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Device42 vs ServiceNow CMDB 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Device42
Ranking in Configuration Management Databases
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
IT Asset Management (8th), IP Address Management (IPAM) Tools (5th), Data Center Infrastructure Management (4th)
ServiceNow CMDB
Ranking in Configuration Management Databases
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Configuration Management Databases category, the mindshare of Device42 is 21.9%, up from 18.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow CMDB is 31.1%, down from 41.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Configuration Management Databases Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
ServiceNow CMDB31.1%
Device4221.9%
Other47.0%
Configuration Management Databases
 

Featured Reviews

AHMEDKASSAB - PeerSpot reviewer
Allows us to determine the exact placement of assets based on the building maps and the room details
In my experience, I believe that the key concern is the pricing strategy of the solution. Instead, other solutions are much more cost-effective. Previously, Device42 has altered the pricing model to include a subscription fee which I see as very costly. They should change their pricing strategy and license scheme, conduct market research and ensure that they provide the right product in the market at the right price.
EdwardScott - PeerSpot reviewer
It has helped us consolidate information, improving reporting and visibility
The setup was pretty straightforward on the development side, but I don't think the expectations of the user community are properly set. There is a gap between what the development side is doing, and what the user community expects. For example, my company has used ServiceNow for several years. When I joined, they weren't using it for much besides change management. That was easy to set up and configure. It was immature but fairly usable because no other processes had access to CMDB. It was easy, but their knowledge of what to do with CMDB was underdeveloped. We redeployed it in nine months, but we're still building. I wouldn't say that the deployment is complete because we haven't finished service mapping yet. We spent nine months fixing old problems and ensuring discovery is dependable. A team of about six people is working on the deployment, including architects, developers, subject matter experts, and process owners.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I like the tool's agentless discovery feature. The tool configures the devices based on the documentation provided. I am also impressed with its auto-discovery feature. The tool also keeps on tracking and finds whatever is in the environment."
"Device42 has everything in one place and links it altogether. This helps when you need to figure out where things are going wrong, where things are happening, or how everything is linked together."
"The Insights+ component is useful for us because it does business application mapping and helps us visualize it. It saves us time because we don't have to hunt for data."
"The IP address tracking [is valuable]... We have a lot of different devices and some of them have many IP addresses, so keeping track of which ones are assigned where is very critical for putting new devices on the network and giving them new addresses. All of our devices are statically assigned, so if we don't keep good records then we could accidentally assign a duplicate, which would cause problems on the network."
"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."
"The topology layout is the most valuable feature."
"The solution's agentless approach to asset discovery is very important for us because installing agents on physical or virtual devices is not easy in our company. We have to escalate these kinds of things to different levels of security. Not having to install agents makes it easy for us."
"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."
"One of the most valuable aspects of ServiceNow CMDB is its user-friendly interface and high degree of customization at the user level."
"We like that this solution allows us to easily track the relationship between our CI and the IT asset module, for troubleshooting purposes, or to check the impact of an incident site."
"One important element is automation. We can back up and manage multiple configurations. It also enables password self-service."
"It has helped in tracking hardware and software and reducing overall costs."
"We can use ServiceNow CMDB to create more tables that can provide granular information."
"The most valuable feature of ServiceNow is the user interface because you can customize or configure it directly from the user interface by using the mouse. It is easy to use even for non-IT people. You can also directly plug your ServiceNow instance within your Microsoft Active Directory and then retrieve all your users and groups. So, you can use the users and groups to put automation inside the application. When you have new hires, you can automate the group security and group attribution. It is very good in terms of performance. Its performance is almost 100%. Once, it took less than two minutes to back up and run an instance. It has very good reliability."
"Portfolio management is very useful for us."
"The CMDB for us is fed by our discovery tools, and it lets us be able to track the changes that we make to any incidents or escalation points that we have associated with a CI."
 

