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SCSM vs SolarWinds Service Desk comparison

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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

Automation Anywhere
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
663
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (2nd), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (2nd), Process Mining (1st), Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) (1st), Agentic Automation (1st), Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (2nd), AI Legal & Compliance (1st), AI Finance & Accounting (1st), AI Procurement & Supply Chain (1st)
SCSM
Average Rating
7.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (13th), IT Service Management (ITSM) (13th)
SolarWinds Service Desk
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
IT Service Management (ITSM) (15th)
 

Featured Reviews

Venkat Sivaprakash - PeerSpot reviewer
Management Consultant at Accenture
Has significantly improved document-driven workflows and reduced processing time across finance and HR functions
Automation Anywhere has evolved significantly and upgraded itself to provide agentic AI and AI-based automation solutions for document automation. The product has matured considerably over time. We can create workflows that can call an API. We can include prompts in particular workflows for ChatGPT-related functions, connecting to an LLM and RAG to perform tasks. For document automation, modern features are available to train documents, ensuring high accuracy and repeatability over time. The system is very easy to use. I recently completed a course in document automation, typically designed for people involved in coding and technical aspects. Though I understand coding comprehensively, I don't do actual coding. The course was very accessible. Currently, extensive coding isn't necessary due to the hybrid model incorporating GenAI aspects, low-code, no-code capabilities, APIs, and numerous pre-built objects in Automation Anywhere. The features include GenAI-driven prompting methods and workflow creation capabilities. In these workflows, we can create decision boxes and call APIs without coding. We simply pull objects, drop them, connect them, and add minimal coding when needed. The most crucial aspect isn't coding but rather sizing the automation and fleshing out the details. Automation Co-pilot takes notes and performs automated analysis. It can extract details from videos, summarize conversations, and provide detailed information. During calls, it identifies instructions and performs tasks such as preparing reports and reconciliation. Automation Anywhere can also connect with Microsoft Co-pilot. Through Co-pilot, real-time operations can be executed, allowing direct interaction between vendors and automation through this component.
LuisSanchez3 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director Metropolitano de Gobierno Digital at a government with 10,001+ employees
Current setup enables smooth problem-solving but lacks comprehensive guidance and local support
More information about setup procedures and a more user-friendly front end would be beneficial. We need more information for setup processes. It is difficult to do the work independently, requiring us to hire external companies for maintenance hours to fix small issues that could be resolved faster in-house if we had better information. We have been looking for an upgrade version, but finding local service has been difficult. It has been challenging trying to get things done. Speaking with the Microsoft office, we found there are no local companies with substantial experience with SCSM. What we have now was installed five or six years ago. It has been difficult to change configurations and look for upgrades, even with all the manuals. Our office is considering moving away from SCSM and getting a service desk solution outside of Microsoft. For me, it has been a good tool to get help and solve internal problems in the office. It is a very good tool, but the difficulty in getting local service or more information is pushing us to look for another tool.
Vaibhav Patkar - PeerSpot reviewer
CISO at Orient Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
Improved service requests and network monitoring have increased efficiency but integration needs work
SolarWinds Service Desk is a recognized product across the world and a dependable product. Kaseya is somewhat dated, and SolarWinds Service Desk has better connectivity in terms of superior integration facilities compared to Kaseya. Additionally, SolarWinds Service Desk offers multiple options within the same tool, including ITSM as well as NOC and network monitoring capabilities. SolarWinds Service Desk has much greater acceptability in the market and a wide range of implementations and integrations with various tools and applications. Life becomes simpler when choosing a standard product, whereas Kaseya may not be as highly regarded in the market. SolarWinds Service Desk may have some flaws, but work is being done to address them. SolarWinds Service Desk is an affordable product. SolarWinds Service Desk is suitable for all customers ranging from small to enterprise. There are some small customers, and the primary usage is within the company itself, and then as customers require it, access can be provided to them.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"While our Automation Anywhere's implementation is in a premature stage, it has really decreased the workload on our service desk and we definitely see some ROI in the future from this product."
"The automation that we have run on a daily basis helps us by saving a lot of time."
"The integrations with the OCR engines in Automation Anywhere are quite powerful, and they have helped us in many projects."
"It is easy to use for non-technical people, with a simple drag-and-drop interface, so they don't need to be technically savvy to automate their processes."
"We are using it for scripting, and it is end user based with screen captures. It is a bit easier to use than any of the other tools out there."
"The ease of use is its key novel feature, as I have actually trained people in finance who have not written a piece of code in their lives and they are able to pick it up."
"In most of the use cases, both time and cost are being saved, which is the reason they are using these automations."
"Automation Anywhere's most valuable features include generative AI, similar to Copilot, which will significantly benefit developers; low-code or no-code technology; and document automation capable of extracting data from structured and unstructured PDF formats, presenting it clearly and easy to follow."
"The integration of the whole Microsoft suites is awesome, a very convenient package like an all-in-one tool but it is actually five or six products acting well together."
"System Center Service Manager is a good product, and it is very easy to use."
"We use SCSM to manage all of our IT operations, including incident and service requests and problem management."
"SCSM helps us keep organized by tracking all user demands and change requests. However, the reporting is not sufficient to provide a clear view of ongoing projects. It helps with daily operations and change request management."
"The solution offers good productivity at a low price point."
"The support from Microsoft is good and we also have local support on the ground in Nigeria."
"The call logging is the solution's most valuable feature; it's very easy to use and isn't too resource-intensive."
"Microsoft System Center Service Manager is a good product; it seems very easy and is better than most of the other solutions, which often have only a few features and cannot do what Microsoft can do."
"What I appreciate the most about the product is that, as per the name given, it brings better visibility to the client in terms of their infrastructure, application, and performance."
"The solution is very stable."
"SolarWinds Service Desk is a recognized product across the world and a dependable product."
 

