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Clarity SM vs ServiceNow vs SymphonyAI IT Service Management comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the IT Service Management (ITSM) category, the mindshare of Clarity SM is 1.7%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow is 15.8%, down from 24.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SymphonyAI IT Service Management is 1.7%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Service Management (ITSM) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
ServiceNow15.8%
Clarity SM1.7%
SymphonyAI IT Service Management1.7%
Other80.8%
IT Service Management (ITSM)
 

Featured Reviews

Türker Kara - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
MT
Manager of Security Engineering & Architecture at a outsourcing company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Seamless data integration and advanced automation improve service delivery efficiency
I think that nothing needs to be improved with the product; you just need the user to commit and spend appropriate time to overcome that learning curve. Once that is done, the product itself is pretty wonderful. I've seen a very nicely built interface with ServiceNow, and I've also seen the ugliest version that feels outdated. ServiceNow does allow that team to exist. They should modernize their fonts and their layout, the UI friendliness. They did introduce AI, chatbots, and AI on the back end, so that's wonderful and extremely useful if you train it. If you don't train it, it's pretty useless. Assessing the impact of ServiceNow's automation on service delivery times is complicated. The engineers who operate on ServiceNow find it isn't straightforward because the data set is accessible by everybody. The problem is that understanding how to manage that data set requires an enormous amount of engineering skill set to run the product. I would not hand the key to the customer; I would highly recommend that ServiceNow take control of that. Instead of offering support for the software, they should offer administrative support for the software. They should provide professional service or some kind of support system that allows us to use their product at a faster pace. I'm sure they offer something, but it's often outrageously expensive, or they rely on another company to resell their product and offer professional service. It makes no sense in my opinion, and they should offer the team at the front to help customize the product to fit each company's needs, as every company has different demands and forms of submitting a request that need adjustment over time.
AS
Senior Practitioner at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Comprehensive IT service processes have been supported but customization and support need improvement
All ITSM functionalities of SymphonyAI IT Service Management, including incident, problem, change, service request, and their out-of-the-box functionalities, are pretty good. SymphonyAI IT Service Management does not have too many integrations and does not have too many out-of-the-box integrations compared to other peers in the market. I think that is the only place where they lack. However, they did have a functionality where we could build our own integration, so we were using that. If they had any out-of-the-box capabilities for some of the common infrastructure tools, that would have been easier for us. The out-of-the-box functionalities were good, including AI. However, the moment we had to customize options, that becomes very difficult with SymphonyAI IT Service Management. As long as we were using out-of-the-box, it worked great.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Great flexibility for every environment and many features are available."
"CA Service Desk is built around the ITIL methodology and would help to improve all organizational processes starting from incidents/problems/request, knowledge management, CMDB, etc."
"The most valuable fractures of Clarity SM are its ease of use and security. I have been highly satisfied. We've been able to integrate it with email and an SMS gateway for the purposes of notifications. That works very well."
"It now tells us how we should do our work, it now tells us how we can staff, it tells us how we're doing, and it's reliable."
"Hands down, the premier feature of the CA platform is the integrated nature of that platform."
"With CA SDM, my entire service management business is ITIL aligned with better productivity across all IT processes."
"The ticket incidents and requests management are the most valuable features for us."
"Customizability. You can easily make your own tables and add fields."
"It's filling a niche I think a lot of people have really, really wanted which is bringing a lot of this information into one central location."
"Of all the systems in our environment, ours has been the most stable."
"The most recent addition of SAM Premium is a game changer for many organizations."
"Now we have invested the time in the CMDB, we've invested the time in a portal and catalog items and now we're moving towards automation and things, and we're able to stay a lot more current a lot faster because ServiceNow is doing the work to keep the platform updated, whereas we can just continue to provide value that is specific to us and what we're trying to do."
"ServiceNow is very easy to set up."
"It's easy to integrate. For instance, yesterday we closed the integration with SAP for the IP business management module to manage the forecast of projects. We created an interface between ServiceNow and SAP to control projects for accounting and on the forecast of the project. It was really easy. We don't have any problems with ServiceNow at the moment. As a company, they are improving constantly."
"ServiceNow provides quite good insights about what is happening in the organization."
"It is quite flexible as a system and is very visual."
"SummitAI IT Management Suite's chat box feature has reduced our service discount, and because it's intelligent, the responses that go out to the users have improved, and the resolutions are much faster."
"It was easy to access and fast. Our experience using it solely as a ticketing tool. We used fetch reports from the tool, particularly with regard to SLA tracking for our partners."
"It is a good tool to use."
"All ITSM functionalities of SymphonyAI IT Service Management, including incident, problem, change, service request, and their out-of-the-box functionalities, are pretty good."
"The product has the best features for ITSM."
"SummitAI IT Management Suite's chat box feature has reduced our service discount, and because it's intelligent, the responses that go out to the users have improved, and the resolutions are much faster."
"The most valuable feature is remote access. People are working from home, and we can take remote access through it."
 

