IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs IT Care Center comparison

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

Read 7 IT Care Center reviews

207 Views
15 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 1, 2024

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk and IT Care Center compete in the IT service management space. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk appears more favorable in support and pricing satisfaction, while IT Care Center excels in features that justify its higher cost.

Features: IBM SmartCloud Control Desk provides comprehensive service desk capabilities, robust asset management, and service catalog functionalities, making it suitable for large enterprises. IT Care Center offers advanced automation features, strong integration capabilities, and flexibility in process customization, highlighting its focus on modern automation and efficiency.

Room for Improvement: IBM SmartCloud Control Desk could improve its modern automation features, integration capabilities, and flexibility in forms creation. IT Care Center may benefit from enhancements in complex environment support, extensive service catalog offerings, and advanced asset management solutions.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM SmartCloud Control Desk provides a flexible deployment model with strong enterprise-level customer support, though it can be complex in larger environments. IT Care Center focuses on a streamlined cloud deployment model aimed at achieving quicker setup times and offers proactive customer support, ensuring simplicity and efficiency.

Pricing and ROI: IBM SmartCloud Control Desk has setup costs that align with its robust capabilities, delivering satisfactory ROI over time. IT Care Center requires a higher initial investment but provides significant ROI through its advanced automation and integration potential, primarily showcasing long-term value over initial setup cost.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs. IT Care Center Report (Updated: June 2025).

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs. IT Care Center

Download the complete report

Helped 860,592 peers since 2012

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

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

Ranking in Help Desk Software

27th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

IT Care Center

Ranking in Help Desk Software

42nd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Service Management (ITSM) (45th)

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Help Desk Software category, the mindshare of IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is 0.9%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IT Care Center is 0.2%, up from 0.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Help Desk Software

Featured Reviews

Jose Pedro Muñoz

Director of operations at Vetasi

Helps standardize our workflow, track client tickets, and it's very flexible

Initially we used HPE Service Desk. Then, Remedy (IBM SmartCloud Control Desk) version 5. When selecting a vendor, the most important thing for us is the flexibility of the tool. It must be very flexible to change the workflow or to add new workflows for the clients. It must have stability and scalability as well.

Read full review

reviewer1566192

IT Customer Service Manager at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees

Saves time by resolving incidents and requests using self-service automation

* Using 70% of the tool from the perspective of service delivery and incident requests. * Using analytics. That gives us a very good picture of the report: the time, delay, and SLA. * Using the asset management tool inside the system. * Managing the OCR change requests all in this one tool. The solution gives internal users answers and solutions for their daily work around the IT workspace, even if it is their computer, laptops, screens, systems, etc. We have found this tool very easy to use and intuitive for us. It is very easy for me, and I am not a programmer or someone who can write code, but it is very easy for me to make most of the changes that I need in the system without approaching the vendor. The flexibility and customization are very good. It is very easy to change. A lot of the changes that we want to do, we can do ourselves. IT Care Center enables us to configure simple forms and flows. It makes our daily customer-facing work very efficient and easy. For example, if we want to add some new flows or change something, we have the ability to do it by ourselves in our own time and manner. This makes it very efficient.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The brand name is the most valuable aspect of this solution for me. It's IBM. It's a global company that supports this product, it's not something open source or something like that."

"The most valuable are its flexibility and agility. It's quick to change it, to adapt it to your needs. That's the most important for us."

"The solution has been stable."

"The workflow capability is useful. It's not a manual helpdesk operation. It's fully automated, even when an alarm has occurred. It covers the complete cycle of initiation to resolving the events. This is its most strong feature that is easily integrable with a monitoring solution. It creates tickets, and the workflow feature is the most important one."

"What I like about the Control Desk is that everything is centralized. You have all the requests in one place, you know which ones are for whom and who is working on them."

"The solution is very easy to work with."

"In the early stages of our company, all requests were done in notebooks, and none of it was centrally managed. But now we have a central tool which is an entry point for all requests that come in."

"A feature I found most valuable in IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is the service request. Another feature I like most about the solution is IT asset management, which tells you who owns a specific asset in the company and from which date."

