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Freshservice vs ServiceNow vs SysAid comparison

 

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:
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Help Desk Software category, the mindshare of Freshservice is 3.9%, up from 3.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow is 12.6%, down from 23.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SysAid is 1.7%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Help Desk Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
ServiceNow12.6%
Freshservice3.9%
SysAid1.7%
Other81.8%
Help Desk Software
 

Featured Reviews

RF
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.
MT
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.
Todd Blake - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT Specialist at COMMUNITY HEALTH CONNECTIONS INC
A solution that streamlines ticket creation for the staff members of a business and enables efficient issue resolution by the IT team
SysAid is similar to Nintex AssureSign. Some of the back-end configurations of the solution are very difficult. So, we always need SysAid's help. Also, there are almost too many features that we are not taking advantage of in our company since we don't even know about them. A little bit of a streamlining or simplification of the main features would be a good improvement. I would like to see SysAid present its solution more easily. There is a lot in the solution, and it is more than what we need in our company.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The overall functionality of the product is excellent."
"The workflow and the change management process are valuable."
"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."
"The most valuable features of Freshservice are the notifications, customization, and flexibility."
"I do 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."
"The solution is very responsive with a 97% success rate in funneling customer tickets."
"It has greatly improved the process of ticket triaging."
"I would recommend this solution to others because it is good and the price is reasonable."
"It has an excellent capability to integrate different access points."
"It has the ability to consolidate different areas of the service desk into one solution."
"I have found that sorting and grouping functions are particularly useful."
"Flexibility is the most valuable feature of ServiceNow, that is, being able to modify it to do what we need it to do."
"ServiceNow will become the new SAP."
"The development aspects within it are valuable, including incident, change, and problem, and it has given us one pane of glass to look at a lot of stuff, which has opened a lot of eyes to our IT department."
"The ability to get in there and create stuff without worrying about setting everything up first; we can start developing right away without having to get instances set up, get everything provisional, or all the networking stuff done, and just get up and go."
"We used ServiceNow for change management, release management, and event management."
"The only way we could have managed that growth was by having an application like SysAid."
"SysAid provides us with multilayered service management and all of our support pieces integrated into one system, making our service and support systems much more transparent for everyone in the business and helping us deal with resources more flexibly."
"At our agency, people love SysAid."
"I would say the overall flexibility of the product is its most valuable feature."
"The simplicity of the solution is excellent."
"The service desk automation and orchestration are very good. We are implementing it at the moment. We implemented it for two of our applications already for our CRM. Whenever there's a change in the CRM, it will automate them into SysAid as well. We have two workflows from our CRM into SysAid, which is very helpful. Overall, we're very happy with the workflow."
"The SysAid team provided excellent service to implement the solution for us. From the very first day, we received a comp manager, and a project manager, to implement the product. They continued to inquire about our business needs and then finalized the best path for us."
"It tracks everything that the technicians are doing. We can account for time and manage resources."
 

