Device42 vs ServiceNow CMDB comparison

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Device42 Logo
446 views|247 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
ServiceNow Logo
3,534 views|917 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Device42 and ServiceNow CMDB based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Configuration Management Databases solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Device42 vs. ServiceNow CMDB Report (Updated: March 2024).
768,246 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"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 reporting part is valuable. You have classic reports, and you can also do advanced reporting. They also have the DOQL feature for queries. You can write SQL queries to get your data and create custom reports.""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.""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 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.""The import/export for bulk operations is a valuable and good feature.""It has agentless discovery; you don't need to put agents on your servers. You can open one or two ports to discover all your infrastructure.""A big plus for Device42 was the auto-discovery. With it, we have updated devices, updated systems, and up-to-date systems."

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"The product's initial setup phase was simple.""We chose ServiceNow because it has more functionalities. It takes at least one week to be trained on ServiceNow, and it is easy to learn.""ServiceNow CMDB works great for large and small businesses.""ServiceNow CMDB is fully integrated and complete. ServiceNow has modules for everything an IT service company needs, and it's flexible.""ServiceNow excels in integration and is considered the best tool in the market for this purpose.""ServiceNow is basically a go-to when it comes to Remedy and ticket management.""The different tables are available in ServiceNow CMDB are quite good. We don't need to create many custom tables.""As I work based on the IT governance framework, what I like best about ServiceNow CMDB is ITSM, so incident/service request management. I also like that it can be useful for project portfolio management."

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Cons
"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.""A con for Device42 is that Kubernetes integration is lacking. You pay for 10,000 spot licenses and if you're spinning up a Kubernetes cluster, or four or five or six Kubernetes clusters like we do, you're going to have 5,000 or 6,000 nodes in each of those, doing different types of business things.""If I want to delete an asset from a cabinet it does take a while. And if I'm doing it in bulk — say, for example, if we have one cabinet that has 20 servers in — if I want to remove all 20 servers, I have to do them individually, which is a bit time-consuming. If there were a way that I could just bulk-remove everything from there, that would definitely save some time.""For the iPhone, the device diagram cannot be downloaded. You have to go to each device and download the device diagram for that device. E.g., suppose there are a 1000 or 2000 servers. You cannot go to each server or device to download a device diagram for each device. There should be a one-click solution for downloading all device diagrams.""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.""While the automatic IT asset discovery is great, the first time using it can be confusing when you are configuring the SNMP. I don't remember for sure but I don't think it said "SNMP community," it said "password". The first time I used it I was thinking about communities but the tool said "password," and when you say "password" in SNMP you are thinking about SNMP version 3. This is the only thing that is confusing, although there were some devices that were not included in the discovery.""In my experience I believe that the key concern is the pricing strategy of the solution. Instead other solutions such as lanweber are much more cost effective. Previously, Device42 operated on perpetualysis without any fees. But recently they have altered the pricing model to include a subscription fee which I see as a very costly affair. Therefore I would like to suggest that they evaluate their pricing strategy and licence scheme, conduct a market research and ensure that they provide the right product in the market at the right price.""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."

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"They can improve the mobile application and the TGO tool, which is a built-in tool for development and implementation. As a developer, it is very frustrating to configure or customize the mobile app. In my opinion, this part of the application needs full rework and re-engineering.""There's room for improvement in terms of integration.""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.""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.""The tool is not user-friendly. It has a lot of features and you can get lost in it.""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.""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.""The initial setup is a bit complex."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Our licensing costs are on a yearly basis."
  • "The product cost is low. It is quite cheap."
  • "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."
  • "The problem with using other vendor, like BMC, is the pricing. The price is so horrible and nobody wants to pay this money."
  • "We pay $100,000 per year."
  • "It's in the top-three most expensive solutions in terms of cost, but it has all the features that are needed."
  • "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."
  • "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."
  • More Device42 Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "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."
  • "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 market sees ServiceNow as the Ferrari in terms of pricing. It's at the very top, and its cost is very, very high."
  • "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."
  • "The product price falls on the higher side of the spectrum."
  • More ServiceNow CMDB Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Based on the use case for Device42, I found the solution a bit expensive. However, when you look at the support and the industry standards, Device42 was on par with the industry. Device42 is a little… more »
    Top Answer:The product must provide AI features. It would be very useful if I could create datasets or queries from an AI interface.
    Top Answer:The product's initial setup phase was simple.
    Top Answer: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. Right… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Ranking
    Views
    446
    Comparisons
    247
    Reviews
    10
    Average Words per Review
    915
    Rating
    7.9
    Views
    3,534
    Comparisons
    917
    Reviews
    19
    Average Words per Review
    399
    Rating
    8.5
    Comparisons
    Learn More
    Overview

    Device42 is a powerful asset management tool for inventory, asset discovery, and CMDB purposes. It can be deployed on-premises or on the cloud and is praised for its ease of use, coordination, and reasonable pricing. 

