Appian vs ServiceNow comparison

Appian and ServiceNow are both solutions in the Rapid Application Development Software category. Appian is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.1, while ServiceNow is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.5. Appian holds a 9.7% mindshare in RADS, compared to ServiceNow’s 11.1% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Appian users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 91% of ServiceNow users who would recommend it.

Appian

Read 58 Appian reviews

13,297 Views
8,979 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

ServiceNow

Read 213 ServiceNow reviews

15,856 Views
9,736 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

Appian

ServiceNow

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 31, 2022

We performed a comparison between Appian and ServiceNow based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

Ease of Deployment: Users of both solutions indicate that setup, installation, and deployment is straightforward and easy.

Features: Appian users like that it integrates well with other systems. It has a seamless, easy to use model interface, which is as close to low-code as it gets. The solution has a solid, robust architecture and scales easily. It also provides very good mobile device applications. Some users feel the management of reusable assets design needs improvement. The solution can struggle a bit when handling large amounts of data, and the decision and rules engine could perform better.

ServiceNow provides very good chain management, incident management, and problem management features. The solution intuitively acts as a database to keep the entire organization informed for the status of all projects. Many users feel that reporting and vulnerability management needs to be improved. Additionally, integrations with today’s popular third-party solutions need further improvement.

Pricing: Users feel both solutions are expensive.

Service and Support: Users of both solutions are happy with the level of service and support they have received.

Comparison Results: ServiceNow comes out ahead in this comparison. It enables organizations to deliver solutions faster and allows users to track solutions using real-time data to ensure continual progress and positive, effective outcomes. ServiceNow is very robust and stable and updates frequently so users always have the best tools available to them.

To learn more, read our detailed Appian vs. ServiceNow Report (Updated: July 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Appian vs. ServiceNow

July 2024

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Categories and Ranking

Appian

Ranking in Rapid Application Development Software

6th

Average Rating

8.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Business Process Management (BPM) (6th), Process Automation (3rd), Low-Code Development Platforms (5th), Process Mining (5th)

ServiceNow

Ranking in Rapid Application Development Software

4th

Average Rating

8.4

Number of Reviews

213

Ranking in other categories

Help Desk Software (1st), IT Asset Management (1st), IT Service Management (ITSM) (1st), No-Code Development Platforms (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2024, in the Rapid Application Development Software category, the mindshare of Appian is 9.7%, up from 8.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow is 11.1%, up from 8.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Rapid Application Development Software

Featured Reviews

reviewer1727346

Practice Leader - Digital Process Automation at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

Dec 8, 2021

Easy to develop, low-code, and has a good user interface

There are four areas I believe Appian could improve in. The first is a seamless contact center integration. Appian does not have a contact center feature. The second is advanced features in RPA. The third would be chatbot and email bot integration—while Appian comes with chatbot and email bot, it's not as mature as it should be, compared to the competition. The fourth area would be next best action, since there is not much of this sort of feature in Appian. These are all features which competitors' products have, and in a mature manner, whereas Appian lacks on these four areas. I see customers who are moving from Appian to Pega because these features are not in Appian.

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Khalid Qureshi

Program Architect at Afiniti.com

May 23, 2023

The workspace feature helps us manage multiple projects, but it's not as user-friendly as some solutions

I work in the compliance department at my company, and we use ServiceNow to manage our team members' tasks ServiceNow helps us deliver projects on schedule. When we start a new project, we share the deadlines with the various team members, and they perform their assigned tasks. I like…

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Compared to other code tools that I've seen, Appian has a more robust rules engine"

"Call Web Service Smart Service - Web service integrations with other systems are super simple and fast to create, supported by low code menus."

"It has very flexible adaptation and the ability to save and automate processes."

"The tech support is quite good."

"Form building capabilities and well thought out process modelling are key points to this product."

"Appian has many valuable features, the first being the ease of development—rapid development. Second, the process of learning the product and tool is faster when compared to its peers in the market. It's closer to low-code, and while it's still not very easy, it's more low-code than other products in the industry. Appian has a good user interface, a seamless model user interface, which comes without additional coding. It can also integrate with multiple systems."

"The product's most valuable feature is the low code aspect of development. We can develop an end-to-end VPN solution using a single platform."

"Process Modeling enables creation of business process workflows. You can create complex business workflows in a visual manner, and it is also easy to debug/monitor."

More Appian pros

"Easy to implement and consolidate different platforms and users with useful functionalities."

