Freshservice vs ManageEngine Applications Manager vs ServiceNow comparison

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Freshservice

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Freshservice, ManageEngine Applications Manager, and ServiceNow based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, Atlassian, ManageEngine and others in Help Desk Software.

To learn more, read our detailed Help Desk Software Report (Updated: March 2026).

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

Help Desk Software Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Freshservice	3.9%
ServiceNow	12.6%
JIRA Service Management	6.3%
Other	77.2%

Help Desk Software

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
ManageEngine Applications Manager	0.8%
Dynatrace	6.0%
Datadog	5.2%
Other	88.0%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

IT Service Management (ITSM) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
ServiceNow	15.8%
JIRA Service Management	7.3%
BMC Helix ITSM	5.7%
Other	71.2%

IT Service Management (ITSM)

Featured Reviews

Raja Farrar

IT Service Delivery Manager at Symposiam

Automation and AI have transformed our service delivery and have made IT support faster and more efficient

I always keep up with Freshservice's roadmaps and new features. Freshservice has been very good at listening to feedback and adding those feature requests into their next iterations. I wish they would offer more granular data export options for utilizing in Power BI, along with predictive analytics for capacity planning and SLA breaches to enable more proactive support management and reduce firefighting. While the dashboards are effective, some users find custom reporting limited compared to ServiceNow or Jira. I would also appreciate deeper integrations, especially for niche apps requiring development coding work to enable advanced orchestration. Native integrations for DevOps pipelines such as GitHub Actions and Jenkins, along with stronger API flexibility for complex workflows, would enhance functionality. Although the CMDB and asset management are solid, they do lack advanced dependency mapping compared to other enterprise tools. My wishlist includes automated impact analysis for changes and improved visualization of asset relationships, enabling quicker resolutions from an agent's perspective when alerts come in. I acknowledge that Device42 may enhance this, but it is an extra cost beyond what we already pay. While Freddy AI is excellent for triage and suggestions, some users desire more proactive automation, such as predictive ticket routing based on historical patterns and AI-driven capacity forecasting. Lastly, the pricing tiers might seem rigid for mid-sized teams, so a more granular add-on option for features such as Device42 or pay-per-use for orchestration workflows could be beneficial.

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Srinivasan Naidu

Senior System Engineer at Qatar Petroleum

Managing application health has become simpler but new monitoring features still need faster delivery

I use application discovery and dependency mapping. It helps with managing application health What I like about ManageEngine Applications Manager is the ease of use and ease of deployment. I cannot remember anything specific for future updates of the product. The new features take a lot of time…

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MichaelTang1

Manager of Security Engineering & Architecture at a outsourcing company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Seamless data integration and advanced automation improve service delivery efficiency

I think that nothing needs to be improved with the product; you just need the user to commit and spend appropriate time to overcome that learning curve. Once that is done, the product itself is pretty wonderful. I've seen a very nicely built interface with ServiceNow, and I've also seen the ugliest version that feels outdated. ServiceNow does allow that team to exist. They should modernize their fonts and their layout, the UI friendliness. They did introduce AI, chatbots, and AI on the back end, so that's wonderful and extremely useful if you train it. If you don't train it, it's pretty useless. Assessing the impact of ServiceNow's automation on service delivery times is complicated. The engineers who operate on ServiceNow find it isn't straightforward because the data set is accessible by everybody. The problem is that understanding how to manage that data set requires an enormous amount of engineering skill set to run the product. I would not hand the key to the customer; I would highly recommend that ServiceNow take control of that. Instead of offering support for the software, they should offer administrative support for the software. They should provide professional service or some kind of support system that allows us to use their product at a faster pace. I'm sure they offer something, but it's often outrageously expensive, or they rely on another company to resell their product and offer professional service. It makes no sense in my opinion, and they should offer the team at the front to help customize the product to fit each company's needs, as every company has different demands and forms of submitting a request that need adjustment over time.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Freshservice's best feature is its user-friendliness."

"This solution has provided us with a level of ticket traceability that didn't exist previously, and we now have statistics and data that tell the story of what our support engineers have been doing, improving speed and reliability."

"We have definitely seen a return on investment based on the use cases we have implemented."

