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Espressive Barista vs ServiceNow comparison

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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

Automation Anywhere
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
668
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (2nd), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (2nd), Process Mining (1st), Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) (1st), Agentic Automation (1st), Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (2nd), AI Legal & Compliance (1st), AI Finance & Accounting (2nd), AI Procurement & Supply Chain (1st)
Espressive Barista
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (37th), AI-Powered Chatbots (9th), AI-Agents for HR (4th)
ServiceNow
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
231
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (1st), IT Asset Management (1st), IT Service Management (ITSM) (1st), Rapid Application Development Software (4th), No-Code Development Platforms (1st)
 

Featured Reviews

Nadeem K. - PeerSpot reviewer
Rpa Developer at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
Automation has freed teams from repetitive finance and supply tasks and supports global operations
In the current organization, we had trouble initially because I think the documentation and support could be better than what it is now. This is one difference between Automation Anywhere and other RPA tools such as UiPath. In UiPath, if you have an issue, you go to the UiPath website and search for it, and you get lots of help materials. In Automation Anywhere, you do not get exactly what you are looking for. You get a very large number of results when you search for something, and from this large result set, you have to filter out what you need, or only partial information will be available. User handbooks are available for each product. In that regard, I would say Automation Anywhere is lagging compared to other RPA tools. It is difficult to get hold of their customer support team. I want to clarify that it is not a matter of us building logic on Automation Anywhere and it failing. When it is a product-related issue, they have to give us support because we only know how to develop within Automation Anywhere. We do not know how to fix Automation Anywhere itself. Whenever we have an issue, trying to get in touch with them always takes three to four business days.
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.
Hemanthreddy Vakiti - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Structured workflows have improved SLA compliance and now support prioritized incident handling
I think the licensing and pricing of ServiceNow is quite expensive compared to other tools. For large organizations, it is acceptable, but specifically for small and medium organizations to track incidents or change requests, ServiceNow is quite expensive. Sometimes performance can be slow when workflows and integrations are configured for complex tasks. For advanced customizations or advanced features which we rarely use, the documentation is not up to standard. The documentation needs to be improved for advanced customization features. However, the platform is stable overall and the features are quite good. The user experience and performance concerns I mentioned are areas I want to be improved. When many workflows and interactions are configured, performance is slow. For the features it is providing, it is quite expensive. If these performance features are improved, we can easily pay that price and get the return on investment.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"There are instances where use cases and opportunities have arisen as a result of having Automation Anywhere and RPA in place that have come about through very casual conversations and have actually resulted in increased revenue opportunities that we didn't realize."
"AA RPA has drastically reduced speed of execution and thus turn around time of processes, ensuring all service level agreements are met and our customers get a great experience."
"The general features, that we can automate a task that takes hours into minutes, are valuable."
"The Control Room is the most important feature, where we can manage the bots and publish to various bot runners in the environment."
"Automation Anywhere has helped us in many ways and is one of the best RPA tools."
"Object Cloning is the most valuable feature I have found for automating a website or a process that includes multiple mouse clicks."
"The AI collaboration is the most impressive feature of Automation Anywhere."
"At the end of the day, the effort that you put in has exponential benefits, giving you many advantages from your lines of code, which is amazing."
"Given Barista's out-of-the-box content for common industry applications, the value is pretty good right from day one."
"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."
"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 solution is available to support us instantly as required."
"This is one of the few tools that live up to the sales reps' hype when it comes to integrating with ServiceNow."
"The bot is pretty easy to update and keep up to date. Espressive itself is pretty easy to work with."
"Given the out of the box content for common industry applications, we got good value out of the solution 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."
"ServiceNow has positively impacted my organization because initially we were not using ServiceNow and were working manually on email or through chat communications, and after integrating ServiceNow, we have automation with failures and automated tickets that get generated when there is an issue in the environment or services."
"Easy to implement and consolidate different platforms and users with useful functionalities."
"In the past, I've used other products, and they're not that scalable; if you're working in a company that has multiple facilities, multiple countries, the best way to go is with ServiceNow."
"I would recommend it and I love this tool."
"It is user-friendly and simple to use."
"The product is very robust, the solution offers very good customization, I can make very strong chains and format excellent business rules."
"I find the incident management part to be the most valuable. That's how the service desk tracks tickets."
"Creating a ticket is much simpler in this tool. That is one big advantage. Also, the simplicity and ease of use are much better. I've used HPSM and it is very complex in comparison to ServiceNow."
 

