No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Freshservice vs OpenText Service Manager [EOL] comparison

Sponsored
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
6.9
Number of Reviews
662
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 (1st), AI Procurement & Supply Chain (1st)
Freshservice
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (7th), Project Management Software (12th), Cloud Management (15th), IT Asset Management (6th), IT Service Management (ITSM) (8th), Configuration Management Databases (5th), IT Alerting and Incident Management (15th), AI IT Support (5th)
OpenText Service Manager [EOL]
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
48
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

Venkat Sivaprakash - PeerSpot reviewer
Management Consultant at Accenture
Has significantly improved document-driven workflows and reduced processing time across finance and HR functions
Automation Anywhere has evolved significantly and upgraded itself to provide agentic AI and AI-based automation solutions for document automation. The product has matured considerably over time. We can create workflows that can call an API. We can include prompts in particular workflows for ChatGPT-related functions, connecting to an LLM and RAG to perform tasks. For document automation, modern features are available to train documents, ensuring high accuracy and repeatability over time. The system is very easy to use. I recently completed a course in document automation, typically designed for people involved in coding and technical aspects. Though I understand coding comprehensively, I don't do actual coding. The course was very accessible. Currently, extensive coding isn't necessary due to the hybrid model incorporating GenAI aspects, low-code, no-code capabilities, APIs, and numerous pre-built objects in Automation Anywhere. The features include GenAI-driven prompting methods and workflow creation capabilities. In these workflows, we can create decision boxes and call APIs without coding. We simply pull objects, drop them, connect them, and add minimal coding when needed. The most crucial aspect isn't coding but rather sizing the automation and fleshing out the details. Automation Co-pilot takes notes and performs automated analysis. It can extract details from videos, summarize conversations, and provide detailed information. During calls, it identifies instructions and performs tasks such as preparing reports and reconciliation. Automation Anywhere can also connect with Microsoft Co-pilot. Through Co-pilot, real-time operations can be executed, allowing direct interaction between vendors and automation through this component.
Raja Farrar - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
MEKKAB Raouf - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Technology Service Manager & Technology Integration DevOps at Djezzy
Excellent pricing with great change management and service management capabilities
We started with version 9.3, and now we're on 9.6 with the full solution, including the CMS. They have lots of options. They propose a full solution for technology and IT service management. We are a telecom company. We are a leader in the market, and therefore, we need to have all details about our own environment and assets. So far, Micro Focus answers all our needs. I'd advise new users to go directly to the SMAX solution, the last, last version of Service Manager. If they are a technical company or information technology company with engineers and developers, they can use it on-premise. If they don't have such competence in the company, they can ask for the solution on the cloud. It is easily available on Microsoft, Amazon, or Google clouds. I'd rate the product nine out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Looking at overall feasibility from features to costing perspective, I strongly feel Automation Anywhere offers a lot of features and scalability and is a very good tool overall and people who have not tried should give a try and put some hands-on."
"Since we can register multiple bot runners in one control room, and we can easily monitor and re-run bots when necessary, it is convenient for me."
"Automation Anywhere has significantly improved our organization's efficiency. Across various processes, we have achieved a 90% time savings for each use case, making our workflow much more streamlined and productive."
"The most valuable feature is its Excel integration."
"Excel automation is one of the best features in Automation Anywhere. If we have to work with multiple excel sheets with lots of rows and columns, it gets really difficult to keep track of this is done manually. But Automation Anywhere makes it really simple and error-free."
"From what I have seen with the IQ Bot, it is very impressive and I think it is going to solve a lot of problems that we face right now."
"Our onboarding process was pretty good. We got access to all software that we needed to learn and utilize. The Automation Anywhere University is really good. In our business, the person who was onboarding us helped us to understand how to create a center of excellence and what verticals we needed to improve. So, the support was there. We are gradually becoming a center of excellence ourselves."
"Automation Anywhere is fully configurable."
"The workflow and the change management process are valuable."
"Freshservice was up and running without any expensive project planning, and all that without sacrificing features."
"The solution’s timely automated triggers increase our IT team’s productivity."
"It has reduced the time to look up who is responsible for a service, and it has reduced the time to finalize a service request because it now goes directly to the person who is responsible for the service in that location. So, a service request is handled quickly and directly by the person responsible for it."
"We find its ability to track what's going on with each request very valuable."
"We found the initial setup to be very simple."
"One of the things I liked about Freshservice was how easy it was to implement. While it doesn't have extensive customization capabilities, the available options are sufficient for certain sizes of companies. You don't need to customize your ticketing system much. Freshservice is a great solution because you can implement it very quickly. You can upload your catalog, and you're done in maybe a week or two."
"There is a nice user interface."
"We improved our service levels and have been able to maintain them for the last four and a half years."
"It's the point of control for managing issues and offers control in the implementation of the changes."
"The modules were very utilitarian and it became like just clicking boxes to track changes, track approvals, or avoid any changes with support, which made it quite efficient."
"The interface is good, I like it, it's easy to use, it's intuitive and it does go to the mobile app for verification and approvals and it's easy to use on the mobile app."
"The flexibility and the integrity of the product allow me to have a rock-solid platform for change, problem, and incident control."
"It is a rich content solution and a good and complete solution, along with a lot of functionality."
"It has an intuitive front end which allows us to roll out good customer end user experiences."
"This is now completely organized and standardized in one workflow, and people work on one ticket, so there's full transparency, no confusion anymore, time to market is much faster, and the email traffic is less."
 

