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Clarity SM vs Espressive Barista comparison

Broadcom and Espressive are both solutions in the Help Desk Software category. Broadcom is ranked #24, while Espressive is ranked #16 with an average rating of 9.0. Broadcom holds a 1.0% mindshare in HDS, compared to Espressive’s 0.4% mindshare. Additionally, 85% of Broadcom users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of Espressive users who would recommend it.
Clarity SM
Read 107 Clarity SM reviews
  • 490 Views
  • 57 Comparison Views
85% willing to recommend
Espressive Barista
Read 9 Espressive Barista reviews
  • 235 Views
  • 42 Comparison Views
87% willing to recommend
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 3, 2024

Clarity SM and Espressive Barista compete in the service management category. Espressive Barista seems to have the upper hand with its advanced AI capabilities and natural language processing, offering a more automated and efficient user experience.

Features: Clarity SM offers traditional service management features such as incident and problem management, asset tracking, and extensive customization options. It effectively handles ticketing, SLAs, and asset management. Espressive Barista stands out with its natural language processing and AI capabilities, providing conversational interfaces and reducing reliance on human support through chat automation, making it powerful for self-service enhancement.

Room for Improvement: Clarity SM users often desire a more modern interface, improved real-time reporting, and easier customization without stability issues. Better documentation and system integration are also sought. Espressive Barista could improve its natural language processing to better understand varied user intents and integrate more deeply with platforms like WhatsApp. It also needs more intuitive management of FAQs and content categorization.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Clarity SM is preferred on-premises, which suits organizations with the necessary infrastructure but can lead to longer deployments and complex support. Its customer service has mixed reviews, with responsiveness issues. Espressive Barista, being primarily cloud-based, offers quicker and simpler deployments, with flexible options including hybrid models. It is praised for improved service desk availability, although some setup and integration refinements are needed.

Pricing and ROI: Clarity SM has a complex pricing model, with high costs for extensive customization, justifying the investment for large enterprises. Its licensing flexibility caters to large user bases. Espressive Barista offers competitive pricing with significant ROI through operational savings enabled by AI automation. It provides value through user-based licensing, scalable across multiple service areas.

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To learn more, read our detailed Clarity SM vs. Espressive Barista Report (Updated: May 2025).
Buyer's Guide
Clarity SM vs. Espressive Barista
May 2025
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Helped 858,038 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

Clarity SM
Ranking in Help Desk Software
24th
Ranking in IT Service Management (ITSM)
26th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
107
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Espressive Barista
Ranking in Help Desk Software
16th
Ranking in IT Service Management (ITSM)
15th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
AI-Powered Chatbots (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Help Desk Software category, the mindshare of Clarity SM is 1.0%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Espressive Barista is 0.4%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Help Desk Software
 

