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IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs ServiceNow comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 1, 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

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk
Ranking in Help Desk Software
26th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
ServiceNow
Ranking in Help Desk Software
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
216
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 2025, in the Help Desk Software category, the mindshare of IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is 0.7%, down from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow is 24.3%, down from 26.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Help Desk Software
 

Featured Reviews

Jose Pedro Muñoz - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps standardize our workflow, track client tickets, and it's very flexible
Initially we used HPE Service Desk. Then, Remedy (IBM SmartCloud Control Desk) version 5. When selecting a vendor, the most important thing for us is the flexibility of the tool. It must be very flexible to change the workflow or to add new workflows for the clients. It must have stability and scalability as well.
Somnath Kand - PeerSpot reviewer
Custom integration and reporting lead to efficient ticket management
There is a need for bug or error tracking in ServiceNow. Although there are child incidents or tickets, tracking primary issues or bugs within enhancements is not present. The reporting features in the new portal could be more user-friendly. While it provides options to minimize chart and image sizes, actual implementation doesn't always reflect these changes.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"SLA integrations, reports, and integration with other applications are the most valuable."
"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 solution is very easy to work with."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"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 subsequent chain of tasks, I believe, is valuable."
"What I like the most is that it's a common service data model and the fact that everything is available on one platform."
"The flow designer for application development is the most valuable. The newest version of flow designer allows us to develop applications quite fast. We can have custom and mobile applications. It has an interface for mobiles, and it also has a good reputation."
"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."
"I have found the workflows and integration the most valuable in this solution."
"ServiceNow is one of the few easiest platforms you can integrate with products like Ansible to automate your workflows."
 

Cons

"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."
"The reporting in relation to updating could be improved upon."
"It could use more facility or flexibility for reporting, and business intelligence in the tool."
"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 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."
"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 solution lacks a graphical user interface."
"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 setup was time-consuming and required a lot of internal resources."
"They could improve license management, particularly when integrating different applications or toolsets."
"It should include information on navigating various user interfaces for creating diverse requests directed to different teams."
"Change Management is the area I have found that this tool can be improved because there are so many fields which are missing, such as urgency of the customer request and how the priority is defined. These are some of the areas in which I found that BMC Remedy is much better than ServiceNow."
"ServiceNow's mobile app should be seamless and it is not right now."
"The discovery of assets could be improved; right now they only allow for one domain."
"ServiceNow doesn't cater to the Middle Eastern market."
"ServiceNow might need to improve its capabilities to integrate with third-party tools."
 

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."
"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 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."
"The CapEx version is great."
"Some time ago it was expensive, but large companies have special contracts. It's enterprise prices, and we're talking about millions per year."
"We are happy with the pricing."
"It is very expensive because it is a big organization. You have to pay for additional things."
"This is a pretty expensive product, so the licensing could be better."
"The licenses are expensive."
"The pricing is reasonable and affordable, making it suitable for businesses ranging from small to large scale."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Educational Organization
28%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

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...
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.
 

Comparisons

No data available
 

Also Known As

SmartCloud Control Desk
No data available
 

Overview

 

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    
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs. ServiceNow and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.