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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 I've seen a very nicely built interface with ServiceNow, and I've also seen the ugliest version that feels outdated.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

"Incident management is a valuable feature."
"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."
"The tool supports a lot of standard reporting KPIs."
"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 initial setup was quite simple; installing just took a few minutes."
"It is highly configurable with PinkVERIFY status."
"The best feature is that SLAs are automatically tracked, so when we breach something, we can set up email escalations as well."
"Identifies better ways to license software or eliminate unused software to save money."
"​The workflow capability for easy setup is powerful."
"In the Service Portal, the widget concept - and the way we have developed our widget - is pretty simple. We can leverage a lot on top of it."
"For our work, ServiceNow's service catalogs and SDK integrations are the most valuable features."
"If it is a high priority, they will respond very quickly. If it is a low priority issue, it might take some time, some three or four days. I would rate the technical support as a 10 out of 10."
"Some of the valuable features I have found the solution to have are it can serve many different types of businesses, it has strong platform capabilities, provides application development, built-in predictive intelligence, and performance analytics reports."
"The feature that I have found most valuable from ServiceNow is the ability to assign sub-tasks to different teams, including problem tickets and the regular and chain tasks."
"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."
 

Cons

"You must be very technical to configure it."
"When we need to implement changes, it usually takes two to three days to happen, making it a very time-consuming process."
"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 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."
"The mobile service is minimal and doesn't provide sufficient capabilities."
"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."
"The interface can be improved. It can be made more interactive for self-service users."
"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."
"There should be fewer clicks and faster integrations between solutions."
"Needs additional software titles and easier normalization."
"Some enhancements to the self-service platform would be helpful. That part is still a little barebone... Also, the mobile app is not bad, but it's limited."
"The solution's user experience could be improved concerning its UI and portals."
"It became kind of complex to set it up without a general lack of knowledge of the particular feature-function capabilities. Features and capabilities could have been explained better to the end-users."
"ServiceNow claims to help a lot, but once you sell the product, it's as if you're on your own."
"The solution should offer better security when it comes to storing data."
"There is a need to enhance ticket details visibility on the portal, such as displaying SLA information, which currently requires development effort."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"ServiceNow tends to be a little bit more expensive as compared to BMC Helix ITSM."
"Isn't pricing always too much? We really do chafe at the ITIL licensing. ITOM is also pretty expensive."
"It is fairly expensive."
"Initially, the licensing model ServiceNow came up with was very good. But now, from a licensing perspective, they are changing their model day by day. It is becoming a bit expensive for customers."
"We know that ServiceNow is not cheap, it's more expensive than other solutions. But we are trying to increase our ability to handle tickets so that the cost per ticket is less."
"The product cost is higher than that of other vendors."
"ServiceNow's pricing is comparatively higher than Helix's."
"The licensing cost is based on your partnership with ServiceNow and what you have selected for implementation. There is an annual license cost which is calculated based on your number of devices."
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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.
882,813 professionals have used our research since 2012.