    The tool's most valuable features include agentless discovery, service discovery, business application mapping, import/export for bulk operations, reporting, insights+, REST API abilities, auto-discovery, topology layout, and data center infrastructure management. Device42 has helped organizations provide visibility into on-premises infrastructure, aiding in asset management, automating IT problem-solving, and aiding in decision-making about resources.

    Say Hello! to Automated Data Center Management

    Say goodbye to spreadsheets and manual drawings which are, at best, inefficient and quickly outdated. Device42 auto-generates accurate infrastructure and inter-dependency diagrams making data center management faster, easier, and more accurate.

    • Gain – Gain accurate infrastructure visibility — know what you have, where it’s located, how it’s connected, and who owns it.
    • Beyond – Go beyond just the physical — gain visibility into blades, virtual machines, cloud instances, and the applications running on them.
    • Support – Support and document the entire lifecycle from purchase order to retirement.
    • Infrastructure – Device42’s comprehensive infrastructure management enables more informed decision making.

    Know Exactly What is Running, and Where, with Deep Application Mapping

    • Mapping – Powerful application mapping tools relate data from various sources.
    • Related – Auto-discovered data is related with imported and input data.
    • Components – Dependency flow diagrams relating application components are automatically generated.
    • Visualize – IT managers can visualize the application’s different parts and interdependencies.
    • Charts – Automatically-generated impact charts show the relationships between applications, hardware components, and facilities.

    Transform IT Anarchy into IT Organization

    Access real-time configuration data to understand where resources are and how those resources are being consumed. Support future capacity and growth planning.

    • IP Address – Get the next available IP address (eliminate ping and pray).
    • Capacity – Locate racks with enough space and power capacity to house new servers.
    • Affected – Determine which users are affected by scheduled and unscheduled outages.
    • Supported – Know if a server/OS is still supported, and where to find it.
    • Accurate – Maintain accurate server-switch port connections.
    • Manage – Accurately manage rack power and cooling capacities.
    • Device – Know device interdependencies and their service relationships.

    Efficiently Manage Growth and Consolidation with Powerful Capacity Planning Tools

    • Rack – Find available rack capacity with heat maps colored by available units.
    • Power – Ensure power availability at a glance with overlaid color bars.
    • Find – Quickly find space, outlets, and power capacity for new equipment with “What-If” scenarios.
    • Connections – Visually ensure all your machines are redundantly connected.
    • Hardware – Easily identify any hardware without redundancy.
    • View – View power consumption, temperature, and humidity over time.
    • Data Center – Locate data center hot spots and eliminate problem areas.
    • Reports – Comprehensive reporting includes abundant pre-configured reports or easily create your own.
    • Change – Instantly report change history, contracts, rack space availability, and much more.
    • Consolidate – Remove the guesswork — know if you have room to grow, or power and cooling capacity to consolidate.

    Dramatically Reduce Data Entry

    Increase data center staff productivity. By minimizing or eliminating redundant and low-value data entry, IT staff can spend more time on high-value business initiatives.

    • Automatic – Device42's autodiscovery, import tools, and 3rd-party integrations do a vast majority of the hard work for you.
    • API – All the documentation you could ever want on our open API is available at http://api.device42.com.
    • Powerful – Device42’s open and powerful REST API is thoroughly documented, easy to use, and extremely powerful —enabling input and output of data to and from external sources with features like .XLS API imports.
    • Better Place – Freedom from excessive data entry means you can focus on building the next cool thing and making the world a better place!

    Enhance IT Service Management

    Device42 integrates with many popular 3rd-party tools and imports from almost anywhere!

    • Input – No need to input the same data into multiple systems!
    • Information – Enhance the information in your ticketing system with data from Device42.
    • ITSM App – Out-of-the-box integrations with popular ITSM applications such as JIRA, Confluence, ServiceNow, and Zendesk.
    • Automation – Out-of-the-box integrations with automation platforms like Rundeck, Puppet, and Chef.
    • CMDB Providers – Import data from other CMDB providers like Aperature, Microsoft SCCM, Solarwinds, OpenDCIM, Racktables, Rackmonkey
    • Anywhere – Import from spreadsheets, Visio docs, and anywhere else you can get a .csv file.

    Effectively Manage Asset Life Cycles

    Make the most out of your budget. Track software and support entitlements, and full hardware asset lifecycles.