Cons

"UI is not perfect, but maybe with Jaspersoft."
"More user experience in the look and feel of the application. ​"
"One area that this product can improve is in the mobile user aspect."
"One of the issues that exists, and I don't know you can really call it an issue, but it's not there yet, it needs to be tighter integration between PAM and Service Desk and they understand that, because the PAM engine for driving business automation and workflows is so critical to our business and keeping us on schedule and doing things."
"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."
"The upgrade was pretty complex."
"We talk a lot about the idea that Service Desk Manager should be more service oriented, not just ticket oriented."
"As an end user I don't probably use it the way that other people would use it, but maybe automatic opening of tickets for other products would be helpful."
"Currently, we are finding it a bit difficult to monitor the subscriptions that are being used. The reporting feature related to this can be improved. Its ITOM functionality can be improved. BMC does a better job than ServiceNow in terms of capturing utilization and other such things."
"It should include information on navigating various user interfaces for creating diverse requests directed to different teams."
"There was an outage at the ServiceNow data center servers, especially on the eastern site. Two weeks later we found out about it through some other call, not to the engineer and it was not notified anywhere on the system."
"Over the two years that we've had ServiceNow up and running, we've had a couple of service interruptions."
"We had ServiceNow’s in-house team for “Quick-Start Implementation”, but it was very basic, and the custom things we asked him to do from scratch were not engineered very thoroughly or using best coding practices."
"The interface, in my opinion, is not very good."
"Like all other IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS subscription cloud providers, ServiceNow is constantly improving by building new capabilities to expand the breadth and depth of its offerings while increasing its activities with partners to build more capabilities."
"If you have advanced questions, technical support often doesn't know the answer."
"There could be flexibility in terms of customization."
"SummitAI IT Management Suite's project management and operational management features could be improved."
"Integration was a major limitation with SummitAI."
"I would like them to add software inventory in the next release. We don't have that right now."
"I would like them to add software inventory in the next release. We don't have that right now."
"Technical support takes too long for any issues to get resolved, and that created a lot of frustration."
"SummitAI IT Management Suite's project management and operational management features could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I think pricing of this model is suitable for growing corporations."
"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 pricing is based on a subscription model."
"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."
"It is a bit expensive, but you definitely get what you pay for. It is worth it!"
"The solution is quite reasonable compared to other solutions in the market."
"For the modules we use, we found it competitive. I can't think of any costs in addition to the licensing fees."
"In Tunisia, the companies find the licensing costs to be expensive."
"The price is okay for us. It's reasonable."
"ServiceNow's pricing is comparatively higher than Helix's."
"The price of this solution is expensive."
"They could be more competitive with their licensing."
"The solution is expensive."
"The mandatory minimum is US$ 20,000 for licensing."
"The product's cost is average."
"SummitAI IT Management Suite's pricing is a bit expensive."
"We have a regular license."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
30%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
Construction Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Construction Company
9%
Government
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise66
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business55
Midsize Enterprise35
Large Enterprise169
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

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Which solution is better for developing non-ITSM applications: OutSystems or Service Now?
The short answer is that OutSystems is far better for 2 main reasons. Firstly, with Service Now you are locked into t...
Would you choose ServiceNow over Microsoft PowerApps?
Hi Netanya, I will choose ServiceNow because ServiceNow is a very good tool compared to Microsoft PowerApp. Because ...
What do you like most about ServiceNow?
The solution has a user-friendly interface.
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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
Summus IT Management Suite
 

Overview

 

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
AAA, AstraZeneca, Becton, Dickinson and Company, Broadcom, Christus Health, Epicor, Equinix, GE Capital, Intuit, KPMG, Loyola Marymount University, OshKosh, Quantas, RedHat, Royal Bank of Scotland, Swiss Re, U.S. Department of Energy, Safeway, Yale University, and Zillow    
Magma, Toyota, Evidera, Netik, KPMG, Innodata, ABB, DAIKIN, Toshiba, Emerson, Dell, Pansonic, DBS, PWC, EY, Hexaware Technologies, Deloitte, NEC, Birla Soft, Panasonic, Harman, SBI, Kotak Life Insurance, SREI, Marico, Perfetti, Manipal Hospitals, Maruti Suzuki, Royal Enfield, Toyota, CEAT, ABB, L&T, VIP, Knight Frank, Adithya Birla
Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, Atlassian, ManageEngine and others in IT Service Management (ITSM). Updated: March 2026.
885,789 professionals have used our research since 2012.