNow to its competitors because of its scalability, stability, and ease of use. It helps everyone in the company to be on the same page by creating a single source of record across all departments. One user stated that “I’ve definitely used over 20 project management solutions, but they can't be compared with ServiceNow.” Another said that “ServiceNow is an industry leader in multiple areas and provides an excellent ROI.”

Sample Customers

St Vincent's Health Australia, Kalibrate Pty. Ltd., Cognizant Technology

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

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs. ServiceNow