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Device42 vs ServiceNow Discovery comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.6
Device42 enhances IT management with cost efficiency and quick issue resolution, despite challenges in quantifying savings and integration.
Sentiment score
5.7
ServiceNow Discovery offers scalable value with automation, but ROI varies due to pricing, data challenges, and organizational needs.
The TCO calculations based on five years and three years have yielded a remarkable ROI compared to on-premise workload, validating the business case submission to the customer.
Associate Vice President at Hitachi Systems India Private Limited
I can confidently say at least 30% is the savings which we have seen.
Sr PreSales Cloud Architect at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees
Device42 is a fully-featured tool that includes everything we need with powerful auto-discovery and intelligent application dependency mapping.
Financial Specialist at Wells Fargo
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
8.1
Device42's customer support is generally dependable and helpful, with quick responses and knowledgeable assistance, though occasionally lacking detail.
Sentiment score
6.1
ServiceNow Discovery's support receives mixed reviews, with inconsistent response times and effectiveness, but training materials are valued.
Customer support for Device42 is fantastic.
Associate Vice President at Hitachi Systems India Private Limited
Our internal teams have also leveraged the platform which is available for the customers and the partners to onboard them, have a bit of training on the tool and then ask any specific questions to either the TAM or the customer support team.
Sr PreSales Cloud Architect at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees
When it comes to resolving technical issues, the support team is responsive and always available to help.
Cloud Presales Engineer at Activedge Technologies Ltd.
The 'follow the sun' model, where the time of raising the ticket and where it lands, plays a crucial role.
Manager, Solution/Service Delivery at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
This rating is because there are features on the tool that never worked and despite calling our support, there were no results.
IT Service Performance Manager at MTN
I would rate the technical support by ServiceNow as good.
Service Now Developer at Bangmetric services pvt ltd
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.2
Device42 effectively supports diverse, growing needs across locations with strong scalability, though some suggest enhancing horizontal scalability.
Sentiment score
7.2
ServiceNow Discovery offers scalability and easy setup, but faces challenges with cloud services, financial concerns, and legacy application complexity.
It is very much scalable and allows you to design your discovery solution without facing any challenge.
Associate Vice President at Hitachi Systems India Private Limited
Device42's scalability works well for me; if I want to add more resources, such as a Remote Collector for a new site, I can easily connect it to the main appliance.
Senior Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The scalability is good and with the increase in the size of the environment, it has definitely grown and changed over the last couple of years.
Sr PreSales Cloud Architect at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees
I would rate it as a nine on a scale of one to ten, indicating it is highly scalable.
Software Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Small companies will not be able to afford ServiceNow Discovery from the pricing perspective.
Manager, Solution/Service Delivery at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
It receives this rating because it can be difficult to troubleshoot when the discovery is failing.
IT Service Performance Manager at MTN
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
Device42 is praised for stability and reliability, with minimal downtime and regular updates enhancing functionality despite installation challenges.
Sentiment score
8.0
ServiceNow Discovery is highly reliable, scoring 8-10 for dependability, with occasional issues influenced by external factors.
Device42 is stable and has been reliable for my organization.
Associate Vice President at Hitachi Systems India Private Limited
Device42 has been pretty stable.
Sr PreSales Cloud Architect at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees
Stability for Device42, in terms of reliability, is generally acceptable.
Solutions Architect at KAF Group
I would rate the stability of ServiceNow Discovery as nine, as we never had downtime.
IT Service Performance Manager at MTN
That is not a mistake of the product. It is due to excessive security on the network.
Manager, Solution/Service Delivery at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
 

Room For Improvement

Device42 requires improvements in deployment, interface, operations, integration, and documentation for enhanced efficiency and user experience.
ServiceNow Discovery requires enhancements in application discovery, integration, pricing, user training, and improved technical support and reporting capabilities.
Device42 could benefit from improvements, specifically regarding the deployment of the software, which sometimes can be hectic and become time-consuming.
Financial Specialist at Wells Fargo
I foresee areas of improvement for the agent-less solution, which could be very useful for those organizations that might not allow configuring an agent in their source machines for workload discovery.
Associate Vice President at Hitachi Systems India Private Limited
From an ITSM and ticketing perspective, I would say if there were integrations available, that would have really been better because a lot of times what we end up seeing or leveraging is ServiceNow because they have that native or out of the box capability, and even Freshservice has that capability out of the box.
Sr PreSales Cloud Architect at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees
ServiceNow ITOM is particularly not very strong in terms of monitoring capabilities. They do not have any monitoring tool.
Manager, Solution/Service Delivery at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Improvements could include implementing chatbots to simplify ticket creation.
Software Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The areas of ServiceNow Discovery that have room for improvement are getting custom reports on the relationship between CIs that are not on the same table.
IT Service Performance Manager at MTN
 