"The Workflow feature is the most valuable."

"It offers enhanced and efficient communication between the requester and the four pillar EDR through an online chat platform."

"I like that it's always up and running."

"The solution has very good automation tools."

"It is user-friendly and simple to use."

"You can put information in or export it out quickly, which is very useful when you have weekly or monthly reports."

"HR Case Management and Customer Service Management are two of the key areas which clients are using."

More ServiceNow pros

Cons

"While Appian is generally flexible, it's rigid in some ways. It takes longer to do something that isn't available out of the box."

"I wouldn't say their response time is long, but it could be quicker."

"It would be useful if they could create an academy or forum in the future to help active users answer questions they have about the solution."

"Appian could include other applications that we could reuse for other customers, CRM for example."

"It is difficult to set up the on-premise version."

"Appian could be improved by making it a strict, no-code platform with free-built process packs."

"Sometimes, clients expect us to implement ERP using Appian, which is very complicated. In such cases, I don't believe that Appian is a good tool for that."

"It needs better integration with our existing application ecosystem."

More Appian cons

"It should include information on navigating various user interfaces for creating diverse requests directed to different teams."

"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."

"The high price is a huge barrier in Portugal."

"The contract module is quite rudimentary and doesn't support contract line items."

"The solution’s user interface could be improved and given a better design."

"They can maybe improve the area of agile project management. They do have user storyboards and other things, but we kind of lean on Jira for that work. This is perhaps an area that could be looked at a little more."

"Where it could be improved is Discovery. This may sound odd since I just praised the value of ServiceNow Discovery, but improvements to its automatic detection, the breadth of devices, and the depth of devices covered, as well as keeping up with new technologies, are all essential."

"It became kind of complex to set it up without a general lack of knowledge of the particular feature-function capabilities. Features and capabilities could have been explained better to the end-users."

More ServiceNow cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is expensive, but powerful. I would recommend comparing against cheaper licensing products and open source."

"The cost is a bit higher than other low-code competitors, OutSystems and Mendix. The price needs to be more competitive."

"We will have to have a dialogue or negotiate a price for future use. To start with, it is a reasonable price. As we go ahead, we will have to make sure the costs are inline with our expectations as we grow our user base and workloads."

"More flexibility in the licensing model is still needed because initially there were customers who are looking at only one or two use cases of business areas, but now the business areas are changing and there is a larger scope. One license model may not fit everyone. They need to be a little more flexible on the licensing model."

"The cost is calculated on a per-user basis. It might be expensive for small and mid-sized enterprises."

"You can't really test the software properly without actually buying the license first."

"The license is a bit expensive and the pricing model is sometimes confusing for new users or business users. It is difficult for them to know what volume of usage they will have to be able to purchase the best-suited license at the beginning."

"The licensing will be on a monthly basis. We are estimating that cost to be around $2000 to maybe $3,000 per month. We don't foresee any costs above that."

More Appian pricing and cost advice

"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."

"ServiceNow's pricing is comparatively higher than Helix's."

"I'm not aware of any additional costs. I'm pretty sure that the current client is paying just the licensing fee per user. I do know that they've got some support agreement with ServiceNow, but I don't think that is broken out or specific to Project Management. It is just inclusive."

"ServiceNow is an expensive solution."

"We are happy with the pricing."

"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."

"ServiceNow tends to be a little bit more expensive as compared to BMC Helix ITSM."

"In Tunisia, the companies find the licensing costs to be expensive."

More ServiceNow pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

27%

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

11%

Government

Educational Organization

24%

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Which do you prefer - Appian or Camunda Platform?

Appian is fast when building simple to medium solutions. This solution offers simple drag-and-drop functionality with easy plug-and-play options. The initial setup was seamless and very easy to imp...

See all answers

Is Appian a suitable solution for beginners who have no additional preparation?

Appian is actually pretty big on educating its users, including with courses that reward you with certifications. There is a whole section on their company’s website where you can check out the edu...

See all answers

Is it easy to set up Appian or did you have to resort to professional help?

We had some issues when we were setting up Appian. It was quite surprising, since this is a low-code tool which, in its essence, means it is meant for business users and inexperienced beginners. So...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

What do you like most about ServiceNow?

The solution has a user-friendly interface.

