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Device42 vs ServiceNow CMDB comparison

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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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Device42
Ranking in Configuration Management Databases
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
34
Ranking in other categories
IT Asset Management (6th), IP Address Management (IPAM) Tools (3rd), Data Center Infrastructure Management (1st)
ServiceNow CMDB
Ranking in Configuration Management Databases
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
34
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Configuration Management Databases category, the mindshare of Device42 is 24.7%, up from 23.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow CMDB is 19.5%, down from 31.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Configuration Management Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
ServiceNow CMDB19.5%
Device4224.7%
Other55.8%
Configuration Management Databases
 

Featured Reviews

Manmohan Rao - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Vice President at Hitachi Systems India Private Limited
Granular discovery has ensured confident workload migration and optimized cloud move group planning
Device42 offers the best features for workload assessment, particularly useful for cloud-to-cloud workload or on-premise data center workload, especially when planning for workload migration to the public cloud. For application and infrastructure discovery, Device42 has enabled me to know the number of machines running in the on-premise environment and has managed to capture complete utilization metrics or trends of their utilization. This has benefited me in right-sizing systems for my public cloud total cost of ownership (TCO) planning, providing me granularity to right-size these systems while planning a migration to the public cloud. Device42 has positively impacted my organization by providing granularity toward application discovery compared to other assessment tools, which is a differentiator since none of the other tools provide such granularity, leading to better decision-making for my migration to the public cloud. Device42 has improved my migration projects by providing granularity around system dependencies that gave me confidence knowing which systems communicate with each other parked in a particular move group. My move group planning became so robust that I am not leaving any system behind in the on-premise data center from my planning, which saves a lot of time and effort, leading to cost optimization—a value addition.
reviewer2782440 - PeerSpot reviewer
ServiceNow Consultant at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
Automation features and integrated service mapping have streamlined incident and change management processes
There is probably room for improvement in ServiceNow CMDB. I'm so immersed in projects and solving direct customer issues that I don't think too much about potential improvements. Maintaining an accurate and up-to-date ServiceNow CMDB can be challenging due to incoming data from various sources, but ServiceNow has been developing small AI components to help with data discrepancies and deduplication recently. They have also improved integrations with other tools, providing many out-of-the-box integrations to different monitoring tools and CMDBs, which previously required coding experience for custom integrations. They are moving towards a more low-code or no-code approach, which is part of their goal as a company.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most helpful feature in Device42 was the import feature, where you can seamlessly import your information into the configuration database manager."
"The continuous asset discovery is good because it means not having to manually input all the small data, such as IP addresses, leases, etc. It helps and saves us a lot of time."
"It makes it easier for anyone to find an asset in a cabinet and it makes it easier for me to figure out if I have room and/or power in a cabinet to rack servers."
"The REST API abilities enables us to run scripts that pull information from our servers about software, storage, etc. Anything we need is pushed through REST API to the Device42 server and reflected in the report it generates."
"The auto-discovery is brilliant. You can have it scheduled to run on a regular basis, and the infrastructure is always getting updated within the platform. I would rate the asset discovery very highly. It's very comprehensive. It covers quite a lot of different methods for doing discovery and it supports a lot of different types of hardware as well."
"One of the most valuable features in my experience is the precise tracking of hardware devices and their locations registered in the solution. The solution allows to determine the exact placement of assets based on the building maps and the room details. This feature has allowed us to gain upper hand on the customers and provide them with a great satisfaction because they can visually see the arrangement of their assets within the organisation or building."
"I've used NetBox, MyIP, and RackTables; I've used quite a bunch of these other tools out there, and honestly, Device42 is the best."
"Device42 has everything in one place and links it altogether, which helps when you need to figure out where things are going wrong, where things are happening, or how everything is linked together."
"ServiceNow is quick to start up because it's on the cloud."
"It's not too difficult to configure with regard to the UI. My experience working with ServiceNow CMDB has been a very comfortable one."
"Almost all customers have reduced their response time, which is the most important benefit, and we have brought tasks that previously took more than 30 minutes or one hour of execution down to a few minutes."
"ServiceNow is basically a go-to when it comes to Remedy and ticket management."
"It has helped in tracking hardware and software and reducing overall costs."
"We were previously using spreadsheets to keep track of everything. ServiceNow CMDB has enabled us to consolidate all this information into one place, which helps with audits and reporting. It also improves visibility."
"Technical support for ServiceNow was perfect."
"ServiceNow CMDB is just something that you could track everything on."
 

