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IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs NinjaOne comparison

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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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Automation Anywhere
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
659
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (2nd), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (2nd), Process Mining (1st), Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) (1st), Agentic Automation (1st), Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (2nd), AI Legal & Compliance (1st), AI Finance & Accounting (1st), AI Procurement & Supply Chain (1st)
IBM SmartCloud Control Desk
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (33rd)
NinjaOne
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (8th), Network Monitoring Software (10th), Server Monitoring (2nd), IT Service Management (ITSM) (7th), Remote Access (8th), Vulnerability Management (18th), Mobile Device Management (MDM) (4th), IT Alerting and Incident Management (6th), Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) (1st), Patch Management (3rd), MSP Backup (1st), Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) (5th)
 

Featured Reviews

Venkat Sivaprakash - PeerSpot reviewer
Management Consultant at Accenture
Has significantly improved document-driven workflows and reduced processing time across finance and HR functions
Automation Anywhere has evolved significantly and upgraded itself to provide agentic AI and AI-based automation solutions for document automation. The product has matured considerably over time. We can create workflows that can call an API. We can include prompts in particular workflows for ChatGPT-related functions, connecting to an LLM and RAG to perform tasks. For document automation, modern features are available to train documents, ensuring high accuracy and repeatability over time. The system is very easy to use. I recently completed a course in document automation, typically designed for people involved in coding and technical aspects. Though I understand coding comprehensively, I don't do actual coding. The course was very accessible. Currently, extensive coding isn't necessary due to the hybrid model incorporating GenAI aspects, low-code, no-code capabilities, APIs, and numerous pre-built objects in Automation Anywhere. The features include GenAI-driven prompting methods and workflow creation capabilities. In these workflows, we can create decision boxes and call APIs without coding. We simply pull objects, drop them, connect them, and add minimal coding when needed. The most crucial aspect isn't coding but rather sizing the automation and fleshing out the details. Automation Co-pilot takes notes and performs automated analysis. It can extract details from videos, summarize conversations, and provide detailed information. During calls, it identifies instructions and performs tasks such as preparing reports and reconciliation. Automation Anywhere can also connect with Microsoft Co-pilot. Through Co-pilot, real-time operations can be executed, allowing direct interaction between vendors and automation through this component.
KM
Computer System Engineer at Informatika d.d.
Has centralization and asset management features, and a helpful and knowledgeable technical support team
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.
Not Joseph Pearson - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Vice President, Tech Solutions at LPL Financials
Has simplified remote software delivery and script management but needs improved reporting flexibility and better Mac support
NinjaOne's best features include ease of use regarding enablement and deployment, a broad selection and ability of software enablement, and API deliveries. Using CrowdStrike, we are able to tie in NinjaOne's API to have these automatically deliver to endpoints upon addition of those devices to a group with that policy deployed to it. NinjaOne has positively impacted our organization by making delivery easier for our end users and improving the ability to create scripts, manage scripts, and check status of devices and their compliance. This easier delivery with NinjaOne gives us oversight on devices without having to be on the call or remoted in directly to a device.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Using the Automation Anywhere University, you can go and train yourself to be an expert in the tool."
"The overall developer client has an easy-to-use UI."
"They can build an end-to-end solution with Automation Anywhere."
"MetaBots are useful when connecting to websites or to forms with objects that need to be captured."
"The best features in Automation Anywhere that I really appreciate are found in the basic module for pure RPA, such as the recorder function, which helps in making automation even easier; no coding is required, you are just doing things, and the recorder records your movements and actions, creating the code out of that."
"With Discovery Bot, we can even have our business people enabled with process finding and do an evaluation on whether it can be converted into an opportunity."
"Looking at overall feasibility from features to costing perspective, I strongly feel Automation Anywhere offers a lot of features and scalability and is a very good tool overall and people who have not tried should give a try and put some hands-on."
"We have a plethora of good use cases saving good, hard dollars."
"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."
"In general, it's been pretty stable."
"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, so you have one big package and nothing is lost."
"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."
"SLA integrations, reports, and integration with other applications are the most valuable."
"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."
"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."
"It helps us to be able to have visibility into the overall performance of the servers, laptops, and desktops that we are managing currently."
"NinjaOne's best feature is its monitoring."
"The solution's most valuable feature is related to its remote access...I know that NinjaOne's technical support is good."
"NinjaOne allows even small teams of three users to support over 400 desktops and keep them up to date and working at peak performance."
"Since NinjaOne was implemented, I would say it represents a huge positive change."
"The software's automation tools have solved critical deployment problems for small businesses."
"The best feature of NinjaOne is the SLA system. Every IT person can check their performance, how long it takes to resolve an issue, and how many SLAs are breached."
"The installation is easy, it only took two minutes."
 

