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Espressive Barista vs ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 3, 2024

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

Espressive Barista
Ranking in Help Desk Software
35th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
AI-Powered Chatbots (8th), AI-Agents for HR (2nd)
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus
Ranking in Help Desk Software
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
70
Ranking in other categories
IT Service Management (ITSM) (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Help Desk Software category, the mindshare of Espressive Barista is 0.8%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus is 3.5%, down from 7.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Help Desk Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus3.5%
Espressive Barista0.8%
Other95.7%
Help Desk Software
 

Featured Reviews

Jim Lobao - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager for End User Support Services at Five9
Has helped enhance our support ability, reduced our resolution time, and reduced our service desk costs
Espressive Barista's natural language processing and conventional AI still have room for improvement. We haven't yet found anything that resembles true AI that can learn autonomously without human intervention. However, Barista does help us identify and address some of these areas, allowing my team to step in and create intents and responses to questions. When a user asks a question that Barista doesn't immediately understand, we can recognize the pattern, capture it, and link it to a common intent. This is highly beneficial for acquiring such data, but it's a reactive approach and still requires curation. Natural language processing still has some way to go. One of our challenges is that our internal employees haven't yet adopted a natural way of interacting with Barista. Getting people to be concise and to the point, rather than being verbose as if they were interacting with a human, has been an ongoing challenge. While they may feel comfortable being conversational in Slack, expecting a human-like response, Barista is a different entity. Barista isn't interested in their recent vacation; it just wants to know they're locked out of their account. So, some users may assume Barista understands their intent when they say, "I'm back from vacation and locked out of my account." Barista, however, may interpret this as a request for the holiday schedule. Therefore, we're gradually educating our users to adapt their communication style for better success with Barista. Conversely, we desire Barista to adapt its behavior based on the interaction, the language used, and the way people communicate. I wholeheartedly desire an AI that can continuously learn and adapt to our organization's evolving needs. This is the most challenging aspect, as it involves understanding our organization's terminology, procedures, and toolsets. We've made significant progress in this area. However, from an NLP standpoint, we still face challenges with our nearly 3,000 Slack channel users, each with their unique communication styles. People ask questions in various ways, and sometimes there are misunderstandings. They want to interact with us naturally. However, we still struggle with natural language processing. People don't always realize that the bot is a virtual agent designed to be concise and efficient. Sometimes, less is more. It's been a difficult transition for people to grasp that they're conversing with a virtual agent, not a human. They still expect human-like interactions, such as discussing their weekend or holidays or simply pasting screenshots of errors. However, the bot can't interpret screenshots. If they provide the error code and some context about the application, the bot can better understand the issue. So, the key challenge is bridging the gap between human expectations and the bot's capabilities in terms of natural interaction.
Mostafiz Miah - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Presales & Technical Lead at Elitbuzz Technologies Ltd
Automation has transformed daily request handling and now tracks every customer interaction
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus helps my team manage and resolve requests compared to previous methods as we previously managed things through paperwork and diaries. After deploying ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, whenever any customer request comes, we provide the customer a product demo if they ask about the products. We then convert that request to a lead, which is converted to a demo, and then to the product POC, allowing us to follow up every stage of the requests. Everything can be tracked from ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, whether at the closing stage or the initial stage. I use ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus daily in a unique way because previously everyone managed their own tracking system through their diary, but now everyone inputs data into this solution so that at the end of the day, we can get reports on how many leads we have taken care of and when they need to be taken care of. This information is visible from the ServiceDesk tool, and using the dashboard, we can easily identify it, providing an at-a-glance view. The best features ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus offers for my team include automating manual tasks, which allows whatever tasks we previously did manually to be converted into automatic tasks. Currently, they have also introduced Zia, a very helpful solution for us. Using Zia, we can search for anything, not only inside the tool but also outside, integrating it with ChatGPT and Teams, and it can integrate with other ManageEngine solutions as well as solutions such as Jira and ServiceNow. When we integrate our network monitoring solutions with ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, it automatically raises an incident ticket and assigns it to the right team whenever any incident has occurred, which saves us time and reduces manual tasks. Previously, we had to communicate to the right people through mail or phone calls after an incident, but now the incidents are automatically converted and assigned to the relevant support groups along with the SLA. The integration with Teams allows us to raise tickets without logging into the portal, and we can see the ticket status and add comments through Teams, which is very helpful. Additionally, mail integration can automatically convert emails into tickets, adding further efficiency. ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus has positively impacted our organization, particularly in customer satisfaction. Previously, customers managed service requests, incidents, changes, and problems manually, but after integration, most of these processes are automated. This includes change requests that now follow a workflow based on organizational needs and ITIL best practices, making tracking incidents and requests much easier for end customers through scheduled reports.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Given Barista's out-of-the-box content for common industry applications, the value is pretty good right from day one."
"When it comes to neutral language processing and conversational AI, it's very good, very solid... We all have different ways of speaking or writing in English and the application does a very solid job of recognizing what's being asked regardless of how it's being asked."
"I like Expressive Barista's integration with Microsoft Teams."
"The bot is pretty easy to update and keep up to date. Espressive itself is pretty easy to work with."
"This is one of the few tools that live up to the sales reps' hype when it comes to integrating with ServiceNow."
"With respect to its natural language processing capabilities, it recognizes things that you wouldn't think it would recognize. Even in cases where it doesn't, it's pretty easy to go in and make the adjustments that are needed."
"Given the out of the box content for common industry applications, we got good value out of the solution right from day one."
"Our department received about a 70% deflection rate, so that was really great."
"The most valuable feature is its ease of use."
"It's a very user-friendly tool with good performance."
"The most valuable feature of ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus is ticket management."
"While I see the normal features of a ticketing system in ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, a good workflow engine is definitely present."
"When comparing ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus to other solutions it is much easier to operate, manage, create users, and design incident tickets, and overall, everything is very easy."
"Even though I haven't been able to test other products and I've used a very old version of ManageEngine, I still think it met our requirements and that it has everything that we need to work as an IT department."
"It's very easy to customize the tool to your business needs."
"The primary benefit of ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus is its ease of use."
 