More IBM SmartCloud Control Desk pros

"All of my staff is quite familiar with the usage and we customize based on our daily needs and based on different profiles. As a manager, I require diagnostics on a weekly or monthly basis. diagnostics. There needs to be some reporting for management and for my customers' management as well. So we created our own template. All of our different staff were required to do their own tagging or own tracking of cases. We create our own templates. I create my own template for my own weekly and monthly reporting to management. It's quite flexible in the sense that we're able to add our own customized views. We are able to easily export all this information into a proper reporting structure."

"It provides the ability to view all information relevant to a task. When you open a task, you can see all sub-tasks and the relevant information underneath it. You don't have to search for all the tasks and cases that are relevant to the same issue. The sub-task listing is the most valuable feature of this solution for us. We are also able to create workflows for things such as new hires and purchase requests. We are using it for onboarding new hires in multiple departments, and we are able to create workflows with IT Care Center. We have subsidiaries, and for every subsidiary, we have different rules. It allows us to put the name of the new hire and the computer and software needs for that subsidiary. Around 30% or 40% of our processes are self-service now. We have additional work to do, but we're getting there. I like the flexibility that IT Care Center provides for creating the forms. I can put the fields, values, dropdowns, etc. It makes things much easier, which is another advantage of this solution. When a user opens a ticket, there are certain values that he or she must enter in order for us to solve the ticket faster. For example, a user must enter his or her email. So, I can create a form with all the things that he or she must do, such as provide an email, phone number, etc. These are required fields. A user can't create a ticket without providing that information. So, it saves time and makes the work efficient."

"IT Care Center enables us to configure simple forms and flows. It makes our daily customer-facing work very efficient and easy. For example, if we want to add some new flows or change something, we have the ability to do it by ourselves in our own time and manner. This makes it very efficient."

"It also enables us to configure simple forms and flows. The fact that the system is very flexible for adding fields and other forms assists our customer service, as well as myself as the CIO, to easily view my SLAs and KPIs."

"We have a lot of automation running from our HR system to IT Care Center. When a ticket has been raised to us, we can notify hiring managers on the status of every employee. We also get notifications in Slack for every ticket opened."

"It runs smoothly and all of the components are very easy to work with."

"For a user to open a new ticket, it is very simple. That is an important thing. The system is available for users on the main desktop on their computer, so it is very easy to report tickets. It is very clear. Also, we manage the tickets with rules, according to subject and groups, so they are going to the right person in IT."

Cons

"Support has been the biggest problem for us. I understand that because we use the product of a global company, some changes are not quick to deploy."

"The solution lacks a graphical user interface."

"The time calculations can be improved. While working on reports, it was taking the time only in seconds, which was hard for me to work out. While creating some dialogs in the service portal, you have to use certain data types in some fields. It was very tricky to make them work. I was testing a certain type of input, and it didn't work. It didn't show me the domain that the fields have to show. I had to make the change to the database, and only then it worked. It was a tricky thing to make them work with the dialogs. Their technical support can also be improved in terms of response time."

"What needs improvement in IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is its graphical interface because it needs to be more user-friendly. IBM is a big company, but this solution is a little bit outdated. The most common comment I get from customers is that IBM SmartCloud Control Desk looks old and needs a refresh. Its frontend needs a little bit of work. The solution needs to be more modern. In the programming world, you see a lot of new technologies, but this particular solution is still on Java. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk isn't like web-based service request tools, and that's an area for improvement. What I'd like to see in the next version of the solution is a more upscale technology. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk has small issues with document links and attachments, and those could bother you when you're using it for a long time. A more user-friendly GUI is also another improvement I'd like to see in the next version of the solution, plus a better user experience, and it would be great if IBM could resolve the current issues I've noticed in IBM SmartCloud Control Desk."

"Overall the user experience, as opposed to the system and databases, could be improved. It does work as it should and it's good, but they should invest more in the user interfaces to be less data oriented and more appealing for the user."

"The reporting in relation to updating could be improved upon."

"The user interface is not very interesting. If you look at other products like JIRA and ServiceNow, they have made it much easier for the end-users. Maybe not ServiceNow, but JIRA is quite flexible. From a presentation point of view, IBM should make more user-friendly interfaces."

"It could use more facility or flexibility for reporting, and business intelligence in the tool."