Cons

"We need more commands for PDF integration to make it more flexible."
"Sometimes the tool is timing out, which would be a good thing to have resolved."
"New versions keep coming up. The challenge for us is to have the downtime to do the migrations. This could be improved upon. We would like fewer version changes and upgrades happening to the application. While the downtime is not that much, depending on the business processes, there are times few critical processes are running on a daily or hourly basis. We would expect the downtime to be even less for them."
"We have had some difficulty with ease of use. In addition, we have had some difficulties getting it to interact in predictable ways with our in-house software."
"The data migration could be better."
"The Help menu/description can be provided while hovering over actions so that it can help us better to know them."
"Where minor but widespread changes are made to the cloud product being operated upon, changing the cloned search values individually was incredibly time consuming, and it shut down the RPA service until it was fixed."
"Sometimes, in Automation Anywhere, the recording process takes longer when capturing tasks on websites or applications, and there can be internal errors."
"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."
"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 solution lacks a graphical user interface."
"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 user interface is not very interesting."
"The product is kind of clunky to use."
"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."
"It could use more facility or flexibility for reporting, and business intelligence in the tool."
"The reporting is lackluster. NinjaOne is great for maintaining systems, but it's hard to use it to understand the state that systems are in without going in and mining the information myself. I rate the reporting two out of 10."
"I want NinjaOne to improve the reports."
"The ability to not have a NinjaOne agent or multiple NinjaOne agents on a singular device is a big pain point for the device, and secondly, the macOS support is also what keeps it from being a higher score."
"There was a lot of delay with NinjaOne's ticketing system. For example, when a user creates a ticket and raises an issue, it would take 30 to 40 minutes to appear on the IT side. So the time delay issue is the main point."
"NinjaOne's pricing and user interface needs improvement."
"I would like to see the software reduced to focus on inventory or remote help tools since many of its current functionalities are not needed."
"Improvements could be made to reduce NinjaOne's functionalities to focus more on inventory or remote help tools."
"The one feature that I believe needs improvement is the software patching."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I'm not sure what the monthly licensing cost is, as that is taken care of by another team, but I would say it's around $100,000."
"Our annual licensing costs are around $100,000 a year."
"It is somewhere in the middle. The price and value of Automation Anywhere are better than UiPath. The pricing is good globally. It could be a little bit cheaper, but it is good."
"It has good licensing costs which are average for the market."
"Subscription for Automation Anywhere (AA) is paid yearly."
"It is subscription-based. They have different schemes. The price depends on how you negotiate with the local partner or local representative in your country."
"It is not cheap, but we are able to get an ROI."
"Licensing for Automation Anywhere (AA) is paid on a yearly basis. Out of all the RPA tools, it has the most value for money, e.g. what you pay is what you get."
"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."
"NinjaRMM uses a subscription model."
"NinjaOne is a little expensive but is still cheaper than competitors like Acronis or Veeam."
"The pricing is reasonable and cheaper than ConnectWise."
"It roughly costs $400 a month. It provides a good value because of the number of tools that you get in the solution. I would rate it a four out of five in terms of pricing. There are no additional costs other than the standard licensing fees."
"We currently pay $1.20 per device on a monthly basis."
"We got a pretty good deal. It was fairly affordable."
"I rate the solution’s pricing a five out of ten, where one is the lowest and ten is the most expensive."
"NinjaOne's price is fine since my workplace is an educational institution, so we get the product at a really good price considering that we do not pay taxes, making the prices very fair and worth the product."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Construction Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
7%
Performing Arts
15%
Construction Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business157
Midsize Enterprise83
Large Enterprise552
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It depends on your use case. Is it simply to automate a couple of processes? Is it to augment a human team? AA is ver...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
From my experience using AA tool, it depends on the applications that you want to automate, because there some applic...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It is a highly preferred RPA tool. You can check my Automation Anywhere Review to know more.
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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NinjaOne?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that I think it is very reasonable for the product that we get.
What needs improvement with NinjaOne?
To improve NinjaOne, there should be better integration between multiple different software including Cisco and Meraki.
What is your primary use case for NinjaOne?
My main use case for NinjaOne is managing machines over multiple networks and locations. For managing machines across...
 

Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise, Agentic Process Automation System (Now Certified for WorkSpaces)
SmartCloud Control Desk
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Interactive Demo

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
St Vincent's Health Australia, Kalibrate Pty. Ltd., Cognizant Technology
Status Pros, Mitchell and Company
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs. NinjaOne and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
902,988 professionals have used our research since 2012.