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LeanIX vs ServiceNow comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

LeanIX
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Architecture Management (1st)
ServiceNow
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
216
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (1st), IT Asset Management (1st), IT Service Management (ITSM) (1st), Rapid Application Development Software (2nd), No-Code Development Platforms (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

LeanIX and ServiceNow aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. LeanIX is designed for Enterprise Architecture Management and holds a mindshare of 16.3%, up 13.0% compared to last year.
ServiceNow, on the other hand, focuses on IT Service Management (ITSM), holds 24.6% mindshare, down 27.5% since last year.
Enterprise Architecture Management
IT Service Management (ITSM)
 

Q&A Highlights

AC
Feb 13, 2025
 

Featured Reviews

Umit Sengul - PeerSpot reviewer
A platform that facilitates efficient IT architecture management and integration, improving organizational coordination and decision-making
LeanIX is primarily used to create and manage architectural models, link capabilities, activities, and products and generate comprehensive reports. It serves as a central platform for overseeing the IT landscape within EON, a large organization, streamlining operations and enhancing governance…
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

"LeanIX has a great application information architecture."
"My favorite feature of LeanIX is its ability to induct attribute-driven surveys."
"LeanIX has good usability and stability. This SaaS is intuitive, easy to use, and comes with a nice reporting feature."
"The most valuable features are that it's user-friendly and the user experience. It's easy to map the fact sheets."
"The most valuable feature would be application portfolio management, which is where they came from, but over time, they have got artificial intelligence. They built up a very good repository. If I identify a system by name, from historical information, oftentimes, they can tell me that this is deployed with this number of CPUs and they can give me a really good profile of the application for me to put it into a change management database with very little effort."
"My favorite feature of LeanIX is its ability to induct attribute-driven surveys."
"Ease of use is the most valuable feature. From an enterprise architecture perspective, it's not too cumbersome with too many functionalities, yet it has a lot of attributes for the content it covers."
"The solution provides a single window view of business, application, data, and technology views of the IT ecosystem."
"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 workflow capability for easy setup is powerful."
"ServiceNow is a very powerful tool that can perform a lot of different functions."
"I have found that sorting and grouping functions are particularly useful."
"Within our organization, we're not finding really any major issues with scalability and things of that nature."
"I really like what they've done with their common service data model because now I can make a connection between the business process and technology."
"The solution integrates well with other products."
"Everything about the schema, including the design of ServiceNow, is great."
 