    • Purchases – Record purchases.
    • Lifecycle – Asset lifecycle tracking from the day of purchase to the day it’s retired.
    • Contract – Associate a service contract with the actual asset it applies to.
    • QR Code – Automatically generate a smartphone-readable QR code for physical inventory.
    • Planning – Improve planning with accurate financial data for budgeting and auditing.
    • Proactive – Proactively manage contracts and maintenance renewals with powerful reporting and renewal notices.
    • Track Well – Track software licensing and ensure compliance.
    • Eliminate – Eliminate waste and save money.

    Resolve Technical Issues Faster

    • Services – Improve your IT service delivery with accurate and actionable data.
    • Flexible – Device42 will discover and correlate relationships between physical, logical, and virtual environments – providing a powerful tool for problem solving.
    • Ticket Makes – Attaching the actual device to a ticket makes confusion about which device is being referenced a thing of the past.
    • Locate Device – Locating the device has never been easier when it’s attached to a ticket; click the device and get all the relevant details from Device42.
    • Emergency – The next time a data center emergency arises, save the day in style!

    Centrally Manage Shared Accounts and Passwords

    • Find – Take control of who has access to what systems
    • Ensure – Ensure that data center teams have the information they need, when they need it
    • Very Fast – Quickly map service accounts and secrets to devices and applications
    • Powerful Control – Protect account and password information with granular access controls
    • Locate – Track password views, expiration dates, and password changes
    • Happiness – And yes…keep the auditors happy, happy, happy!

    ServiceNow Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is an intuitive cloud-based solution that gives users the ability to keep track of their information technology infrastructure.

    ServiceNow CMDB gives users the ability to diagnose and manage any issue that might appear in their systems. Users have at their disposal a suite of capabilities that allow them to handle any number of tasks.

    Benefits of ServiceNow Configuration Management Database

    Some of the benefits of using ServiceNow Configuration Management Database include:

    • Ensure data consists of the most complete and accurate datasets possible. ServiceNow CMDB has a number of features that give users the ability to vet the information that makes up their system’s continuous integration (CI) process architectures. It uses an automated system to scan for copies of any particular dataset. If ServiceNow CMDB finds a copy, it prevents users from creating another CI with that data. There are also dashboards that keep users informed of the status of every part of their system. Users can easily spot any inconsistencies or issues.
    • Deep insights into every portion of your information technology infrastructures. ServiceNow CMDB employs features that can map out the data that makes up your CI infrastructure. It gives users the ability to explore it on many different levels and gain an in-depth understanding of various aspects of the systems that they created. Users can also create reports that clearly lay out the data involved in any scheduled distribution.

    Reviews from Real Users

    ServiceNow CMDB is an information technology resource and data management tool that stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are the solution’s intuitive nature and its discovery tools. ServiceNow CMDB makes it easy for users who lack a background in information technology to customize and configure its user interface to meet their specific needs. Its discovery tools give users the ability to easily map out and create continuous integration process architectures.

    A PeerSpot user who is a ServiceNow developer, analyst, and administrator writes, "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."

    An information technology service management consultant writes, “I like ServiceNow CMDB's discovery tools. If you have discovery tools and the discovery tools are built around a philosophy of mapping, then we can implement a top-down architectural mapping of the elements in the upper structure and create your CI. We can directly map for the dependencies among your infrastructure, hardware, and software. If you do not have discovery tools, we can still populate the CMDB but for the administrator, it's very hard.”

    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
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm36%
    Computer Software Company21%
    University14%
    Logistics Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company14%
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Healthcare Company7%
    REVIEWERS
    Renewables & Environment Company20%
    Financial Services Firm20%
    Educational Organization20%
    Pharma/Biotech Company10%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Computer Software Company13%
    Government8%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business28%
    Midsize Enterprise20%
    Large Enterprise52%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise67%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business21%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise68%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business13%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise76%
    Buyer's Guide
    Device42 vs. ServiceNow CMDB
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Device42 vs. ServiceNow CMDB and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    768,246 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Device42 is ranked 2nd in Configuration Management Databases with 25 reviews while ServiceNow CMDB is ranked 1st in Configuration Management Databases with 31 reviews. Device42 is rated 8.4, while ServiceNow CMDB is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Device42 writes "Good reporting and discovery capabilities, and helpful for understanding device dependencies and asset management". On the other hand, the top reviewer of ServiceNow CMDB writes "It has helped us consolidate information, improving reporting and visibility". Device42 is most compared with ServiceNow, Infoblox IPAM, JIRA Service Management, BMC Helix Discovery and Lansweeper, whereas ServiceNow CMDB is most compared with BMC Atrium CMDB, OpenText Universal Discovery and Universal CMDB and IBM Tivoli CMDB. See our Device42 vs. ServiceNow CMDB report.

    See our list of best Configuration Management Databases vendors.

    We monitor all Configuration Management Databases reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.