"Its ease of use is fantastic. It is just above and beyond, especially when you compare it to something like Cherwell, Salesforce, or anything like that. It is on its own level. It is so easy to administer. The way everything is organized and the way it builds its own documentation is very good."

"The workflow and the change management process are valuable."

"We use the ticketing system primarily, which is very easy to use for all users."

"The admin feature is the UI, so it's very clean. The asset management and its model are valuable as well."

"Freshservice is very user-friendly and easy to customize."

More Freshservice pros

"The most valuable features are: Takes care of all IT monitoring in one console: Server, apps and business services."

"I am impressed with the tool's reporting feature which is simple."

"Depending on the size of the environment, this is a solution that I recommend."

"We have a very good and long relationship with ManageEngine support guys, and they provide very good support for us."

"ManageEngine Applications Manager's installation is pretty easy."

"Applications Manager helps businesses ensure their revenue-critical applications meet end user expectations."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to be able to monitor Kubernetes."

"Its price and the flexibility to deploy are the most valuable. Flexibility is very important, and you can scale from very basic to more complex. This solution is a part of a complete suite of management tools. So, it can be integrated with other solutions for monitoring networks, which is very important. You can expand it or interconnect it with many other tools, which is a powerful feature. We have a very good and long relationship with ManageEngine support guys. They provide very good support for us."

More ManageEngine Applications Manager pros

"Very good incident management, chain management and problem management features."

"I would tell you that ServiceNow is a great product to use because just from what we have, what we use, it's highly customizable and there are a lot of features that we like."

"Primarily, we use it for incident management and change across the landscape; it is the virtual repository for our incident management processes and gives us visibility about what's happening from the change management perspective across our CABs, including our enterprise CABs."

"The product is extremely stable, with no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze, making it very reliable and not problematic at all."

"I really like ServiceNow and all of the features. The way incident management is built is very helpful. You have a lot of options to optimize it, customize it, and automate it. You also have a lot of options for reporting. There are plenty of possibilities to do preference management within your customer CMDB file. These are very useful features, which I missed in BMC Remedy ITSM. ServiceNow is the best ticketing tool I have used so far."

"The solution is stable, scalable and easy to use."

"The most valuable features of the solution are the ease of use and the sensor for ticketing systems."

"ServiceNow was the first true enterprise to service management platform."

More ServiceNow pros

Cons

"We haven't had any issues with the stability of Freshservice. However, we have had some issues with data imports, we have noticed that large amounts of data can get stuck. This is something that we haven't seen in other solutions."

"Freshservice automation capabilities are improving the way we respond to a few customers. There is a bit of delay when we must respond to the customer."

"We would like to have chat as a support channel in order to enjoy the same benefit of real-time support that Freshdesk has."

"It is 80% stable. Some users face issues in Chrome and Firefox."

"Freshservice's technical support has issues with delays and translations."

"They can improve the search. While searching the inventory, when I cancel a selected category, the search box disappears, and I have to reload the page. It is a small glitch. Currently, we can have only one plan per subscription. All users have to be on the same plan. We can't have two users for plan A and five users for plan B. It might be good if there was an option to have different plans within one subscription so that you can assign each agent to the corresponding plan."

"You can't implement a complicated delivery workflow."

"On the reporting side, when we were doing reporting, one thing that was a bit of a limitation was when you had a data list containing a list of changes that have occurred for the whole time and you had to fit the list onto a page. If the list went over the page, it would just truncate it at the page. You wouldn't get all your data. So, it didn't work. That was one big stand-out for me. What we tended to do was convert things into a more readable format, and then we had more targeted exception reporting, but it would be nice to have a full list of things that could be automatically generated and that can flow over pages."

More Freshservice cons

"My suggestion for improving this feature is to also monitor the end-user experience for application clients and servers."

"Even with the top-notch dashboard, it could be made stronger in order to have an additional plug-in for analytics."

"Even with the top-notch dashboard, it could be made stronger with an additional plug-in for analytics."

"The problem is that implementation requires a significant amount of mapping effort."

"One area of improvement is the dashboard should be more readable and available."

"The information provided by ManageEngine is not deep-dive like IBM and CA provide."

