BMC FootPrints Service Core vs IBM SmartCloud Control Desk comparison

BMC and IBM are both solutions in the Help Desk Software category. BMC is ranked #32, while IBM is ranked #27. BMC holds a 0.9% mindshare in HDS, compared to IBM’s 0.9% mindshare. Additionally, 90% of BMC users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 88% of IBM users who would recommend it.

BMC FootPrints Service Core

Read 10 BMC FootPrints Service Core reviews

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37 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

Read 9 IBM SmartCloud Control Desk reviews

404 Views
49 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

BMC FootPrints Service Core

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 1, 2024

BMC FootPrints Service Core and IBM SmartCloud Control Desk are competing products in the IT Service Management domain. Data suggests IBM SmartCloud Control Desk holds an advantage in features, offering value that justifies its cost.

Features: BMC FootPrints Service Core includes customizable workflows, seamless integration capabilities, and a reliable relational database system. In contrast, IBM SmartCloud Control Desk stands out with advanced IT asset management, comprehensive incident management, and robust service request applications.

Room for Improvement: BMC FootPrints Service Core could enhance its analytics capabilities, expand its automation features, and refine its user interface. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk may benefit from a simplified deployment process, improved reporting functionalities, and reduced learning curve for new users.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: BMC FootPrints Service Core offers straightforward deployment and responsive customer service, ensuring an intuitive experience. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk presents a more complex deployment due to extensive features but provides strong customer support.

Pricing and ROI: BMC FootPrints Service Core boasts a lower initial setup cost, appealing to budget-conscious businesses with a quicker ROI. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk demands higher investment yet offers long-term benefits through its extensive functionalities, attracting enterprises seeking comprehensive solutions.

To learn more, read our detailed BMC FootPrints Service Core vs. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

BMC FootPrints Service Core vs. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

June 2025

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Helped 859,687 peers since 2012

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

BMC FootPrints Service Core

Ranking in Help Desk Software

32nd

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Service Management (ITSM) (30th)

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

Ranking in Help Desk Software

27th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Help Desk Software category, the mindshare of BMC FootPrints Service Core is 0.9%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is 0.9%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Help Desk Software

Featured Reviews

reviewer1765752

System Engineer at a manufacturing company with 51-200 employees

A flexible, comprehensive, integrated IT service and asset management platform with good technical support

We use BMC FootPrints Service Core to manage network issues, infrastructure issues, software issues, and ERP. We also use it to manage our facility. So, we do some work orders and also use it as an extra ticketing system Technical support is good. It would be better if it were more…

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Jose Pedro Muñoz

Director of operations at Vetasi

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.

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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

"Ability to auto-generate email messages, process email messages, and approvals."

"We can track issues easier and run reports on issues to see if there are patterns."

"I like the fact that FootPrints is a relational database, so every item in the database can be linked to another. This helps create history and audit trails for each CI."

"Implemented system-wide process for approving and tracking "employee move" requests for over 15,000 employees."

"It has helped the help desk team. We get our tickets in and are able to support our customers, the end-users, with this solution."

"The discovery feature is very flexible."

"We have found the reports and the lockdown on a ticket valuable, so only one person can update issues."

"Technical support is good."

More BMC FootPrints Service Core pros

"The solution is very easy to work with."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 solution has been stable."

More IBM SmartCloud Control Desk pros

Cons

"It would be better if it were more user-friendly. The reporting part in the version we have is a little complicated. It takes too long to build and report. It would also be better if there were another way to manage notifications."

"Hyphens are not allowed in the quick search bar. This has created a problem in our environment where we use hyphens in our asset names."

"It would be nice if they added the ability to go directly to a form via a deep link URL."

"Reporting could be improved along with the option to create more fine tuned reports and to create specific fields for each type of ticket."

"The pricing could be a little lower and the product should cover more iTel versions."

"We need more customizable reporting functionality. We could also use more collaboration of service desk tickets. This will allow for two departments to share the same information, track the progress of the total task scope no matter how complex the request is."

"It is pretty clunky and not very intuitive. Even though I have used it for many years, I don't think it is a very good ITSM platform in general. In the telecom space, a lot of telco providers use this solution, but from my perspective, it is not very user friendly. It is a bit more laborious. There are still too many human touchpoints. There can be a little bit more automation. It would also be good to integrate it with other tools. Integration is quite difficult, especially in the telco space."

"The mobile version of this product does not support asset management."

More BMC FootPrints Service Core cons

"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."

"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."

"The solution lacks a graphical user interface."

"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."

"It could use more facility or flexibility for reporting, and business intelligence in the tool."

More IBM SmartCloud Control Desk cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our costs are well over $250,000."

"Cost was on par with other service desk products, and well below Remedy, while still being a BMC product."

"This solution has good pricing."

"The licensing for FootPrints is a perpetual license with an annual support fee."

"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 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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Government

12%

Healthcare Company

10%

Educational Organization

10%

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Comparisons

Rezolve AI Platform vs BMC FootPrints Service Core

Compared 53% of the time

ServiceNow vs BMC FootPrints Service Core

Compared 47% of the time

More BMC FootPrints Service Core Competitors

ServiceNow vs IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

Compared 52% of the time

SCSM vs IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

Compared 48% of the time

More IBM SmartCloud Control Desk Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IT Service Management (ITSM)

June 2025

Download BMC FootPrints Service Core product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

June 2025

Download IBM SmartCloud Control Desk product report

Also Known As

FootPrints Service Core

SmartCloud Control Desk

Overview

FootPrints Service Core integrates IT service and asset management for end-to-end business services, and it's easy to install, use, and support. With configurable capabilities that streamline service delivery, FootPrints improves customer satisfaction and IT's reputation with your business users.

BMC

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.

IBM

Sample Customers

Cast & Crew

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

Buyer's Guide

BMC FootPrints Service Core vs. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

June 2025

Free Report: BMC FootPrints Service Core vs. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

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