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Power Apps vs Appian

Compared 18% of the time

OutSystems vs Appian

Compared 12% of the time

Camunda vs Appian

Compared 10% of the time

IBM BPM vs Appian

Compared 6% of the time

Salesforce Platform vs Appian

Compared 6% of the time

More Appian Competitors

BMC Helix ITSM vs ServiceNow

Compared 10% of the time

Microsoft Power Apps vs ServiceNow

Compared 9% of the time

Pega BPM vs ServiceNow

Compared 9% of the time

IBM Maximo vs ServiceNow

Compared 4% of the time

LeanIX vs ServiceNow

Compared 4% of the time

More ServiceNow Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Appian

September 2024

Download Appian product report

Buyer's Guide

ServiceNow

August 2024

Download ServiceNow product report

Also Known As

Appian BPM, Appian AnyWhere, Appian Enterprise BPMS

No data available

Learn More

Appian

ServiceNow

Overview

Appian is a unified low-code platform and solution used by businesses to build enterprise applications and workflows. This product adapts to the needs of clients and the technologies they are already using to combine their data in a single workflow and maximize resources. The platform has four main components through which it transforms the work process for companies of various sizes. They are:

Complete automation: Through complete automation, companies are able to coordinate and manage employees, existing systems, bots, data, and artificial intelligence (AI) in a single workflow. The solution offers a way to centrally manage all third-party automation vendors as well.
Low-code applications: Appian offers the ability to build applications faster with visual development and low-code tools. All applications are ready-made to be suitable for mobile.
Low-code data: Appian lets companies source data from multiple types of sources, eliminating the need for data migration. Through no-code and low-code solutions and industry-standard connectors, the platform also eliminates the need for data silos.
Enterprise ready: The platform offers options for companies to scale their businesses to an enterprise level without complications.

Appian is utilized across a diverse set of industries, including automotive and manufacturing, energy and utilities, education, financial services, telecom and media, transportation, retail, insurance, healthcare, and life sciences. The most frequent use cases of Appian are customer journey, governance, risk and compliance, operational efficiency, supply chain, distributed order management, and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) management.

Appian Features

Appian has various features that allow users to create solutions for their businesses. These features can be separated into a few groups according to function, including automation, low-code application development, and integrations and data. Some of the most frequently used features of Appian include:

Robotic process automation (RPA): Users of Appian can assign software bots to perform rules-based tasks that need to be repeated over a set course of time. This can improve efficiency and performance within an organization while saving human resources.
Intelligent document processing: The tool offers a feature for quick and accurate extraction and structuring of data. This can reduce time and costs for organizations because it eliminates the need for outsourcing such services.
AI: Appian utilizes artificial intelligence to enhance applications, workflows, and automation. AI is also used to address complex processes and unique situations.
Business rules: Organizations can automate and simplify work processes while adhering to their operating procedures.
Application development: Appian provides a low-code development feature that allows users to deploy applications over ten times faster than through conventional approaches. This feature not only allows for quick application building, but also applications that run on multiple types of platforms, seamless data integration, and business scalability.
Integrations and data: Appian allows for data integration from a wide array of sources without the need for migration. This contributes to easy access to data across systems, real-time data insights, improved user experience, and accelerated development.

Appian Benefits

The benefits of using Appian include:

The solution ensures seamless organization growth, as it supports various UX patterns, common data schemes, and upgrades, used to facilitate application development on a bigger scale.
Appian can increase process speed and deliver applications considerably faster compared to conventional development.
The platform is easy to use and suitable for complete beginners to build applications and workflows.
Appian offers a variety of design tools that facilitate development and deployment.
Appian offers detailed real-time data insight which allows organizations to access relevant information about their processes as they are developing.
The solution offers clients the ability to move data between the cloud, on-premise, and hybrid configurations.
The platform is easy to optimize, which allows businesses to utilize it according to their personal needs.
Appian offers connectivity across web, mobile, email, voice, and chat, providing a multi-channel experience for companies and their clients.

Reviews from Real Users

A practice leader - digital process automation at a computer software company values Appian highly because the product is easy to develop, low-code, and has a good user interface.

Alan G., an advisory board member at Codecon VR, Appian offers a clear application life cycle, easy to learn documentation, and comes with a fundamentals course.

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

Hansard Global plc, Punch Taverns, Pirelli, Crawford & Company, EDP Renewables, Queensland Government Department of State Development, Infrastructure and Planning (, Bank of Tennessee

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

Buyer's Guide

Appian vs. ServiceNow

July 2024

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