IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs JIRA Service Management comparison

IBM and Atlassian are both solutions in the Help Desk Software category. IBM is ranked #26, while Atlassian is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.3. IBM holds a 0.9% mindshare in HDS, compared to Atlassian’s 8.8% mindshare. Additionally, 88% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Atlassian users who would recommend it.

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

Read 9 IBM SmartCloud Control Desk reviews

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408 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

JIRA Service Management

Read 87 JIRA Service Management reviews

4,934 Views
3,454 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

JIRA Service Management

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 1, 2024

JIRA Service Management and IBM SmartCloud Control Desk are prominent competitors in the IT service management category. Based on feature offerings and deployment flexibility, JIRA Service Management appears to have a broader appeal.

Features: JIRA Service Management offers extensive project management tools, robust integration capabilities, and platform accessibility, enhancing resource allocation and efficiency. Its transparency and customization are noted by small to mid-sized organizations. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk excels with centralized request tracking, comprehensive incident management, and IT asset management, which are pivotal for larger enterprises in managing service requests.

Room for Improvement: JIRA Service Management's integration with email systems and mobile connectivity needs enhancement. Demands for centralized document storage and advanced project management tools persist. Complex customizations and time-based automation limitations are additional hurdles. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk users find the graphical interface outdated and challenging to modify. Improved scalability and a more intuitive design are necessary for competitive parity with modern solutions.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: JIRA Service Management supports various deployment modes including public, private, and hybrid cloud setups, along with on-premises options, offering wide flexibility. Customer service is generally responsive, though feedback on support efficiency varies. In contrast, IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is more suited to on-premises deployments, with limited cloud deployment flexibility. While IBM's support is reliable, it occasionally exhibits delays in responsiveness and issue resolution.

Pricing and ROI: JIRA Service Management has a competitive pricing structure with a flexible license model based on agents, making it attractive to small to medium enterprises, although costs for additional plugins can be a concern. Users often report a notable ROI owing to streamlined operations and effective project tracking. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk, positioned as a higher-cost solution, is optimal for large organizations. It offers a comprehensive service management suite through varied licensing options, but at a premium cost.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs. JIRA Service Management Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs. JIRA Service Management

July 2025

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Helped 865,295 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

26th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

JIRA Service Management

Ranking in Help Desk Software

2nd

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Service Management (ITSM) (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 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 8.8%, down from 12.1% 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

Karim Yousef

GB, Development Practice - Technical Director at EJADA

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…

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 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."

"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."

"SLA integrations, reports, and integration with other applications are the most valuable."

"The solution is very easy to work with."

"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."

More IBM SmartCloud Control Desk pros

"Service Management is great if you're an Atlassian shop already using JIRA for the development team and you want another tool for help desk ticketing. When it's all under the same umbrella, I can easily take a ticket from the help desk and move it to the development team. You can't beat that integration between two products."

"I like the precise ticket management capabilities. JIRA Service Management is easy to use as well."

"Some of the most valuable features are simplicity, ease of configuration, and ease of customization."

"It makes the IT department more transparent and helps the employees."

"The dashboards are nicely laid out."

"This service management solution has a good user interface. It helps improve your IT request requirements and makes tracking requests easier."

"This solution has helped us a great deal in project management tracking and forecasting."

"Useful for tracking issues with development."

More JIRA Service Management pros

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 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."

"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 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."

"The solution lacks a graphical user interface."

More IBM SmartCloud Control Desk cons

"The licensing model could be improved. There needs to be a different licensing model for large numbers of employees, as it remains one of the main barriers to using JIRA Service Management across our entire company."

"It would be beneficial if we could turn comments into subtasks or other JIRA tickets directly."

"One thing I would suggest is that before we create an epic, we mention the required stories in its description. Then AI could directly create those stories instead of doing it manually inside the table, so that integration can occur."

"The price is a point of contention for me. It does overall work out as a significant amount of money that will be spent over a shorter period of time."

"I don't think the program is very scalable."

"It is difficult to navigate if you don't have any prior knowledge."

"The initial setup of JIRA Service Management can be complex for new users. There is a lot of configuration."

"Instability happens sometimes - although not frequently."

More JIRA Service Management cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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 pricing is very competitive and I think that it is okay."

"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."

"On a scale of one to five, with one being really high and five being good, I would rate the price of this solution as a four."