Cons

"It was hard to know which assets I'd already looked at because if I looked up another asset with a similar name, they would still pop up. I would have to make sure I was looking at the right asset. The search function should be improved."
"The architecture is a bit old-fashioned. Device42 is on one server, appliance, virtual machine, or guest. We are loading more into Device42 than it can hold. Overloading Device42 with REST API calls or tasks will directly impact every aspect because the server will be too busy to answer requests."
"It would be nice for the agent to have an installer versus a single file across multiple systems."
"The only thing which I have noticed so far that is not good is that we had an issue with some reporting from the tool, reporting we had to export. We couldn't do it in the way we wanted to, so we tried to reach out to their support but it took pretty long until we understood how we can manage the reports. We still haven't received a complete explanation of what we need to do and how to do it."
"If they could make it so their remote connector could do as much as 10,000 devices, that would be better."
"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 dependency mapping can be quite slow sometimes, if you've got a lot of things connecting to services. It can be very slow to build up the map."
"The breadth and depth of the solution's discovery of IT asset information means the system does most of the work, but they need to work on improving the database discovery part, especially for Oracle Exadata."
"An area for improvement in ServiceNow is the reporting because there are reporting features that would be better when done within the platform, rather than having to buy the performance analytics model. There is so much difference between the dashboarding that you can do from the platform versus what's on the performance analytics model. Some of the features currently available within performance analytics would be good to have within the platform because sometimes, customers will say that the tool is okay, but it's not enough, so you'll need to go with the performance analytics model, and that's costly."
"There could be room for enhancing customization capabilities."
"In general, the pain points are related to ServiceNow. There is a lack of development. ServiceNow is not a true configuration management tool. So, a lot of development is needed to get it to be the kind of tool that you would like it to be. It serves as a platform, and you only get out of it what you invest in terms of development. So, CMDB on its own isn't quite robust until you actually have a CMD project to make it robust. The same thing is there with asset management and all other parts of it. Out of the box, it's not competitive with a like-for-like application."
"It depends on the implementation, but the out-of-the-box product tends to be fixed on the support people. From a linear standpoint, I would like to see a certain number of fields on a table and a related list to describe the support personnel."
"When running large queries within the system, it does have a tendency to bog down the system. This is something that should be improved. I would also like to see the HAM Pro module beefed up a little bit and integrated better into the SAM Pro module, which seems to be pretty much on the roadmap. Its pricing is pretty complicated and always fluctuating. Its pricing should be improved."
"ServiceNow CMDB could be easier to use. Beginners don't always understand the features. It would be helpful if ServiceNow offered more training or self-guided courses where people could learn to leverage the platform better. I've used ServiceNow for a long time, but I see new users struggling with these processes. There's a steep learning curve."
"You need to perform additional planning because their recommendation is not to add columns to the core tables."
"We would like the solution to be made more easily scalable in future updates."
 

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."
"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."
"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."
"We pay $100,000 per year."
"Our licensing costs are on a yearly basis."
"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 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."
"In comparison to the cost of other solutions, you get value for your money with ServiceNow CMDB. It could definitely be cheaper though."
"The product is pricey."
"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 price falls on the higher side of the spectrum."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Healthcare Company
8%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise13
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise19
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Device42?
The product must provide AI features. It would be very useful if I could create datasets or queries from an AI interface.
What is your primary use case for Device42?
I use the solution for physical assets management, IT management, and application dependency mapping.
What do you like most about ServiceNow CMDB?
The product's initial setup phase was simple.
What needs improvement with ServiceNow CMDB?
I don't currently see any problems with ServiceNow CMDB since everything works fine. If I click on some particular CIs at the moment, all the information related to that CI appears by default. Righ...
What is your primary use case for ServiceNow CMDB?
I use ServiceNow CMDB in my company to deal with areas like incidents, problems, and change management. I use ServiceNow CMDB in my company to deal with all the equipment inventories and our infras...
 

Comparisons

 

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 2025.
872,098 professionals have used our research since 2012.