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IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus 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
ManageEngine SupportCenter ...
Ranking in Help Desk Software
23rd
Average Rating
7.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

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 ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus is 0.9%, up from 0.4% 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.
reviewer2650164 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manual ticketing features hinder workflow, but cost-effective ticket management is ensured
We just use it because it's more trouble to rip it out than to replace it with a more expensive tool. I would not recommend this product to others. If budget is a concern, it might be suitable but it doesn’t excite. Hence, I would rate it a four 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

"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 is very easy to work with."
"SLA integrations, reports, and integration with other applications are the most valuable."
"The solution has been stable."
"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 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 product teams are continuously on the products trying to improve them. If, for example, I ask for a change to be done in the software, the chances are in the next release it's going to be done and incorporated. It's this personal touch that I like."
"The most valuable features are the ITIL compliance and billing."
"ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus works fine as a help desk software and is relatively inexpensive."
"Their tech support has been talking to us about expanding features like integrations with Microsoft Teams."
"The product is very scalable and stable when used as a help desk once it is built out."
"We have found the reporting in this product to be very useful."
 

Cons

"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"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 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."
"The solution lacks a graphical user interface."
"The business model for the company is to sell low and charge for customization, education or expertise."
"There is no cloud-based version and it would be helpful if it were available."
"I would like to see some kind of project management or portfolio management in a future version."
"The product is very difficult to use and configure and requires specialists."
"ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus could improve on workflow automation features."
"The tech support is terrible and that seems to be a part of their business plan."
"They're pretty good but there's always room for improvement. There should be more templates that users can utilize immediately."
 

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 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."
"The licensing fees depend on different criteria, including options and sizing."
"ManageEngine products will always be the lowest cost in category as that is part of their business model."
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Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus?
ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus is cheap, around two or three on a scale where ten is the most expensive.
What needs improvement with ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus?
ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus could improve on workflow automation features. Currently, everything is very manual, and there's no automated resolution of tickets. The emails ingested to create ti...
What is your primary use case for ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus?
We use ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus primarily as a ticketing tool within our company.
 

Also Known As

SmartCloud Control Desk
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

St Vincent's Health Australia, Kalibrate Pty. Ltd., Cognizant Technology
Brickman Group, SVP Worldwide, Chicago Tribune, Sodexo, Constellation, Lowcost Holidays, Telesur, PayEx, Quintiq, Moblize, Oman Air, Intelligent Hospital Systems
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs. ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.