Featured Reviews

Türker Kara - PeerSpot reviewer
Quite good back-end architecture for end users but the API is very, very bad
Our company uses the solution for system, program, service request, change, and knowledge-based management.  We perform CMD authorizations and use a lot of integrations for our in-house or third-party applications. We also use Salesforce automations and Microsoft orchestrations.  We have about…
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Jim Lobao - PeerSpot reviewer
Has helped enhance our support ability, reduced our resolution time, and reduced our service desk costs
Espressive Barista's natural language processing and conventional AI still have room for improvement. We haven't yet found anything that resembles true AI that can learn autonomously without human intervention. However, Barista does help us identify and address some of these areas, allowing my team to step in and create intents and responses to questions. When a user asks a question that Barista doesn't immediately understand, we can recognize the pattern, capture it, and link it to a common intent. This is highly beneficial for acquiring such data, but it's a reactive approach and still requires curation. Natural language processing still has some way to go. One of our challenges is that our internal employees haven't yet adopted a natural way of interacting with Barista. Getting people to be concise and to the point, rather than being verbose as if they were interacting with a human, has been an ongoing challenge. While they may feel comfortable being conversational in Slack, expecting a human-like response, Barista is a different entity. Barista isn't interested in their recent vacation; it just wants to know they're locked out of their account. So, some users may assume Barista understands their intent when they say, "I'm back from vacation and locked out of my account." Barista, however, may interpret this as a request for the holiday schedule. Therefore, we're gradually educating our users to adapt their communication style for better success with Barista. Conversely, we desire Barista to adapt its behavior based on the interaction, the language used, and the way people communicate. I wholeheartedly desire an AI that can continuously learn and adapt to our organization's evolving needs. This is the most challenging aspect, as it involves understanding our organization's terminology, procedures, and toolsets. We've made significant progress in this area. However, from an NLP standpoint, we still face challenges with our nearly 3,000 Slack channel users, each with their unique communication styles. People ask questions in various ways, and sometimes there are misunderstandings. They want to interact with us naturally. However, we still struggle with natural language processing. People don't always realize that the bot is a virtual agent designed to be concise and efficient. Sometimes, less is more. It's been a difficult transition for people to grasp that they're conversing with a virtual agent, not a human. They still expect human-like interactions, such as discussing their weekend or holidays or simply pasting screenshots of errors. However, the bot can't interpret screenshots. If they provide the error code and some context about the application, the bot can better understand the issue. So, the key challenge is bridging the gap between human expectations and the bot's capabilities in terms of natural interaction.
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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

"We have decreased training and talk time, and all those good stats, just by reusing information, not reinventing it, every time we get a call."
"Scalability is very good. We have scaled to more users and more functionality."
"It allows IT to handle users on a personal basis. It allows IT to have a name and a face, and we interact with the end-users."
"It also provides the front end for the employees too. It's pretty basic, but it gives them the means to reach out to IT so they don't have to pick up the phones."
"Logging every action in Service Desk Manager (SDM)."
"The in-service catalog is quite useful."
"It improves our service delivery process. We're more efficient. We're leveraging the ticketing system, which is always more efficient, so we can measure and improve."
"You can customize it and make it work to the client's needs."
More Clarity SM pros
"With respect to its natural language processing capabilities, it recognizes things that you wouldn't think it would recognize. Even in cases where it doesn't, it's pretty easy to go in and make the adjustments that are needed."
"When it comes to neutral language processing and conversational AI, it's very good, very solid... We all have different ways of speaking or writing in English and the application does a very solid job of recognizing what's being asked regardless of how it's being asked."
"The solution is available to support us instantly as required."
"The bot is pretty easy to update and keep up to date. Espressive itself is pretty easy to work with."
"Its ability to recognize phrases has gotten smarter over time."
"The most valuable feature is its scalability."
"We have the ability to alter phrases, create new phrases, or enhance phrases, or change paths. From the dashboard, we are able to get a lot of information we need about what people are asking, where they are dropping off from conversations, and where they do not get the information they need."
"I like Expressive Barista's integration with Microsoft Teams."
More Espressive Barista pros
 