Cons

"For my organization specifically, the challenge is with Automation Anywhere upgradation. We have more than 100 bots that were developed five years ago."
"Sometimes, I find that Excel automation is not as expected. Excel automation can be enhanced."
"Logging into Automation Anywhere takes some time. I use it frequently, and each login currently takes some time. A reduction in this time would be helpful."
"Additional features should involve the Cognitive Section where we need more Advance solutions involving ML & AI."
"However, it does not work as well with retrieving data from images."
"Automation Anywhere is troublesome for some people because of the way it is organized."
"Though IQ Bot is the most powerful and effective cognitive OCR platform for data extraction in the market, still, there is a lot of scope for improvement as there are a lot of non-standard documents which do not give a high straight-through processing rate and accuracy."
"Room for improvement is more on the IQ Bot side: How quickly we can adopt and deploy it?"
"The configuration could be easier."
"Look around as there are a lot of better solutions!"
"Mobile application integration would be an improvement."
"Once we had an issue with a desktop download that would not open."
"There is no development with this product, and we had to go and buy additional ITSM solutions to sit on top of it. We had to buy products from companies like Cireson and Cased Dimensions in order to get the functionality that we need out of it. So, we're using Service Manager as an engine, rather than as a full-blown product. It is the engine, but we have other products sitting on top of it to make it work properly."
"It crashes our client's computers. Sometimes they get blue screens."
"One of the disadvantages in this product is that the reporting module is not very easy. It requires SQL development skills, which not all customers or IT professionals have."
"They need to improve their support. When you cannot support the company that has your solution people will start to jump to another company that has a similar solution where somebody can support them if they have a problem."
"The primary concern so far is the integration part because of the APIs; this is the main area of concern."
"The only additional features I would like to see in the future, to make it closer to perfection, are intelligent features that are currently being developed on the cloud platform and not on the on-premise model."
"The integration with other applications can use improvement because, for example, it was nearly impossible to integrate SolarWinds Service Desk with monday.com because we had to get an add-on from Zapier."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's the best RPA tool, but the pricing could be improved."
"Automation Anywhere's pricing is significantly higher than other RPA solutions."
"I don't agree with the IQ Bot licensing costs, which depends on the consumption of the document rather than per bot or user. This is confusing for me, because most of the cases for us in a possible future scenario, there would be a lot of invalid data to be scanned to get to real data. E.g., we would have to supply approximately 100 pages of scanned data to extract two pages of original data. In these type of cases, the IQ Bot might be a costly venture."
"Additional costs will be for the machines and the number of machines that you are using. You can deploy virtually as well as on physical machines. In both the situations, you do need to allocate a certain budget for securing the machines and where the software will be installed and running. The machines cannot be used for anything else, because only a certain bot can run at a certain time. You need to be very particular about your scheduling of running the bots, and while the bot is running nobody can use the machine. You cannot have an agent working on a machine and the bot running in the background. It has to be completely dedicated. Then there are the network bandwidth requirements and space requirements, which are additional costs apart from the licensing and software costs. The developer is also going to charge you for their coding time too."
"Despite being less expensive than UiPath, Automation Anywhere remains cost-prohibitive for many small and medium-sized businesses."
"We are interested in saving manual engineer man-hours. So far, we have saved $100,000."
"The price of Automation Anywhere is a little higher than some of the competition, such as UiPath. However, depending on the use case and other factors we are able to receive some discounts."
"My understanding is that the license cost of Automation Anywhere is more reasonable than UiPath and Blue Prism."
"It is an expensive solution."
"It is a lower price vs. other things on the market."
"The license for SCSM is cheap."
"I would rate the pricing as two out of five."
"Licensing can be complex and confusing."
"The price should be lower."
"It comes free with the enterprise agreement that we have, but the expense really is in having to buy another product to sit on top of it to make it work properly. You wind up having to buy additional support and additional product with their own support and maintenance costs on top of that."
"The platform is competitively priced."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Construction Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Construction Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business159
Midsize Enterprise81
Large Enterprise554
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise14
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It depends on your use case. Is it simply to automate a couple of processes? Is it to augment a human team? AA is ver...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
From my experience using AA tool, it depends on the applications that you want to automate, because there some applic...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It is a highly preferred RPA tool. You can check my Automation Anywhere Review to know more.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SCSM?
I am not sure about the pricing as I do not have experience with it.
What needs improvement with SCSM?
More information about setup procedures and a more user-friendly front end would be beneficial. We need more informat...
What is your primary use case for SCSM?
In my job, I work for the city where we have an enterprise agreement with Microsoft. We have Office, Word, PowerPoint...
What needs improvement with SolarWinds Service Desk?
The primary concern so far is the integration part because of the APIs; this is the main area of concern. Currently, ...
What is your primary use case for SolarWinds Service Desk?
SolarWinds Service Desk is used for ITSM and network monitoring purposes. The major use cases being utilized are from...
What advice do you have for others considering SolarWinds Service Desk?
I think the pricing of SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability is now comparative and suited to our business model, whi...
 

Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise, Agentic Process Automation System (Now Certified for WorkSpaces)
System Center Service Manager
No data available
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
Fibabanka, UMC Health System
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about SCSM vs. SolarWinds Service Desk and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
906,781 professionals have used our research since 2012.