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OpenText Service Manager [EOL] 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

OpenText Service Manager [EOL]
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
48
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
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)
 

Featured Reviews

MEKKAB Raouf - PeerSpot reviewer
Excellent pricing with great change management and service management capabilities
We started with version 9.3, and now we're on 9.6 with the full solution, including the CMS. They have lots of options. They propose a full solution for technology and IT service management. We are a telecom company. We are a leader in the market, and therefore, we need to have all details about our own environment and assets. So far, Micro Focus answers all our needs. I'd advise new users to go directly to the SMAX solution, the last, last version of Service Manager. If they are a technical company or information technology company with engineers and developers, they can use it on-premise. If they don't have such competence in the company, they can ask for the solution on the cloud. It is easily available on Microsoft, Amazon, or Google clouds. I'd rate the product nine out of ten.
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

"A valuable feature for us is that we have an ordered way to handle all the cases that we can handle with the infrastructure."
"It's easy to scale."
"It gives us better understanding and control of service management."
"Technical support is pretty good."
"It helps to register things, to see the changing parts, and to correlate incidents."
"Service Manager does what it should, but it's quite outdated."
"It's pretty well-structured in modules."
"It's mostly so reliable and has a lot of functionality. We're using a lot of HPE tools and we can do a lot with it. So, its functionality is the most valuable feature."
"This solution is a single-storage for our user community to submit help desk tickets."
"I find the incident management part to be the most valuable. That's how the service desk tracks tickets."
"Very easy to implement and to respond to my clients' needs."
"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."
"Flexibility is the most valuable feature of ServiceNow, that is, being able to modify it to do what we need it to do."
"What I like the most is that it's a common service data model and the fact that everything is available on one platform."
"Within our organization, we're not finding really any major issues with scalability and things of that nature."
"We used ServiceNow for change management, release management, and event management."
 

Cons

"Service Manager is at the end of its life. The architecture, performance, and look are all way behind."
"The interface could be better."
"With the new version moving toward the codeless configuration is good, but it's losing flexibility."
"We aren't able to take emails that come in and turn them into tickets, especially when it comes to attachments. When an email has an attachment, like a screenshot, it is a very cumbersome process, and it does not work very well. I shouldn't have been paying technicians to cut and paste attachments from an email into the ticketing system. It should do that automatically. Other solutions are able to do that. This is something that needs to be improved. Test manager and knowledge management areas are probably amongst the worst parts of this solution. We try to use this solution for knowledge management, but it is not user-friendly. Therefore, it has limited ROI as you need to spend time to try and fully capitalize on the knowledge management system."
"Micro Focus Service Manager is not very great. It would be better if it had more features. When it comes to features, BMC tops the chart. When it comes to usage, people use BMC more."
"Pure cloud-based native functionality is lacking."
"There's a lot of manual work, which is error prone and time consuming, in how the code gets transported from one system to the other."
"Service Manager would be improved with access to automation."
"For healthcare, which is a pretty audited environment, there are no concrete solutions for digital signatures, apart from our license with Adobe, so it requires orchestration."
"Data access is a bit difficult, where you sometimes wish you had a relational database for some queries. The flexibility of data access in general is a bit on the low end. Of course, there is flexibility in some ways, but when I need a certain combination of data for some report, it can become a challenge."
"The interface can be a bit more intuitive."
"When it comes to changing some of the features, I would like a little more leeway."
"For me, there's a real opportunity, especially within the IT Service Management suite, to give a much better overall view of the workflow that individuals have across the different applications. At the moment, a lot of information is quite siloed in the different tables in ServiceNow."
"When it comes to reference fields, there are some limitations where you aren't able to use them, like in relationship queries. In Remedy, when you click a menu, you get options directly, whereas here, if you use a reference field, it points you to a different form. So the UI experience totally changes for the end user."
"The asset management application could be improved. They have a lot of the infrastructure built, but it does not come with already made compatibility with some of the most popular vendors, such as Cisco and Microsoft. You have to fix it yourself."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I pay for Service Manager on a yearly basis, and the price is reasonable - I would rate it five out of ten."
"I would say that identify your requirements and pay for the support to implement and test those requirements, and then hope that you did a good job because the cost of their service is fairly expensive."
"HP Service Manager has moderate pricing."
"The license is not cheap."
"Micro Focus Service Manager is a little cheaper than other options. You have to pay a monthly subscription fee."
"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."
"Isn't pricing always too much? We really do chafe at the ITIL licensing. ITOM is also pretty expensive."
"ServiceNow is an expensive solution."
"We know that ServiceNow is not cheap, it's more expensive than other solutions. But we are trying to increase our ability to handle tickets so that the cost per ticket is less."
"I am from Brazil. For Latin American markets, ServiceNow is very expensive as compared to other vendors, such as VMware."
"The solution is expensive."
"The price of the solution is comparable to industry standards. For the features that we received, it is reasonable."
"The price of this solution is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
25%
Manufacturing Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Government
9%
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

What needs improvement with Micro Focus Service Manager?
The product's technical support services need improvement.
What is your primary use case for Micro Focus Service Manager?
We use the product for infrastructure, profile, and incident management.
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

Micro Focus Service Manager, HPE ITSM, HPE Service Manager
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

resultspositive, Globicon
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 ServiceNow, Atlassian, ManageEngine and others in IT Service Management (ITSM). Updated: March 2025.
842,388 professionals have used our research since 2012.