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Ivanti Service Desk [EOL] vs ServiceNow 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Ivanti Service Desk [EOL]
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
ServiceNow
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
224
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (1st), IT Asset Management (1st), IT Service Management (ITSM) (1st), Rapid Application Development Software (2nd), No-Code Development Platforms (1st)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2150373 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager - Strategic Initiatives | Project Management | Reporting & Analytics at a hospitality company with 10,001+ employees
Scalable but interface can be improved
Basically, we use it for service management from the financial side of things I would say the simplicity of it. It's not very difficult and doesn't require strong technical skills to understand or implement. The interface can be improved. It can be made more interactive for self-service users.…
MT
Manager of Security Engineering & Architecture at a outsourcing company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Seamless data integration and advanced automation improve service delivery efficiency
I think that nothing needs to be improved with the product; you just need the user to commit and spend appropriate time to overcome that learning curve. Once that is done, the product itself is pretty wonderful. I've seen a very nicely built interface with ServiceNow, and I've also seen the ugliest version that feels outdated. ServiceNow does allow that team to exist. They should modernize their fonts and their layout, the UI friendliness. They did introduce AI, chatbots, and AI on the back end, so that's wonderful and extremely useful if you train it. If you don't train it, it's pretty useless. Assessing the impact of ServiceNow's automation on service delivery times is complicated. The engineers who operate on ServiceNow find it isn't straightforward because the data set is accessible by everybody. The problem is that understanding how to manage that data set requires an enormous amount of engineering skill set to run the product. I would not hand the key to the customer; I would highly recommend that ServiceNow take control of that. Instead of offering support for the software, they should offer administrative support for the software. They should provide professional service or some kind of support system that allows us to use their product at a faster pace. I'm sure they offer something, but it's often outrageously expensive, or they rely on another company to resell their product and offer professional service. It makes no sense in my opinion, and they should offer the team at the front to help customize the product to fit each company's needs, as every company has different demands and forms of submitting a request that need adjustment over time.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Ivanti offers us the flexibility to transform it from purely an internal IT tool to something we can use across multiple departments. There's now a queue of departments waiting to onboard and get their processes built. The flexibility within the workflow is excellent."
"Incident management and service request management features are the most valuable."
"The most valuable features of the Ivanti Service Desk are service requests and incident management."
"The tool supports a lot of standard reporting KPIs."
"The best feature is that SLAs are automatically tracked, so when we breach something, we can set up email escalations as well."
"The initial setup was quite simple; installing just took a few minutes."
"Incident management is a valuable feature."
"It is highly configurable with PinkVERIFY status."
"It provides internal clients with greater transparency about their projects and deliverables."
"ServiceNow gives us a lot for free: workflows, organizational structures, service portal, forms, reporting, disaster recovery, and so on."
"We can keep track of incidences. There is a bucket where we keep all our information, and it enables communication between stakeholders. It helps us collaborate with each other."
"The solution has a user-friendly interface."
"It allows us to filter the data, create graphs, and get detailed reports."
"It is robust and very user-friendly."
"​The workflow capability for easy setup is powerful."
"We have found the service easy to use, although, we have ended up customising a lot of parameters."
 

Cons

"The interface can be improved. It can be made more interactive for self-service users."
"The documentation for migration which includes migration from one version to another or cloud to on-premises is not available in detail. There is no proper planning on metadata updates. I am not able to do the data movement with the package push."
"You have limited ability to customize how Ivanti renders. It's a fairly strict design that doesn't offer you much freedom to alter the rigid, two-column layout on the screen. You can choose between one column or two, but that's about it. The presentation is probably the biggest weakness."
"You must be very technical to configure it."
"Ivanti Service Desk could improve the GUI because it is not as good as other solutions, such as BMC or ServiceNow. If Ivanti Service Desk works on the GUI and makes it more user-friendly, and its content more attractive it might help the solution in the long run."
"The administrative side of it could be a little more intuitive. This is the side that you use to do customizations. It is very customizable, but it could be a bit more intuitive and user-friendly. Their support can also be better in terms of response time. Currently, their response time is a little slow."
"The mobile service is minimal and doesn't provide sufficient capabilities."
"When we need to implement changes, it usually takes two to three days to happen, making it a very time-consuming process."
"The scalability needs improvement."
"I am interested to see the firm's strategic plans for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), and how the particular areas it will expand on from its existing investments (that feature, for example, in its ITSM Pro and CSM Pro modules)."
"I know that discovery tools are not meant to be simple, but somehow, if they could make it more simple and robust, that would be great."
"It is annoying that ServiceNow keeps on changing back to Quebec every six months."
"One thing I don't care for is the reporting and the way it functions."
"There is a need to learn scripting because as in the case of all the ITSM tools, scripting is needed for customization. If you're not very comfortable with scripting, then you may feel that you cannot do everything in ServiceNow without learning scripting."
"I would like to see more functionality in terms of custom workflows, not impacting the overall platform health."
"ServiceNow doesn't cater to the Middle Eastern market."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"In Tunisia, the companies find the licensing costs to be expensive."
"The solution is expensive."
"This is a pretty expensive product, so the licensing could be better."
"It is very expensive because it is a big organization. You have to pay for additional things."
"The license model is based on a number of fulfillers (active users who play some role within the ServiceNow functionality). Therefore, you can serve as many end-users as you want, without additional costs."
"The pricing is reasonable and affordable, making it suitable for businesses ranging from small to large scale."
"The price of this solution is expensive."
"It is fairly expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business55
Midsize Enterprise35
Large Enterprise166
 

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 that platform for good. The business model is to lock in and then keep pumping th...
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 ServiceNow has a very strong module (Performance Analysis) reporting which will ...
What do you like most about ServiceNow?
The solution has a user-friendly interface.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

MBDA, Coates Hire, Perth & Kinross Council, Oil States International Inc., London Borough of Lambeth, Avon IM&T Consortium, Diagonal Consulting
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    
Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, Atlassian, ManageEngine and others in IT Service Management (ITSM). Updated: January 2026.
882,594 professionals have used our research since 2012.