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IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs JIRA Service Management comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 1, 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

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk
Ranking in Help Desk Software
27th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
JIRA Service Management
Ranking in Help Desk Software
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
86
Ranking in other categories
IT Service Management (ITSM) (2nd)
 

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 JIRA Service Management is 8.7%, down from 12.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Help Desk Software
 

Featured Reviews

Jose Pedro Muñoz - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Karim Yousef - PeerSpot reviewer
Efficiently track and document projects with seamless tool integration
We are a management warehouse that provides services to different customers in different sectors. Primarily, we serve the banking sector and the military sector. We manage all the software delivery projects through tools such as JIRA Service Management or TFS Confluence is a great tool for…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution has been stable."
"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 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."
"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."
"SLA integrations, reports, and integration with other applications are the most valuable."
"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."
"The solution is very easy to work with."
"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."
"Everyone knows how to use it, so there's no need to teach new members."
"Its integration is most valuable. It is pretty open for integration."
"The SLA, speed, the comments from agents' side, and the dashboard for agents are the most valuable features."
"I like the precise ticket management capabilities. JIRA Service Management is easy to use as well."
"The initial setup is easy and straightforward."
"I find the Kanban chart where we put each story in to be the most valuable feature. We use the Kanban chart to revise the project every morning in our five-minute meeting."
"Simplicity is a key aspect. It is not hard to use."
"Developing processes is easy and user-friendly."
 

Cons

"It could use more facility or flexibility for reporting, and business intelligence in the tool."
"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."
"The solution lacks a graphical user interface."
"The main issue that we hear from our customers is that the self-service user interface is a little bit old, possibly due to the fact that IBM is such a large enterprise company. People say that they think they're in the year 2004, because you can very clearly see that the technology is lagging behind modern trends."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"JIRA Service Management could improve the forms. When you complete the form for the ticket, for example, to have more information given to the team. If they needed this information, you can give it to them. They need to add additional information for a better understanding of the whole picture of the issue or problem."
"Field addition and removal features are not very intuitive in JIRA Service Management."
"This solution lacks features for project management."
"With Jira, we were unable to implement time-based automation in its ticketing system. We would like a feature where we can define tickets based on severity, then tickets are automatically escalated to the next level after a set period of time if they go unanswered."
"The initial setup of JIRA Service Management can be complex for new users. There is a lot of configuration."
"Integration could be improved."
"Include a split configuration in a layer part to allow cloud services to have almost full admin rights in SaaS."
"From the customer side, it's not friendly used compared to other competitors, like ServiceNow or BMC. It's also not fully ITSM management if you compare it with ServiceNow or BMC. They have a full model of ITSM. In BMC they have TrueSight, they have Discovery, which helps IT to discover IT equipment with a serial number, with the specs, capacity of the server."
 

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."
"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."
"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 is a cheaply priced product."
"Costs are about $50 per user per year. JIRA is sold in user tiers of 25, 50, 100, 250, 500, 2000, 10,000, and unlimited users. It is bad when you have 51 users then the price is based on that 100 user tier. Users at 100 will be the most cost effective."
"I price of JIRA Service Management is reasonable."
"It is one of the premium products on the market, but it is very costly, especially in the Indian market."
"The cost has recently increased. It might be around $20 to $25 per user license."
"The pricing is free for us because we are an associate partner for the product."
"This is pricey solution. Should we move to using all cloud solutions in our business, we may move to different tools that have multiple functionality versus having a solution for each area. This would be too pricey and we would need to replace Jira with a different solution that also offers other features."
"We need a license because we have a higher number than the free part."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Also Known As

SmartCloud Control Desk
JIRA Service Desk
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

St Vincent's Health Australia, Kalibrate Pty. Ltd., Cognizant Technology
mgm technology partners, Telestream, Build.com, Zend Technologies, OfficeDrop, PGS Software, American Diabetes Association, NEPTUNE Canada
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs. JIRA Service Management and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,168 professionals have used our research since 2012.