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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
33rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
AI-Powered Chatbots (8th), AI-Agents for HR (3rd)
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus
Ranking in Help Desk Software
3rd
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 January 2026, in the Help Desk Software category, the mindshare of Espressive Barista is 0.8%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus is 3.8%, down from 7.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Help Desk Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus3.8%
Espressive Barista0.8%
Other95.4%
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

"The bot is pretty easy to update and keep up to date. Espressive itself is pretty easy to work with."
"The solution is available to support us instantly as required."
"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."
"Our developers have used the Barista Control Center to extend the platform by adding content, and they've found it fairly easy to do and manage"
"The most valuable feature is its scalability."
"Its ability to recognize phrases has gotten smarter over time."
"I like Expressive Barista's integration with Microsoft Teams."
"We have the ability to alter phrases, create new phrases, or enhance phrases, or change paths. From the dashboard, we are able to get a lot of information we need about what people are asking, where they are dropping off from conversations, and where they do not get the information they need."
"The most valuable feature is the ticketing system which is working well."
"CMDB as a baseline, incident management, service request management, and license management are valuable features. It offers really interesting features for complete use in an enterprise. You have one platform, and you could set up different service functions for HR, engineering, or another team in the same platform."
"I rate the solution a ten out of ten for scalability."
"The tool's most valuable feature is task creation. The tickets get timestamps as well."
"It's a very user-friendly tool with good performance."
"Service Catalog and Project Management are awesome features. Customers love them because they are easy to use and simple to install."
"The solution overall has been quite stable."
"ServiceDesk Plus improved the turnaround time for asset allocation and the employee onboarding process."
 

Cons

"I would like to see the continued expansion of all of the automation capabilities."
"I would like to see improvement to the out-of-the-box verbiage, with the questions going to the right place."
"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."
"The knowledge management could definitely be improved."
"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."
"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."
"Espressive Barista's natural language processing and conventional AI still have room for improvement."
"The reports provided by the solution are not customizable."
"The CMDB should have correlation capabilities."
"The reporting capabilities are not as good as Ivanti's. So, ManageEngine could certainly improve on that."
"There are some performance issues. The solution we used before this ran through a centralized server for remote control and it was much more responsive than this one is. There is a bit of a lag with the remote control option."
"The UI for the app needs improvement."
"ManageEngine has developed and implemented new features in its cloud version. I would like to see the features extended to the on-premises version."
"As a partner, their technical support can respond better to the tickets. We provide deployment services and also support products as a partner. We get a lot of tickets from clients complaining about certain issues related to the system, but when we send or escalate an issue to the agent, sometimes, there is a delay. That's something that they could improve on. Because we are a local partner, we are able to copy to some employees who can try to push a ticket to close, but it would be best if they can respond a bit quicker."
"ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus could improve by making asset management better. The professional version has asset management but it should be available in the free version, it would help my organization."
"Security could be better. It would be better if ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus had really good defense products like BlackBerry. I can recommend BlackBerry for the defense part, but not the other things. For example, before we switched over to ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, we had issues with mobiles switching off cameras, and now it doesn't happen at all."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"User-based licensing has been working well for us, and we believe we are deriving significant value from it."
"The price for the licensing is fair."
"The solution is affordable."
"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."
"It is expensive. It's not a cheap thing."
"It is above average. But it is neither cheap nor expensive."
"ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus' price is very reasonable."
"Pricing can always be improved and made more affordable."
"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."
"As compared to a lot of systems out there, it is more affordable."
"The price of the solution is low. However, it still could be less expensive."
"ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus has reasonable pricing because my colleagues mentioned that the solution is more cost-effective than the previous one the company used."
"For our 500 assets that are using the professional version of the solution, we pay somewhere between $4,000 and $5,000 per year."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
26%
Retailer
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Healthcare Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

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 Enterprise19
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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What do you like most about ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus?
The platform's most beneficial features are incident management, change management, request management, and asset management.
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...
 

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: December 2025.
881,114 professionals have used our research since 2012.