Cons

"Report generation could be more detailed. There are some shortcomings when creating reports. We can't create tag-based reports or go beyond basic technical reports."
"They could include a combination of LeanIX and some modeling extensions."
"Improvements in user interface simplicity could be made, particularly with the reporting and filtering capabilities."
"Does a poor job of being able to allocate detailed costings to components within the network."
"The solution’s API integration needs to improve. I would like to see a digital screen watch feature also in the solution."
"LeanIX should improve its support services."
"Not a ten because you always have that gap between complexity and easy to use. And the more complex the tool becomes, the more difficult it is to get the usability."
"They should improve the out of the box connectors that they provide. They should see if clients are really ready to adapt them."
"We do a lot of relatively advanced stuff for the size that we are, but ServiceNow itself is so big and to some extent, there is a significant amount of complexity that you have, a big learning curve I would say, in order to really get on board."
"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."
"I know that discovery tools are not meant to be simple, but somehow, if they could make it more simple and robust, that would be great."
"It's a great platform, but there's still room for improvement. As the solutions stands now, you do need a lot of previous experience to use it. It would be great if they could develop some use case templates. This would be beneficial for a small and medium-sized businesses."
"The reporting, which also includes dashboards, needs to be improved, and there should also be the ability to turn on and off portions of Project Management. Currently, as soon as you install the new version, you've got to go back there and make all the tweaks. There should be just a configuration file that goes to the new version.  The Project Management module does not leverage the knowledge base the way it should, and there is no built-in ability to get to the articles. Resource management should be easier. It would be amazing if they can make resource management a little bit more graphical. There are other solutions that I've seen where resource management was a more visual experience."
"ServiceNow might need to improve its capabilities to integrate with third-party tools."
"Transparency in the pricing model needs to be improved."
"I find the way you need to attach things like screenshots and stuff is a bit gimmicky. I'm a casual user. I'll use it once every two months and only when I have an incident that I need to report. You don't get a lot of experience with it when you're just using it once in a while like that. Therefore, it needs to be more intuitive so that you don't have to re-learn how to do simple tasks as the way to do certain things just isn't obvious."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool needs to include more flexible licensing options. We do not use the tool all the time. So pricing should be considered only when we use the tool."
"The solution's pricing is based on a licensing model that is competitive and in line with other products."
"The pricing is very good. We definitely get good value for the money."
"It cost me $91,000 a year for 300 applications. For any enterprise, 300 applications are minimal, as many have well over 1,000 applications."
"There is a sweet spot of where they need to be on pricing right now. They could go up a little bit in pricing, but it has to do with the cost savings, and it has to do with the practitioners using it. I use it where I get cost savings and I can justify it, but they probably have the ability to flex a 10% up channel on their sales on that. So, they could increase their settle price, not their offering price, when they sell. They can probably hold that up a little bit higher than it is because there are cost savings that we can drive from it."
"I would rate the pricing a one out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."
"LeanIX uses application-based account licensing, where the cost is multiplied by the number of applications in the software implementation."
"As the tool is cloud-based, its cost is more affordable."
"The platform offers a free trial, by providing a free developer instance once you sign up."
"In Tunisia, the companies find the licensing costs to be expensive."
"ServiceNow pricing is an art, not a science. The deal depends on how commercially savvy you are, which does make it something that is quite difficult to get right. It is most definitely an opportunity area for ServiceNow to improve and have more visibility around pricing of the different products within the platform."
"I know that it's not too bad because people continue to use it and they are happy to renew up their contract."
"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."
"The price could be a little lower for the solution. Many of my customers have issues with the licensing process, they have to make it easier and straightforward."
"ServiceNow is a leader and its pricing is quite good, quite competitive... Sometimes some plugins are not priced reasonably but, generally, the platform itself, its modules, are priced reasonably."
"Initially, the licensing model ServiceNow came up with was very good. But now, from a licensing perspective, they are changing their model day by day. It is becoming a bit expensive for customers."
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Answers from the Community

AC
Feb 13, 2025
Feb 13, 2025
Bizzdesign has a ServiceNow integration that is available on the SNOW App Store - this blog will explain how you can use the power of both platforms to design strategic technology roadmaps to drive digital transformation, IT estate modernization and cloud transformation for your enterprise. - ServiceNow APM and Bizzdesign to win at Digital Transformation
2 out of 5 answers
Jairo Willian Pereira - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 4, 2022
IMHO, ServiceNow is a complete ITSM tool, designed to support tradictional/waterfall and digital/agile "business" and is completely adherent with ITIL (and others frameworks). LeanIX offers a more limited setup of inventary, correlation and others tools (for example, offers only few ITIL domains), such as showed here https://docs.leanix.net/docs.For market-time, features and maturity i'll choice ServiceNow but the price may be a problem.
KO
Jan 4, 2022
Don't know about LeanIX but QualiWare has a ServiceNow bi-directional API already in place....
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
6%
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

Any experience with Strategic Project Portfolio Management Solutions?
Hi @Cheryl Joseph ​Looking at the crossover between Project and Portfolio management with EA, then Planview could be a good choice. If looking at Portfolio Management from an EA perspective then Le...
What do you like most about LeanIX?
The ability to import data and generate reports from it. That's where its power lies.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for LeanIX?
LeanIX is associated with high costs. It cost me $91,000 a year for 300 applications. For any enterprise, 300 applications are minimal, as many have well over 1,000 applications. The first pricing ...
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

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

adidas, Bosch, Chico's, Haworth, Helvetia, KuKa, Osram, Telekom, TUI, Santander, Swarovski, Vaillant, 7Eleven, and Zalando.
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 SAP LeanIX, Sparx Systems, erwin by Quest and others in Enterprise Architecture Management. Updated: February 2025.
842,296 professionals have used our research since 2012.