Clarity SM vs Espressive Barista comparison

Broadcom and Espressive are both solutions in the Help Desk Software category. Broadcom is ranked #26, while Espressive is ranked #15 with an average rating of 9.3. 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

501 Views
290 Comparison Views

85% willing to recommend

Espressive Barista

Read 9 Espressive Barista reviews

244 Views
86 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Clarity SM

Espressive Barista

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.

To learn more, read our detailed Clarity SM vs. Espressive Barista Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Clarity SM vs. Espressive Barista

April 2025

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Helped 850,028 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

26th

Ranking in IT Service Management (ITSM)

28th

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

15th

Ranking in IT Service Management (ITSM)

14th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

AI-Powered Chatbots (3rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Help Desk Software category, the mindshare of Clarity SM is 1.0%, up from 1.0% 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

Application & Software Architect at Turkiye Finans Participation Bank

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

Senior Manager for End User Support Services at Five9

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

"There is a lot of flexibility in the system. There has not yet been a case where we've had people come to us and say, "Hey, can you guys do this?" and we can't. Some of it is obviously a little bit more complicated at times, but the flexibility in the system provides a lot."

"Ability to write macros, which can in turn trigger some condition or could be conditioned to basically trigger notifications, the workflow desk, or web calls. It is huge benefit to customize it."

"This product has so many adjustment possibilities for many different clients."

"The UI is very user-friendly."

"The database and the power that is driven behind the database."

"It has all our configurations. All our infrastructure configurations are on a single pane of glass to view, allowing for one single point of information."

"The most valuable features of this solution are reporting, configuration monitoring, and the Request and Incidents workflow."

"It has allowed us to be more efficient in our problem and change management processes and procedures."

More Clarity SM pros

"Our developers have used the Barista Control Center to extend the platform by adding content, and they've found it fairly easy to do and manage"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The most valuable feature is its scalability."

"I like Expressive Barista's integration with Microsoft Teams."

More Espressive Barista pros

Cons

"There are some issues regarding the knowledge base and the configuration manager."

"Compared to some of the other products, I think we are bit behind."

"Although I wasn't involved in the initial setup I have been involved with upgrades. They have been fairly complex. We've had some issues with upgrades where we had to roll back and get some things fixed. Some things that we ended up tracking back to not following directions right, but then other things we've run into issues."

"We just upgraded about a year and half ago and it was painful. We had the testing of the dev environment, and then testing of the production environment, so it was two weekends out of my life. And stuff broke."

"The product needs to have a better user experience in the interface and mobile functionality."

"The interface is pretty straightforward, but I think for some end-users a little more simplified user interface would help."

"The user interface is just boring. I'd like to see a more interactive UI, from the end-user perspective, and from the analyst's perspective. I would like a product that looks like it was developed maybe in 2015, or at least 2012."

"The cost of this solution is too high, which is why we're leaving."

More Clarity SM cons

"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."

"The knowledge management could definitely be improved."

"I would like to see improvement to the out-of-the-box verbiage, with the questions going to the right place."

"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."

"I would like to see the continued expansion of all of the automation capabilities."

"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."

"The reports provided by the solution are not customizable."

"Espressive Barista's natural language processing and conventional AI still have room for improvement."

More Espressive Barista cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"The solution is quite reasonable compared to other solutions in the market."

"The pricing is based on a subscription model."

"I think pricing of this model is suitable for growing corporations."

"It is a bit expensive, but you definitely get what you pay for. It is worth it!"

"I don't see anyone other than large companies being able to afford this system."

"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."

"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."

"It is expensive. It's not a cheap thing."

"The solution is affordable."

"The price for the licensing is fair."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

51%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Retailer

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.

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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 ...

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What needs improvement with Espressive?

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Comparisons

ServiceNow vs Clarity SM

Compared 100% of the time

More Clarity SM Competitors

ServiceNow Virtual Agent vs Espressive Barista

Compared 64% of the time

Moveworks vs Espressive Barista

Compared 25% of the time

ServiceNow vs Espressive Barista

Compared 11% of the time

More Espressive Barista Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Clarity SM

April 2025

Download Clarity SM product report

Buyer's Guide

Espressive Barista

April 2025

Download 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

April 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: April 2025.

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