Setup Cost

Device42's pricing is generally cost-effective but can be costly with add-ons, appealing mostly to smaller device organizations.
ServiceNow Discovery is costly yet valued for its advanced features, with potential cost savings despite high total ownership costs.
Compared to other competitors, it does not cost much, and I would recommend it from a cost perspective.
Associate Vice President at Hitachi Systems India Private Limited
For example, I felt the BMC Discovery pricing was quite high.
Sr PreSales Cloud Architect at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees
The pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Device42 are relatively cost-effective and affordable.
Financial Specialist at Wells Fargo
ServiceNow is considered more expensive compared to other products.
Software Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
I think the price of ServiceNow Discovery is cheaper than BMC.
IT Service Performance Manager at MTN
 

Valuable Features

Device42 offers automatic IT asset discovery, integration, real-time visualization, and AI-enhanced features for comprehensive hybrid environment management.
ServiceNow Discovery enhances IT operations with automated discovery, dependency mapping, scalability, and efficient management of network devices and cloud infrastructure.
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.
Associate Vice President at Hitachi Systems India Private Limited
We have leveraged that to discover IT assets such as physical servers, VMs, network devices, containers, storage devices, the applications, cloud resources and their relationships or their dependencies with each other and to the outside.
Sr PreSales Cloud Architect at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees
Device42 has positively impacted our organization by helping us become one of the best companies for asset management and inventory for the enterprise businesses we work with.
Cloud Presales Engineer at Activedge Technologies Ltd.
The workflows are beneficial as they allow tasks to be assigned to respective teams without the need for coding.
Software Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
ServiceNow Discovery helps with operations, audits, and allows people to assess how a particular change in infrastructure impacts other components.
Director, Information Technology at Gen™
ServiceNow Discovery has normal discovery of CIs, as well as horizontal discovery for understanding Service Mapping.
Manager, Solution/Service Delivery at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Device42
Ranking in IT Asset Management
6th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
33
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management Databases (2nd), IP Address Management (IPAM) Tools (3rd), Data Center Infrastructure Management (1st)
ServiceNow Discovery
Ranking in IT Asset Management
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (4th), Cloud Resource Discovery Services (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the IT Asset Management category, the mindshare of Device42 is 4.2%, down from 6.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow Discovery is 4.1%, down from 5.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Asset Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Device424.2%
ServiceNow Discovery4.1%
Other91.7%
IT Asset Management
 

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.
Abhinay Sharma - PeerSpot reviewer
Service Now Developer at Bangmetric services pvt ltd
Cloud discovery has improved asset visibility and reporting but still needs smarter automation
The impact of ServiceNow Discovery on my organization's strategic planning depends on various factors. Some customers have their own discovery tools which they do not want to switch from, even if we explain why ServiceNow might be better, because they have been using them for a long time. Some customers are dynamic, so we need to have some kind of proposition that comes with ServiceNow. Sometimes, we need to talk with ServiceNow people themselves to give them a bundle offer in which we can have Discovery and ITSM at a much more affordable price than the competitors, so that is our main goal. Currently, I would say there might be a possibility if we can use some AI discovery features that could be helpful for our organization. If we can get discovery jobs running based on AI schedules, that would be beneficial. I believe in the coming future that I want to see myself working more with ServiceNow in this capacity.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise20
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise5
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?
Device42 can be improved by adding more reporting features and architectural diagrams. If visual representations for application dependencies could be incorporated, that would be helpful.
What do you like most about ServiceNow Discovery?
The solution can prioritize the discovery of IP ranges. The product automatically places all Discovery CIs into the correct class within the CMDB.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ServiceNow Discovery?
Regarding pricing, I have not dealt much with it. I am more focused on the feature side of things, so I cannot comment on the latest pricing because it is dynamic as well. Sometimes it is cheaper f...
What needs improvement with ServiceNow Discovery?
The impact of ServiceNow Discovery on my organization's strategic planning depends on various factors. Some customers have their own discovery tools which they do not want to switch from, even if w...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Computershare, Concur, Doosan, Fitch Ratings Inc., Fujitsu, HomeAway, Jasper Wireless, Mercedes-Benz, Square, Twitch, UCSB, Zayo Group Inc.
York, National Grid, DXC Technology, experian, BEACHBODY
Find out what your peers are saying about Device42 vs. ServiceNow Discovery and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.