"An area for improvement in ManageEngine Applications Manager is artificial intelligence. If AI is integrated into the solution, it'll be a piece of cake. Currently, it's all configured manually."

"They could probably rearrange the UI so that it would be easy for people who are new to the Application Manager to configure things."

More ManageEngine Applications Manager cons

"We have implemented some various complex ACLs and they've impacted our performance significantly, and we've had several incidents open to help with performance, and it's been kind of a struggle to get the ServiceNow support group to say "Yup, I see it's a problem, let's do this.""

"They could be more competitive with their licensing."

"There is a need for bug or error tracking in ServiceNow."

"Also, some of the way that the patches would break the catalog and the catalog items would cause unnecessary changes to the layout in the UI."

"There are sometimes challenges with the portal being a bit confusing for new users."

"It's like, "That's not an answer." It's like, "What should we do? We need guidance." Well, "No. you can do anything with it." Okay. That doesn't quite help me as a user, and future administrator, or as an executive."

"The interface can be a bit more intuitive."

"ServiceNow is not meeting our expectations. The contract module is quite rudimentary and doesn't support contract line items, which are subdivisions of contracts in VA."

More ServiceNow cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Freshservice is a fairly cheap solution. Though monthly payments can be made towards the licensing costs of the solution, my company prefers to make annual payments."

"It is $34 per license, per agent. Currently, we don't see any add-ons at extra fees."

"I don't think it's expensive for the US or some European markets. Still, when I used Freshservice in Mexico, some customers found it a bit pricey, especially considering the platform's features. I think the pricing is fair for use in the European market, but it might be perceived differently in Latin America."

"One of the key benefits of Freshservice is license management. Asset management has the possibility to keep track of licenses and that's very useful. The price of the solution is very good."

"The solution has an annual licensing model."

"The price of Freshservice could improve, it is expensive."

"The pricing is reasonable."

"Its price is great. Its pricing is supposedly a lot less than ServiceNow and other alternatives."

More Freshservice pricing and cost advice

"The licensing costs for ManageEngine Applications Manager are around $1,200 per year. For additional monitors, you have to pay extra."

"ManageEngine Applications Manager has reasonable pricing. It's more affordable than other solutions in the market. My company has an instance-based license for ManageEngine Applications Manager. You can purchase a yearly subscription or a perpetual license. The standard license covers most features, but you can still have some paid add-ons."

"The solution is noted for its cost-effectiveness, a crucial consideration for potential users."

"Its price is good."

"The cost of this solution is not too bad, although it could be cheaper considering what you're getting for the price."

"It is a cost-effective solution."

"The annual licensing depends on the number of monitors you have connected. Once you get to two hundred monitors you can see the price reflect."

"The solution's licensing costs are yearly."

More ManageEngine Applications Manager pricing and cost advice

"It has a higher cost compared to local/regional solutions."

"The licensing expenses are excessively high."

"We are happy with the pricing."

"$230 per user."

"Some time ago it was expensive, but large companies have special contracts. It's enterprise prices, and we're talking about millions per year."

"ServiceNow tends to be a little bit more expensive as compared to BMC Helix ITSM."

"I have found the solution very expensive."

"The setup cost is high compared to others, especially when the scope is not fixed."

More ServiceNow pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

University

10%

Manufacturing Company

Construction Company

Educational Organization

Construction Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	24
Midsize Enterprise	5
Large Enterprise	15

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	10

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	55
Midsize Enterprise	35
Large Enterprise	168

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Freshservice?

I do not have any experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing, as it was assigned to the infrastructure team.

What needs improvement with Freshservice?

Freshservice has an AI agent that needs improvement for finding knowledge base articles. When issues or incidents are...

What is your primary use case for Freshservice?

Freshservice is used to redirect ticket handling and acknowledge tickets and incidents received. Tickets are redirect...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ManageEngine Applications Manager?

I am satisfied with the licensing cost for ManageEngine Applications Manager.

What needs improvement with ManageEngine Applications Manager?

The new features take a lot of time to be implemented, and that could be improved about ManageEngine Applications Man...

What is your primary use case for ManageEngine Applications Manager?

