Clarity SM vs IBM SmartCloud Control Desk comparison

Broadcom and IBM are both solutions in the Help Desk Software category. Broadcom is ranked #26, while IBM is ranked #27. Broadcom holds a 1.0% mindshare in HDS, compared to IBM’s 0.8% mindshare. Additionally, 85% of Broadcom users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 88% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Clarity SM

Read 107 Clarity SM reviews

501 Views
290 Comparison Views

85% willing to recommend

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

Read 9 IBM SmartCloud Control Desk reviews

401 Views
197 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

Clarity SM

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 1, 2024

Clarity SM and IBM SmartCloud Control Desk are leading solutions in the IT Service Management category. Clarity SM has an edge in customization and ease of use, while IBM excels in integration and asset management.

Features: Clarity SM offers robust flexibility with full SLM reporting, extensive customization, and integration options. Users appreciate its ticket management, scalability, and the unified portal. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk provides strong incident and service request management, IT asset tracking, and integration capabilities. It is praised for its cohesive integration features and asset management strengths.

Room for Improvement: Clarity SM struggles with scalability and stability. Its user experience and documentation need updates, and integration often requires significant investment. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is criticized for an outdated user interface lacking modern design and ease of customization. Users report it being cumbersome, with technical support described as slow to respond, affecting user satisfaction.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Clarity SM offers on-premises and public cloud deployments, with mixed reviews on customer and technical support. Users report inconsistent support quality. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is mainly on-premises, with dissatisfaction over customer service and technical support delays, with long resolution times unless issues are escalated.

Pricing and ROI: Clarity SM is seen as expensive, potentially prohibitive for small businesses, but its concurrent licensing model is cost-effective for larger firms. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk follows a per-user licensing model, which can be costly, but offers comprehensive features without extra fees for users reporting issues. It provides a solid ROI for medium to large enterprises despite higher upfront costs.

To learn more, read our detailed Clarity SM vs. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Clarity SM vs. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

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

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

107

Ranking in other categories

IT Service Management (ITSM) (28th)

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 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 IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is 0.8%, up from 0.6% 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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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.

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

"Modules of integrated ITIL managers."

"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."

"It gives us one central location to know, not only who is contacting us, but what they're contacting us for, what application they're contacting us for."

"It has a good GUI interface."

"We can search open and closed cases to find what we have done in other incidents."

"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."

"Our users access it via the web. We have external and internal sources, and we're now introducing the mobile app portion so our computer engineers can respond to tickets remotely."

"It is the most stable product in the market."

More Clarity SM pros

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The solution has been stable."

"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."

"SLA integrations, reports, and integration with other applications are the most valuable."

"The solution is very easy to work with."

"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."

More IBM SmartCloud Control Desk pros

Cons

"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."

"The UI needs to be upgraded."

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

"I am not able to see tickets on a bigger scale. I can't see the overall bigger picture."

"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."

"Report solutions are a little short."

"We need a mobile solution. We are not using any mobile functionality for the product, but we think that this necessary."

"On permissions, there are options to do groups and options to do roles. What is practical, you have to pick one or the other, for both read and write permissions."

More Clarity SM cons

"The solution lacks a graphical user interface."

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

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

More IBM SmartCloud Control Desk cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"The pricing is based on a subscription model."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"Pricing is simple, as it’s per concurrent analysts."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

Government

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Comparisons

ServiceNow vs Clarity SM

Compared 100% of the time

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ServiceNow vs IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

Compared 100% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Clarity SM

May 2025

Download Clarity SM product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

April 2025

Download IBM SmartCloud Control Desk 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

SmartCloud Control Desk

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

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

Banco G&T Continental City of Perth, FEMSA, Fujitsu, Manpower, Muslim Commercial Bank - MCB, Punjab National Bank, Santa Clara County Social Services, Stefanini

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

Buyer's Guide

Clarity SM vs. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

April 2025

Free Report: Clarity SM vs. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

Find out what your peers are saying about Clarity SM vs. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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