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IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs ServiceNow vs Zendesk comparison

 

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:
 

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 ServiceNow is 21.3%, down from 26.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zendesk is 4.6%, up from 4.2% 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.
Nikhil Gohil - PeerSpot reviewer
Enables effective incident management and seamless workflow automation with valuable mobile accessibility
I haven't thought deeply about improvements for ServiceNow or what might be missing right now. There are so many modules and features in ServiceNow that I haven't explored them all, so it's hard to say what might be missing or should be improved. I suggest making the cost more affordable for smaller companies.
JohanSkibdahl - PeerSpot reviewer
Automating customer support with advanced AI capabilities and seamless communication
Zendesk has been invaluable in automating communications such as email and phone calls. It allows us to handle more support cases with fewer people due to its advanced artificial intelligence capabilities. This intelligent tool can manage complex queries before users even realize they are interacting with a non-human. Additionally, we have integrated Zendesk with Datto and Klaviyo ( /products/klaviyo-reviews ), enhancing our workflows.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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 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."
"SLA integrations, reports, and integration with other applications are the most valuable."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Makes ticket information easy to access."
"ServiceNow is great. You can download the data into Excel and you can basically create reports. It's very flexible."
"One feature of ServiceNow that is important is the workflow engine. From my perspective [as a consultant] the power to be able to structure processes, represent workforce management for organizations, and the visibility provided by the reporting are additional top features."
"I don't have to look through a whole bunch of other incidents that aren't relevant to me. It's very useful in that sense."
"Operations and maintenance costs have been reduced using this solution. We have been able to deliver faster solutions to our customers and track progress using live data."
"For the nuts and bolts running of an IT organization, I can't really say there's anything lacking feature-wise."
"We consider the integration capabilities of the solution with other tools to be a valuable feature."
"The most recent addition of SAM Premium is a game changer for many organizations."
"Its agility and simplicity are the most valuable features. This tool is very user-friendly."
"Zendesk Support has a lot of good APIs."
"It's a very stable tool, very powerful."
"Zendesk has been invaluable in automating communications such as email and phone calls."
"It is very easy to connect back and forth between the requester and the person fulfilling the ticket."
"It has good management, the ability to sign tickets based on content, the multi-channel support, the self service portal, the integration with Salesforce, the setup process, and the product features as we are currently using them."
"One of the most valuable features is the ease of use. If you take the standalone product, it is so easy to use, but if you want a tailor-made Zendesk Guide, you can't do it yourself. However, you can use a template that already exists—they have a lot, and they're very cheap, around 300-400 euros—and use it on all your brands. It's a very easy product to use."
"One of the most valuable features is that Zendesk gives you a lot of configurability, and a lot of leeway in terms of customizing the look and theme. Zendesk offers you the facility to design your own landing page, as well as the look and feel of the entire knowledge base. At the same time, they offer themes that you can simply purchase and implement. Either way, it can really be turned into the right look and feel of the knowledge base required by our company, which is very important—if you have a bland-looking page, most of the time, people will lose interest. Zendesk also allows you to test the customizations before you publish it. It gives you a sandbox location where you can test everything new that you're trying to create and publish, which is very interesting."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"Licensing costs are very high."
"Local solutions have lower costs."
"They can maybe improve the area of agile project management. They do have user storyboards and other things, but we kind of lean on Jira for that work. This is perhaps an area that could be looked at a little more."
"There should be greater integration with other enterprise applications. We're using Microsoft, Oracle, and other applications, and it would be good to have a greater integration on some of the immediate hiccups that you have with these services. It doesn't mean that when we have a problem with using another application, ServiceNow should be able to fix it, but ServiceNow should be able to alert us to things. There should be a bit more automation or integration."
"The level of complexity and the level of discovery are the two areas that can be improved. Its UI needs to evolve. They focus a lot on cool colors and other little things, which don't bring value in terms of functionality. They need to focus less on presentation and more on the functionality within the UI. Its discovery mechanism should be improved. There is a component in ServiceNow that discovers the assets, but it doesn't do an immediate discovery, and there is a lag. If I want to open a ticket for a laptop or an asset, that asset needs to exist within ServiceNow for me to be able to say that I need to have its disk space or memory increased. It is referred to as a CI or configuration item in ServiceNow. Sometimes, ServiceNow doesn't discover these items, and as a result, I cannot open a ticket and tag that system or asset. If a system was introduced to the environment last week and it is still not listed, it becomes a problem. I will either have to wait or manually enter that system or asset. So, if I have a laptop with only 8 GB of memory and I want to request 16 GB of memory, I won't be able to do that in ServiceNow because my system or asset hasn't been discovered yet. Discovery is not immediate, and there is a lag."