I use application discovery and dependency mapping. It helps with managing application health.

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 do you like most about ServiceNow?

The solution has a user-friendly interface.

JIRA Service Management vs Freshservice

Comparisons

Zendesk vs Freshservice

Compared 9% of the time

Compared 7% of the time

Device42 vs Freshservice

Compared 5% of the time

Samanage vs Freshservice

Compared 4% of the time

monday.com vs Freshservice

Compared 4% of the time

More Freshservice Competitors

Azure Monitor vs ManageEngine Applications Manager

Compared 13% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs ManageEngine Applications Manager

Compared 11% of the time

SCOM vs ManageEngine Applications Manager

Compared 7% of the time

Dynatrace vs ManageEngine Applications Manager

Compared 6% of the time

Prometheus-AI Platform vs ManageEngine Applications Manager

Compared 5% of the time

More ManageEngine Applications Manager Competitors

BMC Helix ITSM vs ServiceNow

Compared 5% of the time

IBM Maximo vs ServiceNow

Compared 5% of the time

Zendesk vs ServiceNow

Compared 4% of the time

JIRA Service Management vs ServiceNow

Compared 4% of the time

TeamDynamix vs ServiceNow

Compared 3% of the time

More ServiceNow Competitors

Product Reports

Freshservice

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ManageEngine Applications Manager

Download ManageEngine Applications Manager product report

ManageEngine Applications Manager report

Download ServiceNow product report

Also Known As

Flint

Applications Manager

No data available

Overview

Freshservice is an intelligent, cloud-native service management solution. It provides efficiency and agility through AI to create a contextual and intelligent experience. The solution also empowers employees to work whenever and wherever they need to work. Freshservice powers integrations and workflows at the enterprise scale, building upon an open platform and marketplace with connectors and APIs that you can extend and customize.

Freshservice Features

Freshservice has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

ITIL-aligned processes
Intelligent AI/ML capabilities
Advanced CSAT
Extensible platform
Self-service portal
Smart automations
Service catalog
Effective monitoring and alerting
Out-of-box analytics
Mobile app
Marketplace apps

Freshservice Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing Freshservice. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Intelligent service management and customized workflows: Freshservice offers powered bots, automation, and orchestration to help you make management more efficient and gives you the ability to customize all workflows.

Fast time-to-value: Freshservice’s out-of-the-box features help you quickly deploy it and enable easier adoption, at scale.

Minimizes downtime: Freshservice prevents critical issues by identifying the right alerts, collaborating with context, and delivering an enhanced end-user experience.

Extensible: The solution is extensible and allows organizations to access enterprise-scale tools to customize, integrate, and automate business workflows.

Support: Freshservice has 24/7 support so your issues can be addressed around-the-clock.

Boosts productivity: The Freshservice solution helps improve employee productivity. It helps you prioritize work better with real-time custom dashboards.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the Freshservice solution.

A Senior Helpdesk at a non-profit says, “I like the workflow automation capabilities, where based upon certain actions, it will automatically go and route tickets to a particular person. It is fairly user-friendly.”

PeerSpot user Cesar Q., CIO at Grupo Kasto, mentions, “The analytics are very good. The solution offers very nice incident management. The overall functionality of the product is excellent. The change management is helpful. They have an agent that we installed in every single asset. We have the inventory for all assets automatically. Contract management is very valuable for us as an IT department, as we have the information for every single computer across the company. We are starting to use the project management aspects right now. We have different projects and we have all the information in the same solution, in the same place. It makes everything more centralized and easier to access. The user interface is very nice and the solution is easy to use. You don't need to be an expert in order to navigate around and use the product. You don't need to read a lot of manuals in order to figure everything out. It's pretty intuitive.”

A Network Analyst at a real estate/law firm shares, "We find its ability to track what's going on with each request very valuable. We are also able to merge ticket requests and assign them to different groups in the company. We have another department that uses the same system."

Freshworks

ManageEngine Applications Manager is an application performance management (APM) solution that is designed to give users deep insights into both the way that their applications perform and the way that users of those applications experience them. Organizations can use this solution to identify areas where their critical applications are lacking and address them before there are any negative repercussions. ManageEngine Applications Manager is the kind of tool that companies of all sizes can use to keep their applications running in the best way possible.