Cons

"We face issues with Excel file creation. I’m trying to create a file in Excel .xls, it is getting corrupted."
"With Oracle and ServiceNow, there seem to be challenges. With SAP, it worked very well."
"I would like more cognitive abilities, artificial intelligence, and machine learning."
"I would like it to have AI and ML capabilities."
"The user interface should be enhanced to make things simpler for the user."
"We are having some challenges when it comes to stability."
"I don't find a lot outside of the internal community forum."
"From a QA and development perspective, we would like to communicate with the tech support through email and have that put in the dashboard. This would let us better track the ticket and make it easier for us to communicate with Automation Anywhere."
"Expressive Barista could improve by adding native integration with WhatsApp, one of the top communication channels in South Africa. When we're trying to sell Barista to customers, we have to tell them that the solution doesn't have out-of-the-box support for WhatsApp. We can develop it, but then we need to have a conversation about how much that will cost."
"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."
"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."
"The reports provided by the solution are not customizable."
"I would like to see the continued expansion of all of the automation capabilities."
"Espressive Barista's natural language processing and conventional AI still have room for improvement."
"I find the pricing of ServiceNow to be high and somewhat reasonable."
"I don't think it's very secure, and it's web-based, and Remedy is really the standard that it's judged against."
"I would like to see Advanced Intelligent Automation."
"The visual representation of the data is an area where they fall short of, but they do have a partner who is native to their product that does a much better job visualizing the data."
"I do not like the user interface."
"We did have some performance issues where some of the system areas were slow, but that was really our fault."
"The interface can be a bit more intuitive."
"Before implementing this solution, you should have the ITSM model in place for change management requests. That is a prerequisite because you cannot perform tasks without it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I am not sure about the costs, but two Bot Runners and four Bot Creators may cost approximately 1CR."
"The cost is affordable, which makes an easy barrier to entry for the RPA market."
"I am not involved in the pricing, but based on what I hear from our central RPA team, it is not very expensive; it is also not cheap. Its price is in the midrange."
"They give us a good deal on the licensing because we bundle and customize things. If you ask to get a bulk business deal, you will receive more benefit. If you take other products from the suite, like IQ Bot, you can also receive a deal on the licensing."
"Time-wise: We have saved hundreds of thousands of hours."
"Subscription for Automation Anywhere (AA) is paid yearly."
"Overall, the pricing of Automation Anywhere is good."
"The licensing fees are approximately $10,000 USD for between five and ten users."
"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 price for the licensing is fair."
"It is expensive. It's not a cheap thing."
"User-based licensing has been working well for us, and we believe we are deriving significant value from it."
"The solution is affordable."
"The CapEx version is great."
"Initially, the licensing model ServiceNow came up with was very good. But now, from a licensing perspective, they are changing their model day by day. It is becoming a bit expensive for customers."
"This is a pretty expensive product, so the licensing could be better."
"Some time ago it was expensive, but large companies have special contracts. It's enterprise prices, and we're talking about millions per year."
"The solution is expensive."
"The price of the solution is comparable to industry standards. For the features that we received, it is reasonable."
"$230 per user."
"The platform offers a free trial, by providing a free developer instance once you sign up."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Construction Company
10%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Construction Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business162
Midsize Enterprise86
Large Enterprise565
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business57
Midsize Enterprise35
Large Enterprise179
 

Questions from the Community

How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It depends on your use case. Is it simply to automate a couple of processes? Is it to augment a human team? AA is ver...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
From my experience using AA tool, it depends on the applications that you want to automate, because there some applic...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It is a highly preferred RPA tool. You can check my Automation Anywhere Review to know more.
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Which solution is better for developing non-ITSM applications: OutSystems or Service Now?
The short answer is that OutSystems is far better for 2 main reasons. Firstly, with Service Now you are locked into t...
Would you choose ServiceNow over Microsoft PowerApps?
Hi Netanya, I will choose ServiceNow because ServiceNow is a very good tool compared to Microsoft PowerApp. Because ...
What is the cost of implementation and maintenance of ServiceNow?
Nobody can give you a clean percentage without knowing your license tier, but here’s how I’d budget it, based on what...
 

Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise, Agentic Process Automation System (Now Certified for WorkSpaces)
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Interactive Demo

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
Information Not Available
AAA, AstraZeneca, Becton, Dickinson and Company, Broadcom, Christus Health, Epicor, Equinix, GE Capital, Intuit, KPMG, Loyola Marymount University, OshKosh, Quantas, RedHat, Royal Bank of Scotland, Swiss Re, U.S. Department of Energy, Safeway, Yale University, and Zillow    
Find out what your peers are saying about Espressive Barista vs. ServiceNow and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
920,929 professionals have used our research since 2012.