Cons

"Integration with secondary environments needs to be improved or enabled."
"It may sound a little funny or weird, but one thing that we are thinking is we have to go to various websites and pick up relevant data from various websites using the bot."
"I would like to see better and more technical use cases for the AI features, showing how to build them instead of repeated general examples."
"What we currently have with Fortress IQ needs to mature more, and I say this since people spend weeks creating PDDs documentation."
"I feel A2019 is still not completely ready and the discontinuing of version 11 is a negative impact for all of the users and clients."
"It is not always predictable 100% of the time. While it has improved with each version, some unexplained issues still exist."
"We have a third bot which takes longer being automated than it did with the human process."
"There should be more available Data Analytics and more AI Front and Deep Learn concepts."
"A chat bot needs to be added to the portal."
"It would be good to have the product integrated with Google because that's our corporate tool of choice."
"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."
"I've had some problems with Freshservice's technical support. They often drag out cases by continually passing them on to other people, and they seem overeager to close tickets and sometimes mark them as resolved without checking first."
"We'd like to see a CMDB, a Configuration Management Database, in the future."
"Freshservice has limitations in the discovery part of the solution. In order to automate the process of bringing information from your infrastructure to the database of the solution, it has a lot of limitations."
"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."
"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."
"Customization can be difficult at times because scripting is often required."
"We struggle with and the simplicity of getting reporting data at a high level, and output is not where it needs to be for us."
"I don't see anything lacking."
"Stability was a major issue in older versions of the product."
"I think the best recommendation to Micro Focus would be to increase awareness and the marketing for this product."
"The end-user experience is very key for me. At the moment, that's an area that the product's perhaps a bit weak."
"Part of our reason for moving away from Service Manager is that HP was not on the leading edge of the technology and was consequently being surpassed by SaaS offerings."
"I think one area which is the most painful from my point of view is if you need to integrate a lot of the tools, and being able to make that a lot more seamless."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Automation Anywhere is expensive."
"Whatever investment, licensing, and resource costs together are put in for development and delivery, we are still at an ROI of 250 percent."
"We are restricted to use one license on one PC. However, if my license is not working, I want to be able to use it somewhere else. This would be a nice improvement to the licensing, as other competitors in the market have better licensing terms."
"If we talk about the automation RPA. it definitely has worked very well for us. I'm talking about giving good savings, about more than 180 FTE savings, after implementing more than 200 plus bots. It has worked well. As an organization, it has supported us very well, and also for our customers."
"There may be room for the product to be more competitively priced to excel in the market."
"The licensing cost could be improved. It costs a lot. At the very least, the developer licenses and the control panels should be made free to enterprises, and the production environment licensed."
"It's an ideal pricing model to customize the components based on everyone's needs."
"If you look at the capital expenditure, Automation Anywhere is number two to UiPath. But if you take a long-term view, on a scalable model of a large number of bots coming out, it slowly goes on to become the costliest tool. There is something they can do about that. The capital expenditure goes out right at the point of buying the tool. For Automation Anywhere, I would need to spend $20,000. UiPath can give me something for $6,000, while Blue Prism will come in at $300,000."
"The price of Freshservice could improve, it is expensive."
"The cost at the current timing is very reasonable but as the product gains popularity, I anticipate it might become expensive. Fortunately my customers have been offered a generous discount making it more affordable for me and satisfying both my needs and customers requirement."
"There are some additional costs but not that many. For example, we have unlimited assets, which is something for which we pay extra. We also paid for additional orchestration. I would rate it a three out of five in terms of pricing. They are right in the middle."
"Freshservice's licensing costs are pretty good, and it has different categories of pricing based on what modules and features you choose, which gives a lot of flexibility."
"It was a middle tier. It wasn't an expensive one. It was a tier model usage. Licensing costs varied between admin users and regular users."
"Our licensing fee for Freshservice is $2,500 a year."
"It is good for the price you pay. It has different plans. If you need all features, you need to go for a higher plan. Currently, with the second tier plan, you cannot completely separate the group of agents. So, the agent in each group can see another person's ticket. You also cannot modify the rules based on the viewable, readable stuff and cannot have a custom role in this plan. If you want to do that, you have to go for a higher plan. It works in our case because it doesn't matter if the other group can see our ticket because it doesn't contain anything sensitive. We also didn't need the project or change management features. That's why we didn't go with a higher plan."
"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."
"I would say that identify your requirements and pay for the support to implement and test those requirements, and then hope that you did a good job because the cost of their service is fairly expensive."
"HP Service Manager has moderate pricing."
"I pay for Service Manager on a yearly basis, and the price is reasonable - I would rate it five out of ten."
"The license is not cheap."
"Micro Focus Service Manager is a little cheaper than other options. You have to pay a monthly subscription fee."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions are best for your needs.
908,877 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Construction Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Construction Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
University
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Construction Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business157
Midsize Enterprise81
Large Enterprise558
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise16
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise38
 

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.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Freshservice?
I cannot comment much on the pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Freshservice as it was already preset up in my co...
What needs improvement with Freshservice?
I believe Freshservice can be improved by offering more advanced features and customizability. In terms of improvemen...
What is your primary use case for Freshservice?
In Freshservice, I typically use it for day-to-day tasks. A quick, specific example of how I use Freshservice in my d...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise, Agentic Process Automation System (Now Certified for WorkSpaces)
Flint
Micro Focus Service Manager, HPE ITSM, HPE Service Manager
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
Sinclair Broadcast Group, Western Carriers, Judson University, Golf Canada, Travix, Proxama, Paymentez, Ready Auto Transport
resultspositive, Globicon
Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, Atlassian, ManageEngine and others in IT Service Management (ITSM). Updated: July 2026.
908,877 professionals have used our research since 2012.