Cons

"This product is very good for small and mid-level markets; however, I'm not sure about expanding to a 100,000 to 200,000 user base or more."
"We did a review of our project management tool internally within the company, and it was one of the choices, but it didn't match up anywhere close to any of the other tools we were considering."
"Freshservice could improve the delegation and workflow management features."
"We'd like to see a CMDB, a Configuration Management Database, in the future."
"The automation workflows are powerful, but the UI can feel limited; once the workflows get complex, it becomes hard to visualize them."
"The ability to customize the user interface is a bit lacking, and the reporting is a bit lacking because they're very stringent upon what you can pull reporting-wise within Freshservice. They have a lot of built-in reports that are very nice, but when it comes to customizing these, they just provide you with certain data. When you try to build your own report wizard, you aren't able to go and select some of the data that is shown in some of the reports that come with Freshservice. This is something that we have brought up with our account representative, and we have suggested these as feature updates in the future. We're still waiting on them to go and implement something like that."
"You can't implement a complicated delivery workflow."
"They're not very good at technical support."
"I don't think it's very secure, and it's web-based, and Remedy is really the standard that it's judged against."
"The high price is a huge barrier in Portugal."
"The usability and user experience is a really big issue and needs to be improved."
"It's not user-friendly by default, but it can be customized to be customer-friendly."
"Currently, we are finding it a bit difficult to monitor the subscriptions that are being used. The reporting feature related to this can be improved."
"Like all other IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS subscription cloud providers, ServiceNow is constantly improving by building new capabilities to expand the breadth and depth of its offerings while increasing its activities with partners to build more capabilities."
"A new user does need training or time to learn the solution before jumping in. It was very hard in the beginning to understand everything."
"The technical support SLA can be improved because sometimes they take a long time to answer our queries."
"There is a learning curve for the users."
"The only thing that I would like to see is for them to improve asset management so that it's more usable."
"The administrative side of the user interface could be a little more user-friendly."
"Monitoring needs improvement. At the moment we are looking for some advanced monitoring tools, which are using AI and machine learning as well. This product currently does not offer that."
"We would like them to approve the security functionalities, e.g., management security features."
"From my perspective, it's a little bit of a legacy system in our IT landscape."
"Currently, SysAid does not have a mobile application."
"The administrative side of the user interface could be a little more user-friendly. It is easier for me to export our reports into Excel, then do a server retrieval and get the information. Whereas, to do a report, you have to go through a configuration type of process, which is kind of difficult and complicated. I have been using this solution for two years now and I still haven't gotten the hang of the reports."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Compared to other tools, Freshservice is affordable."
"Freshservice price is competitive, it is not more than other solutions on the market."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"The solution may be around 20,000 euros a year."
"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."
"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."
"The price of Freshservice could improve, it is expensive."
"The platform offers a free trial, by providing a free developer instance once you sign up."
"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."
"The price of this solution is expensive."
"ServiceNow tends to be a little bit more expensive as compared to BMC Helix ITSM."
"The price is okay for us. It's reasonable."
"I rate the solution's pricing a six out of ten. The pricing for ServiceNow is based on a SaaS platform with annual contracts. However, it may not offer much flexibility for adjusting usage in the short term."
"I am from Brazil. For Latin American markets, ServiceNow is very expensive as compared to other vendors, such as VMware."
"The cost is quite high."
"SysAid is a good solution, especially from a pricing perspective."
"We saw our investment back at the end of year one."
"The pricing of SysAid is less than its competitors."
"Though I am not really sure about SysAid's prices, I know that it is competitive compared to some of the other products that our company looked at, like ConnectWise and ServiceNow."
"Once you're interested, talk with SysAid. You can have them come in and look at your company and advise you on the best solution. They will tell you what comes with each separate package and also advise you what application to activate. If you want something that they don't have, they have a department that can design something based on your unique requests."
"Overall, the price is good. It's all about what you get for the base amount. From my perspective, you want to look at what you're getting out-of-the-box. SysAid does a good job of putting key stuff in the box for you."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
University
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
9%
Educational Organization
7%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
8%
Construction Company
17%
Computer Software Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise15
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business55
Midsize Enterprise35
Large Enterprise168
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise4
 

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...
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.
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Comparisons

 

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Sinclair Broadcast Group, Western Carriers, Judson University, Golf Canada, Travix, Proxama, Paymentez, Ready Auto Transport
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    
Disney, Sears Holdings Corporation, LAN Airlines, Schneider Electric, On Semiconductors, Toyota, Sky, KPMG, Georgetown University Law Center, Motorola, North York General Hospital, Volksbank, Xerox, Bacardi, Del Monte Fresh Produce, Manpower, Nucor, Ecobank
Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, Atlassian, ManageEngine and others in Help Desk Software. Updated: March 2026.
885,444 professionals have used our research since 2012.