ManageEngine Applications Manager Benefits

Some of the ways that organizations can benefit by deploying ManageEngine Applications Manager include:

Gain real-time comprehensive insights. ManageEngine Applications Manager makes it possible for organizations to gain deep insights into every aspect of an application’s performance. This takes place in real time and enables users to take complete control of their application’s management.

Keep applications running smoothly. Organizations don’t have to worry about missing issues that will disrupt users’ ability to have a smooth experience. ManageEngine Applications Manager detects any issues and allows administrators to quickly address them before they can become major problems for users.

Ease of use. ManageEngine Applications Manager is designed to be intuitive to use so that organizations do not need to formally train employees in its use. This saves time and makes organizations more productive.

ManageEngine Applications Manager Features

Some of the many useful features ManageEngine Applications Manager has to offer include:

AI-powered threat detection and remediation. ManageEngine Applications Manager leverages AI software to spot issues as they arise and to alert administrators. Additionally, users can use this AI to automate issue remediation, which will allow administrators to focus on other tasks.

Advanced analytics. ManageEngine Applications Manager uses various analytics tools to enable users to gain critical insights from their data. These include custom dashboards that allow you to display and interpret data.

Real user monitoring. Administrators have access to tools that allow them to monitor users’ application traffic. The tools deliver detailed reports that track various critical pieces of information related to the users and their application user experience.

Reviews from Real Users

ManageEngine Applications Manager is a solution that stands out when it is compared to many of its competitors. It is part of a complete suite of management tools that users can take advantage of. The way that ManageEngine Applications Manager keeps up to date with a regular schedule of software updates enables organizations to manage their applications without worrying that they are missing any important capabilities or features. If any feature is absent, users can integrate the solution with other monitoring solutions. ManageEngine Applications Manager regularly undergoes updates that ensure that users have access to all of the latest features and patches.

Rodrigo T., the CEO of AXIOVISTA spa, writes, “This solution is a part of a complete suite of management tools. So, it can be integrated with other solutions for monitoring networks, which is very important. You can expand it or interconnect it with many other tools, which is a powerful feature.”

Syed A., the enterprise senior account manager of sales at a tech services company, writes, “Our customers appreciate that ManageEngine sends regular updates, upgrading their software several times a year.”

ManageEngine

ServiceNow is a cloud-based task-management platform that specializes in IT operations management (ITOM), IT services management (ITSM), and IT business management (ITBM). ServiceNow allows users to manage their teams, projects, and customer interactions using a variety of different plugins and apps with which it easily integrates.

ServiceNow offers prebuilt applications to support any process, as well as a framework and tools that allow you to build your own.

ServiceNow’s service management solutions include change, request, incident, problem, and cost management, as well as HR, IT, field service, and facilities management solutions. They also cover business management solutions such as vendor performance management, financial management, performance analytics and project portfolio suite, as well as governance, risk, and compliance.

“The Smarter Way to Workflow”

ServiceNow’s activities, processes, and tasks are overseen as part of a comprehensive managed workflow that supports such features as real-time collaboration, communication, and resource sharing. ServiceNow’s suite of products allow for operation using serverless computing, and include the categories of Business Apps, Customer Service, HR, IT, and Security.

ServiceNow can be used to support most workflows because of the wide range of tools it offers. These include on-suite ticketing tools, predictive modeling to manage workflows, and benchmarking for the tracking of progress. ServiceNow can assist with artificial intelligence and machine learning processes and can be used to organize the cases of a help/service desk as well as for instance management and problem management. It also smoothly integrates with many legacy systems.

ServiceNow offers service management software for industries including:

Cloud services
Education
Financial services
Government
Healthcare
Manufacturing
Telecommunications

Reviews from Real Users

PeerSpot users prefer ServiceNow to its competitors because of its scalability, stability, and ease of use. It helps everyone in the company to be on the same page by creating a single source of record across all departments. One user stated that “I’ve definitely used over 20 project management solutions, but they can't be compared with ServiceNow.” Another said that “ServiceNow is an industry leader in multiple areas and provides an excellent ROI.”