"The interface is not user-friendly."
"It's a great platform, but there's still room for improvement. As the solutions stands now, you do need a lot of previous experience to use it. It would be great if they could develop some use case templates. This would be beneficial for a small and medium-sized businesses."
"The capital expenditure neeed to get the tool up and running is extensive."
"The support team is time-consuming, and they don't find the answer to our problem."
"Zendesk Guide could be improved by allowing us to put our assets in one location. What happens now for each article, for example, is we have to upload the images for that article to that location, so the image reuse is still not something that they have perfected. If they could allow us to update all the images in one location, and then pull the image from there, it would be easier when working on Multibrand projects. There are no Multibrand updates available—we have to update each brand manually. For my company, I have come up with an API tool which allows me to push the content to multiple brands together, but if you don't have something like that, you have to manually do it."
"You couldn't give administrative access to new hires."
"The price of the solution should be reduced."
"The data you get when logged in to Zendesk Support differs from the data you get when you programmatically query Zendesk Support through its API because of a sync time delay."
"As per me, there arent much significant issues or areas for improvement with Zendesk, as my usage of it is limited. I appreciate its ability to organize tickets effectively based on tags, allowing me to easily gather and analyze customer feedback and requests."
"One of the drawbacks of Zendesk is that it doesn't provide a secure way for us to send data. So, we usually use a secure SharePoint folder link. We put that in the Zendesk ticket so that the requester has a secure way of getting to their data."
"Report generation is still slightly tricky and not very customizable as per my inquiries."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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 price of this solution is expensive."
"$230 per user."
"I would say it is moderately expensive, ranging from six to seven on a scale of ten."
"The solution is priced for medium to enterprises sized businesses. However, it is expensive compared to competitors."
"They could be more competitive with their licensing."
"The price could be a little lower for the solution. Many of my customers have issues with the licensing process, they have to make it easier and straightforward."
"This is a pretty expensive product, so the licensing could be better."
"While the option exists to pay for a monthly license, we are dealing with large enterprises and these typically involve multi-year licenses of ten or five years, at a minimum."
"You have to pay extra for better support. So it's not only the license that you pay for, but you have to pay extra for the support as well."
"The price is very competitive."
"There are different plans that are offered. We are using the entry-level plan. The overall price of the solution should be reduced. The price is too high."
"From what I hear, Zendesk's pricing is a little expensive."
"Zendesk's licensing is not cheap. For Enterprise, we are paying $200 per agent. It's a per-month cost, so it's pretty steep. There are some services you need to pay extra for. For example, with Zendesk Guide, we had to buy the most expensive offering in order to get Multibrand and everything. We also had to pay a lot of money for themes."
"We pay for the solution on a yearly basis and my understanding is that the cost is about $30,000. That's the cost for 24 to 25 agents."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Educational Organization
14%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
23%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Educational Organization
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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Which solution is better for developing non-ITSM applications: OutSystems or Service Now?
The short answer is that OutSystems is far better for 2 main reasons. Firstly, with Service Now you are locked into t...
Would you choose ServiceNow over Microsoft PowerApps?
Hi Netanya, I will choose ServiceNow because ServiceNow is a very good tool compared to Microsoft PowerApp. Because ...
What do you like most about ServiceNow?
The solution has a user-friendly interface.
What do you like most about Zendesk Support?
I found the user experience with vendors on Zendesk to be straightforward, especially when it comes to understanding ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zendesk Support?
Zendesk's pricing is reasonable. It is not the cheapest solution nor the most expensive, but it provides value for mo...
What needs improvement with Zendesk Support?
There could be improvements in integration, which can be achieved with APIs or tools like Zapier ( /products/zapier-r...
 

Also Known As

SmartCloud Control Desk
No data available
Zendesk Support, Zendesk Guide, Zendesk Sell
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

St Vincent's Health Australia, Kalibrate Pty. Ltd., Cognizant Technology
AAA, AstraZeneca, Becton, Dickinson and Company, Broadcom, Christus Health, Epicor, Equinix, GE Capital, Intuit, KPMG, Loyola Marymount University, OshKosh, Quantas, RedHat, Royal Bank of Scotland, Swiss Re, U.S. Department of Energy, Safeway, Yale University, and Zillow    
Mailchimp, Tesco, Vimeo, Instacart, Mediaocean, Slack, Uber
Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, Atlassian, ManageEngine and others in Help Desk Software. Updated: June 2025.
860,711 professionals have used our research since 2012.