Cons

"The SDM administration and customisation needS deep information about architecture and vendor support continuously."
"Report solutions are a little short."
"Improvements would include simplification in the user interface, being more expandable, better documentation. The user interface is fairly cluttered, and we can update it the way we need to, but it just seems dated."
"It doesn't yet have the ability to integrate with other products."
"Nowadays every person is used to an interface that is more user-friendly and this one is not so user-friendly maybe due to the fact that, if you need to let people customize everything, sometimes you lose out on a clean user experience."
"Right now, you have to create the Scoreboards individually for roles or users. If they could separate that functionality, and create the scoreboards separately, and then just link scoreboards to roles and users - that way you could reuse the same ones - that would be a huge benefit. I know, because they're a nightmare to manage at times."
"They should enhance the service desk manager's service point function to be more customizable."
"The API is very, very bad so we developed our own."
More Clarity SM cons
"Expressive Barista could improve by adding native integration with WhatsApp, one of the top communication channels in South Africa. When we're trying to sell Barista to customers, we have to tell them that the solution doesn't have out-of-the-box support for WhatsApp. We can develop it, but then we need to have a conversation about how much that will cost."
"Although they've done some work on their metrics dashboard, there is some fine-tuning to do for people that just want to go in there at a glance and see their metrics."
"My only comment would be if they wanted to use this as an IT service management tool, maybe they could think about Barista making tickets and having change management and problem management capabilities."
"Espressive Barista's natural language processing and conventional AI still have room for improvement."
"I would like to see improvement to the out-of-the-box verbiage, with the questions going to the right place."
"The reports provided by the solution are not customizable."
"The knowledge management could definitely be improved."
"What would make things easier is more detail, out of the box, about what is helping out of the box. We're struggling a little bit to get that data. We want more information about what Barista has brought in that the employees are using, out of the box. We want more visibility into the things that we ourselves haven't done the interaction for."
More Espressive Barista cons
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is quite reasonable compared to other solutions in the market."
"I don't see anyone other than large companies being able to afford this system."
"It is a bit expensive, but you definitely get what you pay for. It is worth it!"
"There is a subscripted needed to use Clarity SM. The price of the solution could be less expensive. ServiceNow is less expensive and BMC Helix is priced similar to Clarity SM."
"I think pricing of this model is suitable for growing corporations."
"Clarity offers a perpetual license. Customers purchase the license once and then pay for maintenance. CA provides a subscription model as well. Both models are available for our customers."
"The pricing is based on a subscription model."
"Pricing is simple, as it’s per concurrent analysts."
"The pricing isn't overly burdensome. It's going to be interesting to see how new models come in with new capabilities but, as it is, as a base system, it's pretty good."
"User-based licensing has been working well for us, and we believe we are deriving significant value from it."
"The price for the licensing is fair."
"The solution is affordable."
"It is expensive. It's not a cheap thing."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
49%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
5%
Retailer
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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What do you like most about Espressive?
The most valuable feature is its scalability.
See all answers
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Espressive?
Espressive has been very accommodating in trying to meet our needs and adapt to our current situation. User-based licensing has been working well for us, and we believe we are deriving significant ...
See all answers
What needs improvement with Espressive?
Espressive Barista's natural language processing and conventional AI still have room for improvement. We haven't yet found anything that resembles true AI that can learn autonomously without human ...
See all answers
 

Comparisons

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Compared 14% of the time
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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide
Clarity SM
June 2025
Clarity SM reportDownload Clarity SM product report
Buyer's Guide
Espressive Barista
June 2025
Espressive Barista reportDownload Espressive Barista product report
 

Also Known As

CA Service Desk Manager, Clarity Service Management, CA Service Management, Unicenter Service Desk, CA SDM, CA Service Catalog, CA Business Service Insight
No data available
 

Overview

Service desk capabilities, an integral part of the CA Service Management solution, can enable you to deliver efficiencies in IT service management to business consumers, power users and decision makers. Mobility and collaborative self-service capabilities provide a modern user experience for accessing services and performing tasks, which can help drive user adoption, satisfaction and productivity.

Learn More: https://www.ca.com/us/products...

Broadcom
Barista, Espressive’s innovative virtual support agent (VSA) platform, takes on the role of the service agent, bringing the best of human experience with the best of artificial intelligence. Leveraging a proprietary and domain-specific large language model (LLM), the Employee Language Cloud, as well as integration with generalized LLMs, Barista automates resolution of employee questions, issues, and requests with personalized experiences that result in employee adoption of 80 to 85% and reduced help desk call volume of 50% to 70%.
Espressive
 

Sample Customers

Banco G&T Continental City of Perth, FEMSA, Fujitsu, Manpower, Muslim Commercial Bank - MCB, Punjab National Bank, Santa Clara County Social Services, Stefanini
Information Not Available
Buyer's Guide
Clarity SM vs. Espressive Barista
May 2025
Free Report: Clarity SM vs. Espressive Barista
Find out what your peers are saying about Clarity SM vs. Espressive Barista and other solutions. Updated: May 2025.
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