More IBM SmartCloud Control Desk cons

"There is no global support. With our previous system, we had 24/7 global support. We need much faster support. When I have an issue and raise a ticket, someone should call me back. They can also think about having object-oriented APEX so that the agents can easily create dashboards instead of having to learn the complete APEX language. This is something very important for us. We are using Oracle APEX for creating certain dashboards with KPIs. This is the visual platform that we use to see all the data, and it is very important for us because we get all the BI and data. Currently, we have a vendor who helps us with that because we don't know how to use it ourselves. We want to use it to make more dashboards with more KPIs for every department, but we cannot because we don't have the knowledge. We are very dependent on the vendor and the time he has for us."

"Our business is quite interesting because we actually look at our staff based on their productivity. So if a case is created where we want to track the productivity of the user, sometimes we look at how many actual hours they clocked in to solve the case. We realized that it would take quite a lot of hours, which was unusually high. We want to look at how we can measure that against a baseline. For example, every user should resolve the issue within three hours. We want a certain baseline where they have to resolve the issue within certain times and if they don't, I would get alerted."

"I would like the solution to have a native application for mobile phones. While I have IT Care Center in my mobile, it is not a pure application, like Outlook or Teams."

"They should have full integration with SSO services, like Okta, creating a full service solution."

"There is no such thing as a perfect solution and in the past, I have contacted support to implement new features."

"The UI screens could be a little bit more modern."

"IT Care Center has some room for improvement in regard to mobile. It doesn't have an application, there is only an adaptable web page, and that is less convenient."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The license for IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is paid yearly and is on a per-user basis. You buy the product and pay for its license yearly. IBM is changing the licensing structure, but for now, it's a yearly license. There's no additional cost. It's just the license that you need to pay for to use IBM SmartCloud Control Desk."

"The licensing we have for IBM Control Desk is on a yearly basis. They have a concurrent license and an administrative license. And with these, you get all the products. There aren't any additional fees for extra add-ons or anything like that."

"It's basically for a big company because of the costs. A small company can't afford the licensing cost. For medium and large companies, it's the best product. The price of the license is on the higher side compared to others."

"Buy it as one package, not as modules. That is from my knowledge and experience. Most of the time, it has better pricing. They have flexibility by price size in the negotiation."

"We reduced our costs compared to our previous solution, which was really expensive. We managed to reduce costs by half by switching to IT Care Center, not including any professional services."

"Compared to other products in the market, pricing is reasonable. It does meet our usage and requirements."

"This product is very cheap when compared to other platforms."

"With SysAid, we paid for every end-user. If we had 100 end-users, we had to pay for each one of them. With IT Care Center, we can have as many users as we want. We only pay for the end unit. We have the asset manager and different models that we can use for the same price. So, it reduces costs."

"The licensing model is very flexible."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Help Desk Software solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Comparisons

ServiceNow vs IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

Compared 35% of the time

SCSM vs IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

Compared 35% of the time

Zendesk vs IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

Compared 30% of the time

More IBM SmartCloud Control Desk Competitors

No data available

Product Reports

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

Download IBM SmartCloud Control Desk product report

Download IT Care Center product report

Also Known As

SmartCloud Control Desk

IT Care Center Asset Management, IT Care Center Analytics, IT Care Center Application Delivery, IT Care Center Service Catalog

Overview

IBM Control Desk on Cloud offer an access to a user friendly self-service, automated service management, and seamlessly-integrated, best-practice based service desk capabilities. IBM Control Desk provides the IT service management (ITSM) needed to simplify support of users and infrastructure. It also offers a unified IT asset and service management software provides a common control center for managing business processes for both digital and physical assets and enables control, governance and compliance to applications, endpoints and assets to protect critical data and prevent outages. Control Desk is IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)-compliant, accessible through mobile devices and integrates with social media and development tools.

IBM

IT Care Center is an affordable end-to-end platform, designed to manage IT operations from ticketing to application development and lifecycle management. The system includes a built-in rapid application development platform that helps organizations meet their specific requirements faster while continuously improving the user experience and a recognised decrease in support costs and incidents ongoing.

The solution can operate as both a cloud and an on-premise service, and it includes a simple user interface, customizable dashboards, internal and external user support, automation, customizable chatbot, SLA management & monitoring tool plus ITIL best practice workflows.

Sample Customers

St Vincent's Health Australia, Kalibrate Pty. Ltd., Cognizant Technology

Information Not Available

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs. IT Care Center