We performed a comparison between BMC Helix ITSM and IBM SmartCloud Control Desk based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, Atlassian, BMC and others in Help Desk Software."BMC Helix ITSM gives us email and SMS notifications, we can check the tickets, and give feedback. All the basic features that we need are available."
"The digital workplace is appealing."
"The product's initial setup phase was easy."
"We use the solution's Discovery tool to discover our assets, and we've used the ticketing tool for years."
"Our Change Management and Incident Management processes have been greatly improved."
"It provides a good user experience."
"The versatility and customizability of the product is what I like most."
"BMC Smart IT is somewhat rigid, but they have a powerful backend that supports our complex need for extension versus customization. Between extension and customization, you can achieve complex business processes. That's one of the main advantages of BMC."
"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."
"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 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 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 solution has been stable."
"SLA integrations, reports, and integration with other applications are the most valuable."
"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."
"Working with numerous processes can be complex, and the processes are not always transparent in the solution."
"The interface is somewhat dated as compared to technologies in use today."
"Encountered issues with scalability and stability."
"It has created more layers of bureaucracy."
"It needs a more organic workflow, so every field you create is labeled throughout the stack. BMC has a few products that they try to bundle together. Generally, that solution works. BMC should take a step back and think about the overall solution—not only ITSM but also CTI Integration along with chat. They have all that, but it's not an end-to-end holistic solution with the added reporting analytics."
"Integration could be better. If something doesn't work well with some tools and operations, then management becomes difficult, so you have to integrate other tools."
"In the next release, I would like to see AI used for classification or categorization."
"The dashboard can be better."
"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."
"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."
"It could use more facility or flexibility for reporting, and business intelligence in the tool."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
BMC Helix ITSM is ranked 3rd in Help Desk Software with 75 reviews while IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is ranked 22nd in Help Desk Software with 9 reviews. BMC Helix ITSM is rated 8.0, while IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is rated 7.6. The top reviewer of BMC Helix ITSM writes "The leading service management platform for delivering intelligent, user-centric experiences". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM SmartCloud Control Desk writes "Stable but clunky and lacks a user interface". BMC Helix ITSM is most compared with ServiceNow, JIRA Service Management, ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, Freshdesk and IBM Maximo, whereas IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is most compared with ServiceNow and SymphonyAI IT Service Management.
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