Cons

"I would like to see the continued expansion of all of the automation capabilities."
"Expressive Barista could improve by adding native integration with WhatsApp, one of the top communication channels in South Africa."
"What would make things easier is more detail, out of the box, about what is helping out of the box. We're struggling a little bit to get that data. We want more information about what Barista has brought in that the employees are using, out of the box. We want more visibility into the things that we ourselves haven't done the interaction for."
"Although they've done some work on their metrics dashboard, there is some fine-tuning to do for people that just want to go in there at a glance and see their metrics."
"My only comment would be if they wanted to use this as an IT service management tool, maybe they could think about Barista making tickets and having change management and problem management capabilities."
"Espressive Barista's natural language processing and conventional AI still have room for improvement."
"There aren't very many things that this product needs improvement on."
"I would like to see improvement to the out-of-the-box verbiage, with the questions going to the right place."
"Feature-wise, the reporting is not quite satisfactory."
"The product needs to allow for implementation for other departments besides the IT help desk."
"Its reporting can be improved. It can have better analytics reports. Even though they provide integration with another tool called Analytics Plus to get those reports, it would be quite helpful to have them on the fly and out of the box. A lot of improvement is required in change management and release management. Their change management module is quite simple, and they need to do a lot of work on the change management module. The release management is out only on the cloud. It is not available in on-premises deployments. In the next release, I would like it to have effective project management. They do provide the project management and contracts management modules, but these modules need a bit of improvement."
"It needs more customization and the ability to generate reports based on custom feeds."
"The current MDM is very basic and should be expanded."
"The product needs to allow for implementation for other departments besides the IT help desk."
"I think asset management took a hit recently."
"The self-service feature for end users and the knowledge base need to be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price for the licensing is fair."
"The pricing isn't overly burdensome. It's going to be interesting to see how new models come in with new capabilities but, as it is, as a base system, it's pretty good."
"The solution is affordable."
"User-based licensing has been working well for us, and we believe we are deriving significant value from it."
"It is expensive. It's not a cheap thing."
"We use the cloud model, which is subscription-based, and each year, the subscription fees seem to go up, making it a more expensive solution."
"The prices are attractive. Customer can use a subscription if they do not have enough budget."
"ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus is a reasonably priced product."
"When I compared it with a similar product, ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus was $2,000 cheaper."
"It is cheaper than the competitors."
"It is not an expensive solution."
"Cost-wise, we're quite happy."
"It is above average. But it is neither cheap nor expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Healthcare Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
6%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business32
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise20
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus?
Regarding pricing, ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus offers three editions: Standard edition, Professional, and Enterprise. The Enterprise edition is the full suite, and the Professional edition has in...
What needs improvement with ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus?
Currently, ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus is a mature solution, and I do not think major improvements are needed, as it already covers most ITIL features such as incident, change, problem, service r...
What is your primary use case for ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus?
My main use case for ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus is to record the day-to-day customer requests and incidents or any queries about our solutions, and we record those solutions and provide their so...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Tranter IT Infrastructure Services Limited, Sterlite Technologies, averda, Radiology Associates
Find out what your peers are saying about Espressive Barista vs. ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
894,738 professionals have used our research since 2012.