"I would suggest to always buy licenses through an Atlassian partner, so you can also rely on their expertise."

"I rate Service Management four out of 10 for affordability. The price could be better, especially for companies using more than one Atlassian product. It's suitable for SMBs that can afford it. I don't think there's another tool that's both better and cheaper. All help desk tools are relatively expensive."

"I am using the free version, but my clients are paying for it. When they start, they evaluate it for 30 days, and after seeing the value, they move to its paid version."

"Jira Service Management has affordable license fees. It's $12 a month per person."

"We have paid $20,000 recently for a one-year license for our on-prem server."

More JIRA Service Management pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

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Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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What is your favorite Help Desk Software and why?

JIRA Due to its agility.

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What do you like most about JIRA Service Management?

JIRA Service Management is a very user-friendly solution.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for JIRA Service Management?

The price is actually reasonable.

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Comparisons

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Compared 30% of the time

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Compared 25% of the time

Zendesk vs IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

Compared 25% of the time

Ivanti Neurons for ITSM vs IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

Compared 21% of the time

More IBM SmartCloud Control Desk Competitors

ServiceNow vs JIRA Service Management

Compared 14% of the time

PagerDuty Operations Cloud vs JIRA Service Management

Compared 11% of the time

BMC Helix ITSM vs JIRA Service Management

Compared 10% of the time

ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus vs JIRA Service Management

Compared 9% of the time

Freshservice vs JIRA Service Management

Compared 4% of the time

More JIRA Service Management Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

August 2025

Download IBM SmartCloud Control Desk product report

Buyer's Guide

JIRA Service Management

August 2025

Download JIRA Service Management product report

Also Known As

SmartCloud Control Desk

JIRA Service Desk

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

JIRA Service Management is Atlassian’s IT service management (ITSM) solution. It unlocks all teams at high velocity by:

1. Accelerating the flow of work between IT teams, development teams, and business teams

2. Empowering teams to deliver their service more quickly

3. Bringing visibility to their work

Built on JIRA, JIRA Service Management enables best practices across request, incident, problem, change, knowledge, asset, and configuration management so that teams can streamline collaboration between themselves. More than 30,000 customers of all sizes rely on JIRA Service Management to deliver service.

JIRA Service Management Features

JIRA Service Management has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Request management: Allows businesses to manage work across teams with one platform so employees and customers get the help they need quickly.
Problem management: To minimize the impact of incidents, this feature groups incidents, fast-tracks root cause analysis, and records workarounds.
Change management: IT teams are empowered by richer contextual information around changes from software development tools. This helps them minimize risk and make better decisions.
Asset management: Manage inventory efficiently, track lifecycles and ownership, and reduce costs.
Configuration management: Attain visibility into the infrastructure that supports critical services and applications. Understand service dependencies to minimize risk.
Incident management: The solution brings development and IT teams together to rapidly respond to, resolve, and learn from incidents.
Knowledge management: While fostering team collaboration, the solution enables self-service, deflection of more requests, and management of knowledge articles.

JIRA Service Management Benefits

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

The solution empowers all teams across IT, development, and business with intuitive, flexible workflows.

Work is made visible through the open and collaborative JIRA platform.
Connect IT and development on a single platform to accelerate workflow.
Gain significant ROI with competitive pricing on useful features.
Benefit from faster time to value by implementing a full ITSM solution in just a few months.
Lower total cost of ownership without expensive ongoing maintenance and upgrades.
Enjoy a broad ecosystem of more than 4,000 best-in-class apps and integrations.

Reviews from Real Users

JIRA Service Management stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Some of these include its stability, its easy customization, and its seamless integration with other solutions. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

Abhishek S., a Program Lead at PureSoftware, writes of the solution, “You can scale the solution whether it is deployed to the cloud or the data center. While we might have up to 5,200 people using the solution, we do not require that many licenses, as only those dealing with the tickets are required to be licensed.”

Andrew B., a Technical Engineer at a consultancy firm, notes, “One of the valuable features is that an automatic response or action can be taken on tickets. We can have certain responses for tickets that contain keywords or are logged and tagged with certain labels.”

Atlassian

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

Buyer's Guide

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs. JIRA Service Management

July 2025

Free Report: IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs. JIRA Service Management

Find out what your peers are saying about IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs. JIRA Service Management and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.

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