Cons

"I would rate Device42 at seven out of 10 because we need to fix it to find the devices that are not discovered."
"From a documentation and reporting standpoint, at present, it is useful, but I feel that it can be improved because it currently feels incomplete in certain areas."
"I have not seen a return on investment with Device42, as it primarily provides information and not revenue."
"Device42 can be improved by adding more reporting features and architectural diagrams."
"However, the documentation has not been updated in a while, so it needs updates."
"Configuring rPDUs in the data center for Device42 required us to add multiple discovery jobs. The rPDUs were referred to the ISPDUs and daisy-chained. They would automatically assign a unique SMP port, but Device42 didn't allow SMP ranges, so we had to create a discovery job for each rPDU individually. We submitted a feature request to mitigate that."
"Currently, if you want to ping devices, you need to log into Appliance Manager. This feature should be available on the Device42 side. You should be able to use the ping utility without logging into Appliance Manager. The features that are there in Appliance Manager should also be available on the main Device42 server so that you have more control on one screen. You don't need to switch to another portal, but it is not something critical."
"When servers have two network adapters, automatically discovered will be only one network card because the other one is a backup. Device42 has some problems to find the other connection."
"The discovery process and service mapping could be improved."
"I don't think it's a failure of Service Now or something that they don't offer, but I haven't seen any training modules."
"You need to perform additional planning because their recommendation is not to add columns to the core tables."
"While ServiceNow CMDB is flexible and comprehensive, it's also difficult to implement and requires a lot of customization. In order to fully leverage ServiceNow CMDB, you need ServiceNow Discovery and some other ServiceNow solutions. It's expensive to purchase all of these. We're negotiating with ServiceNow, but we're thinking about replacing it with another CMDB solution."
"There are areas that could be improved, but that's a longer discussion. It all depends on what you are looking to do with it and then it becomes an issue of how do you configure the CMDB accordingly."
"There is some customization we need from the customer side."
"The platform's stability needs improvement."
"The reporting function could be more advanced and has room for improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The problem with using other vendor, like BMC, is the pricing. The price is so horrible and nobody wants to pay this money."
"Functionality-wise, Device42 is on par with industry standards, but price-wise, the solution is expensive. I'm rating the pricing for the solution as eight out of ten."
"I am not involved in its pricing, but I have seen their plans during a discussion with the customer. For 500 servers, they were asking 50,000 USD. The cost of BMC Discovery was less than half. For the same thing, they were charging only 10,000 USD. Its pricing needs to be improved. As compared to other discovery tools, such as BMC Discovery and ServiceNow Discovery, its price is a little bit higher."
"The product cost is low. It is quite cheap."
"It's in the top-three most expensive solutions in terms of cost, but it has all the features that are needed."
"On a yearly basis, our licensing is $10,000. However, our license is now nearly full with devices. We need the next bigger license with 5,000 devices, which will cost us $19,000. We pay for a set of licenses, a maximum number of devices, and a maximum number of IP addresses. We have the smallest amount of features, which is enough for us at this time."
"Our licensing costs are on a yearly basis."
"We pay $100,000 per year."
"The product price falls on the higher side of the spectrum."
"I would like it to be cheaper. If you've got a large environment, it can get quite expensive quite quickly. You still get a return on investment, but everybody has a tight budget. In terms of licensing, everything is pretty much known upfront. Being SaaS-based, there are no real additional gotchas that we came across."
"The market sees ServiceNow as the Ferrari in terms of pricing. It's at the very top, and its cost is very, very high."
"It is always fluctuating. It seems to change every six months. Every time they come out with a new iteration, it changes. It is pretty complicated, and they should improve it."
"It is really expensive. I don't know actually how much it costs, but in 2016, when a client decided to move from an old solution to ServiceNow and had to choose a supplier for ServiceNow, I had heard that it could cost $10 per hour, which is really expensive. I am not aware of any additional fees to the standard licensing fees. There is no standard ServiceNow solution. When a company wants to acquire ServiceNow, they already know which module they will choose. In a basic package, you would have Service Catalog, Incident Management, and Change Management. These modules are usually required in an IT company."
"The product is pricey."
"In comparison to the cost of other solutions, you get value for your money with ServiceNow CMDB. It could definitely be cheaper though."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Healthcare Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Outsourcing Company
14%
Healthcare Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise20
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise23
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Device42?
The pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Device42 are relatively cost-effective and affordable. I do not know if a small organization would be able to afford it, but I presume it would also be co...
What needs improvement with Device42?
I think Device42 can be improved by adding more features around the CMDB aspect and lifecycle management. I do not think many people use it for that functionality, but if they were to expand the su...
What is your primary use case for Device42?
My main use case for Device42 is that we use it as a CMDB and affinity map to check out network topology or determine when we need to decom something in a life cycle. We use it for many different p...
What needs improvement with ServiceNow CMDB?
I believe that related to the solutions in the Now Assist platform, we can put more autonomy on that. Some reconciliation can be automated. AI Assist is the current improvement now. I don't have an...
What is your primary use case for ServiceNow CMDB?
I primarily work with ITSM, HR, SPM, AI, Now Assist, CMDB, and CSDM modules, covering almost all of these areas. I use the integration with ServiceNow CMDB with all the processes that we have imple...
What advice do you have for others considering ServiceNow CMDB?
I help customers evaluate their CMDB health. We use the CMDB health to make that analysis, to see the relationships, what is missing with the processes they have, and any mis-ownership issues. So, ...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Computershare, Concur, Doosan, Fitch Ratings Inc., Fujitsu, HomeAway, Jasper Wireless, Mercedes-Benz, Square, Twitch, UCSB, Zayo Group Inc.
Wayfair, Siemens, Allianz, Experian, Vitas Healthcare
Find out what your peers are saying about Device42 vs. ServiceNow CMDB and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
914,109 professionals have used our research since 2012.