IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs SysAid comparison

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 1, 2024

SysAid and IBM SmartCloud Control Desk compete in the IT service management category. SysAid appears to have the upper hand with its flexibility and customization, while IBM offers robust centralized controls suitable for larger settings.

Features: SysAid offers extensive customization from the front-end to back-end integrations, a robust asset management system, and BI Analytics for operational insights. Its customizable workflows and a user-friendly self-service portal enhance flexibility. In contrast, IBM SmartCloud Control Desk focuses on centralized service request and asset management, strong SLA integrations, and efficient API connectivity, making it ideal for larger enterprise environments.

Room for Improvement: SysAid can improve its Knowledge Base and admin security roles for better user differentiation, refinement in asset management, and integration options. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk requires a more modern graphical interface, enhanced mobility features, and better technical support responsiveness despite its strengths.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SysAid supports both on-premises and cloud deployments with mixed reviews about customer support efficiency. On the other hand, IBM SmartCloud Control Desk offers comprehensive on-premises solutions with robust and responsive customer support, highlighting a more consistent service experience.

Pricing and ROI: SysAid is known for its cost-effectiveness, competitive pricing, and quick return on investment through process efficiencies. It appeals to a broader audience. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk suits larger enterprises better with its comprehensive licensing structure that can be costly for smaller companies but includes limited additional costs.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs. SysAid Report (Updated: June 2025).

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs. SysAid

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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

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

SysAid

Ranking in Help Desk Software

21st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Service Management (ITSM) (20th)

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 SysAid is 0.8%, up from 0.7% 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.

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Todd Blake

Senior IT Specialist at COMMUNITY HEALTH CONNECTIONS INC

A solution that streamlines ticket creation for the staff members of a business and enables efficient issue resolution by the IT team

SysAid is similar to Nintex AssureSign. Some of the back-end configurations of the solution are very difficult. So, we always need SysAid's help. Also, there are almost too many features that we are not taking advantage of in our company since we don't even know about them. A little bit of a streamlining or simplification of the main features would be a good improvement. I would like to see SysAid present its solution more easily. There is a lot in the solution, and it is more than what we need in our company.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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 solution has been stable."

More IBM SmartCloud Control Desk pros

"The solution provides us with multi-layered service management along with all our support pieces integrated in one system. Our entire system is run on SysAid, from Tier 1 to Tier 3. All the other IT department functionality is captured in SysAid, like development, warehousing, and application. So, it has vertical and horizontal coverage."

"All our service management is integrated into one system. Our response time is much faster because we have a visual into what is going on."

"It's really customizable. It's very user-friendly to change very quickly. We've developed lots of custom forms and things, without any need for thousands of accounting consultants which was one of our main aims of it."

"The solution can scale."

"The simplicity of the solution is excellent."

"It tracks everything that the technicians are doing. We can account for time and manage resources."

"I would say the overall flexibility of the product is its most valuable feature."

"The SysAid team provided excellent service to implement the solution for us. From the very first day, we received a comp manager, and a project manager, to implement the product. They continued to inquire about our business needs and then finalized the best path for us."

More SysAid pros

Cons

"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 reporting in relation to updating could be improved upon."

"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."

"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 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 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 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 solution lacks a graphical user interface."

More IBM SmartCloud Control Desk cons

"Currently, SysAid does not have a mobile application."

"The automation needs improvement. The workflow has some improvements to do. There's some stuff that they are working on like having cascaded fields. For example, we're categorizing tickets by location, by site and by building and then by data room within a data center. At the moment they're all separate fields."

"Some of the back-end configurations of the solution are very difficult. So, we always need SysAid's help."

"There is a learning curve for the users."

"We would like them to approve the security functionalities, e.g., management security features."

"One of the features that I'm hoping comes at some point is that currently you can only have one Knowledge Base instance within it. For me, it would be beneficial to have multiple instances for different purposes. I'd like to have a completely separate one for customers and the only way I can achieve that right now, where I can tag articles to only be viewed by customers, would be if I use its portal function."

"So far, we're very happy with the new integration. The only thing that I would like to see is for them to improve asset management so that it's more usable. We looked at it once and we didn't find it quite usable for us. That's why we didn't use it. We haven't looked into the new one yet but the asset management is something that can be improved even more and patch management is not as good as it could be."

"Monitoring needs improvement. At the moment we are looking for some advanced monitoring tools, which are using AI and machine learning as well. This product currently does not offer that."

More SysAid 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 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 pricing of SysAid is less than its competitors."

"We saw our investment back at the end of year one."

"Though I am not really sure about SysAid's prices, I know that it is competitive compared to some of the other products that our company looked at, like ConnectWise and ServiceNow."

"Overall, the price is good. It's all about what you get for the base amount. From my perspective, you want to look at what you're getting out-of-the-box. SysAid does a good job of putting key stuff in the box for you."

"Once you're interested, talk with SysAid. You can have them come in and look at your company and advise you on the best solution. They will tell you what comes with each separate package and also advise you what application to activate. If you want something that they don't have, they have a department that can design something based on your unique requests."

"SysAid is a good solution, especially from a pricing perspective."

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Top Industries

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Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Construction Company

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

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Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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What do you like most about SysAid?

SysAid is more user-friendly, and its configuration is easier than other tools.

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What needs improvement with SysAid?

With SysAid, most of the customers are requesting a native mobile application. SysAid has fewer AI features compared to other tools.

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What advice do you have for others considering SysAid?

Our customers use the enterprise edition and the standard edition of SysAid. We provide local support, but there are some things we have to escalate to SysAid. When we need support, we use their su...

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Comparisons

ServiceNow vs IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

Compared 35% of the time

SCSM vs IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

Compared 35% of the time

Zendesk vs IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

Compared 30% of the time

More IBM SmartCloud Control Desk Competitors

HaloITSM vs SysAid

Compared 41% of the time

ServiceNow vs SysAid

Compared 20% of the time

Teamwork vs SysAid

Compared 20% of the time

JIRA Service Management vs SysAid

Compared 19% of the time

More SysAid Competitors

Product Reports

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

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Also Known As

SmartCloud Control Desk

No data available

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

Offered in both cloud and on-premise versions, SysAid is a globally-adopted IT Service Management (ITSM) solution that combines all the essential capabilities in one, feature-rich tool. From traditional ticket management to asset management, SysAid allows administrators to monitor and manage tasks in one platform, so they can deliver fast and comprehensive support from a single view. Available in 42 languages, SysAid serves over 10,000 customers across 140 countries, spanning all industries and sizes.

Sample Customers

St Vincent's Health Australia, Kalibrate Pty. Ltd., Cognizant Technology

Disney, Sears Holdings Corporation, LAN Airlines, Schneider Electric, On Semiconductors, Toyota, Sky, KPMG, Georgetown University Law Center, Motorola, North York General Hospital, Volksbank, Xerox, Bacardi, Del Monte Fresh Produce, Manpower, Nucor, Ecobank

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs. SysAid