We performed a comparison between IBM SmartCloud Control Desk and ServiceNow based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, Atlassian, BMC and others in Help Desk Software."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 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 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."
"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."
"The solution has been stable."
"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."
"Simplicity of Change Manager."
"Straightforward tool."
"It provides internal clients with greater transparency about their projects and deliverables."
"It's more about the ease of use of ServiceNow. Plus, everything is there in a single platform. If you need any additional functionality, you just need to enable the plugins without even installing anything on the servers"
"ServiceNow has been implemented to streamline team workflows across different departments in our company. Users, including traveling leaders, were able to approve requests and authorize additional rights through the mobile platform."
"There are a lot of features within ServiceNow. There are plenty of add-ons that go beyond the typical core helpdesk operations, such as HR facilities, BRM functionality, and various compliance and governance capabilities."
"HR Case Management and Customer Service Management are two of the key areas which clients are using."
"The solution has very good automation tools."
"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."
"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 reporting in relation to updating could be improved upon."
"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."
"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."
"Creating service catalog forms could be made easier."
"We would like to have an Asset Management and/or Project Management feature enabled in this version and in the IT Service Management edition."
"Most people are discussing UIs, but I'm a developer. I would say 80-90% of the people would appreciate that, that's easy for them, but from a developer perspective, it's hard for me, because for me it's clunky"
"Their user interface is old-fashioned and outdated, and it can be more friendly for the eye. They can improve the user experience."
"The RPA needs improvement. That's a new area for them that they're just entering into now."
"The setup was time-consuming and required a lot of internal resources."
"Performance could be improved."
"The biggest complaint I have is that the ServiceNow search engine is not very robust."
IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is ranked 22nd in Help Desk Software with 9 reviews while ServiceNow is ranked 1st in Help Desk Software with 210 reviews. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is rated 7.6, while ServiceNow is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of IBM SmartCloud Control Desk writes "Stable but clunky and lacks a user interface". On the other hand, the top reviewer of ServiceNow writes "A stable and scalable solution that has excellent features and is useful for collecting data and building KPIs". IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is most compared with SymphonyAI IT Service Management, whereas ServiceNow is most compared with BMC Helix ITSM, Microsoft Power Apps, Pega BPM, IBM Maximo and Appian.
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