ServiceNow alternatives and competitors

We use it for IT service management. We use it for HR service management. We also use it in an operations capacity in combination with some other tools.

We use a combination of Freshdesk, Freshservice, and Freshchat. We use the whole suite. We're the third largest customer of theirs. 

We have the Enterprise plan, and we have its latest version. We are in beta testing for another upgrade that they're doing, but it is still in beta. So, it is not live yet. It is a cloud solution. Freshservice owns everything. We just use it as a cloud platform.

Our SLAs are being met way more consistently. We're seeing that customer issues are getting answered in a timelier manner. Our tech issues are resolved in a more timely manner. We have more access to information with the combination of knowledge, tickets, etc. We have integrated it with Jira. So, I can look and say that I have a ticket, and I need to send something to a developer in Jira. I can just do that with a click from Freshservice, which makes it easy. Configuring it is also super simple.

Its ease of use is fantastic. It is just above and beyond, especially when you compare it to something like Cherwell, Salesforce, or anything like that. It is on its own level. It is so easy to administer. The way everything is organized and the way it builds its own documentation is very good. 

It integrates with a lot of things. If they don't have an integration, once you bring it to them, a lot of times, they get that working in their pipeline. They get integration with different software going. They really are looking to do things a little bit better than others, and it shows how much work they put into the platform.

Sometimes, the billing process is an absolute nightmare. That's really frustrating. If you have a straightforward contract and don't need to make changes, it is fine, but if you need to make any changes, it'll take months.

The other piece is that sometimes, they will push out updates without telling you they're doing updates, or they'll just have it as a notification. If you don't go and actively check, you just won't even know it is pushed out. You have to stay on top of it. You can't pick the version you're on. Everybody is on the same version, which is great and makes being an admin and working on the platform a much more consistent experience. For the most part, it is all pretty much the same.

As compared to the Freshdesk knowledge base, it needs work. You can't save knowledge-based templates, which is a little bit ridiculous. For example, you can't have article templates in there. These are IT people. They're not thinking about formatting. We've got to do that for them.

Some of the ways that tasks are reported on and shown can be better. You can't see tasks in your regular ticket list view. You can't see a combo view of tasks and tickets. It is a little bit difficult to get a solid overview of your list of things to do. You can only see them in separate views, instead of one single view.

There should be the ability to add screenshots into a service request without having to download and attach them because that can be really frustrating for users. You can do that in the incident version, but you can't put a screenshot in a service request, which is frustrating. The users certainly don't want to take a screenshot, save it to their computer, and then attach it just to submit the ticket. They could just print the screen.

I would like to see further integrated analytics, which is something that's on their radar. I would also like them to bring back some of the different metrics that they got rid of. I know that's on their radar too, and they're working on it. The unified bot builder is also on their radar. There is so much stuff that I know is already getting ready for deployment in the next year.

The vendor-provided training material has some room for improvement. We disabled the incidents in our portals, and the customizability of all that has also been awesome, but beyond that, it would be good if I could see how a service request goes from end to end instead of being a whole lot of things.

Their support could also be better. We have had some long-drawn-out and unnecessary experiences because of their support.

I have been using it for about two years. 

The uptime is fantastic. We very rarely have any issues with anything going down. Sometimes, it randomly slips into Arabic, which is weird, but it only happens to one user. So, I don't know what the user is doing. After refresh, it goes away. It might be a user problem.

It is scalable. We're their third largest customer, or we used to be. I don't know if we still are. It works very well for us.

We use it very extensively, and we're looking at expanding to additional teams. We have about 300 users. In this instance, I have 200, and then in another instance, I have 30 right now. I'll have another hundred in the next couple of months. We're bringing all of our dispatch operations into it. It is going to be a big list.

From a scalability perspective, it is really good, but Freshcaller isn't. We can't use their full suite of solutions because even though Freshservice is extremely scalable on its own, when we're looking at upselling to Freshcaller, they just can't support the fact that we do a million minutes a month, which is a lot.

We literally have weekly meetings with them, and for the last two years, we've had some hit-and-miss experiences. The response time is great, but when they reply with a knowledge base article, the way we are into the system, we would've already read that before approaching them. That's why we're asking them. I sometimes get a little bit frustrated about that.

Sometimes, there are some communication issues with their support. I spent a year just being like, "No, we shouldn't be in Freshdesk for this." They were telling my bosses that we should be, and I was like, "I'm telling you that's incorrect. Why are you telling my boss that? You don't even work here?" You don't even go here. What are you doing? They don't even check your circumstances. I am a certified Six Sigma Black Belt. I gave them all of our process maps and everything, and they didn't even read over them. They just kept trying to put us into Freshdesk when Freshservice was a better fit because all we do is move around trucks, trailers, and drive. That's what we do all day long. I would like to know how we would do that without asset management or a portal with forums. They were just constantly trying to get us to implement break fix after break fix after break fix instead of putting us in the right product in the first place. It wasted a year's time and money.

I brought a guy onto the call. He said the same thing to them in a guy's voice, and then they were like, "Oh, we get it now." I sent them a PowerPoint, and I said the exact same thing in email all the time. The guy was like, "I literally just said exactly what you said in the exact same words and with the same cadence." They just wanted to hear the guy say it. I said, "Are you kidding me?" And then they asked if he was my boss. He was not. I was training him. That was my one really bad experience because it went on for a full year, but it has been resolved now. Everything is good now, but I was deeply frustrated at the time. I would rate them a three out of five. That was a really long drawn-out experience, and it was so unnecessary.

Neutral

For IT specifically, we used Cherwell. Operations were working out of email, and HR was also working out of email. Cherwell is just a nightmare to work with. It is a nightmare to administer. We were able to stand up and migrate away from them so quickly and easily. It might have cost a little bit more the way that we did it, but it was completely worth it. Our reporting looks better, and our analytics looks better. Everything is drastically improved.

I run two instances of it, and I deployed both. It just depends on the needs of the business. If you need a lot of custom development, then you do, but if you don't, then you don't. It depends on the level of complexity that you have for your buildout such as:

• How many workflows do you need?
• How many admins do you have?
• How many people do you have? 

Because of the size and scope of our group, it took longer. We spent six months on it. Migration from Cherwell for IT and then for operations is an ongoing thing.

It was implemented in-house. There are three of us who work on this and the intranet full-time. It is a combo role, and then I have two people on my team. They just added intranet to my role. So, it takes three of us just to make sure that we can support because we have so many different types of teams, but a smaller team wouldn't need as many. 

We deployed IT into Freshservice about eight months ago, and we reorged IT three times since then. It is a little bit difficult to quantify right now because the teams have been moving so much, but I do know that our teams are way happier with it.

We see that the metrics are getting better. Cherwell metrics were just so bad that even our baseline was so off. We had people who just wouldn't ever close tickets. I found tickets that were three years old in VIP status in Cherwell. It was just that they would just get lost in there. Now, we actually have visibility into that.

There are some additional costs but not that many. For example, we have unlimited assets, which is something for which we pay extra. We also paid for additional orchestration. I would rate it a three out of five in terms of pricing. They are right in the middle.

We went through ServiceNow. We went through Cherwell and then landed on Freshservice. They might have vetted other options, but that was before my time.

I would advise bringing somebody in who knows the product, at least as a part-time consultant. That's because a lot of times, they'll sell it as like, "Oh yeah, sure, just have your director of operations set it up." In some of the instances where I've done consulting work. it didn't work the way it should because one step was missed. It is very fixable, but that's also why it was not working. If you don't have someone who can dedicate time to learning how the workflows work and how to make things talk to each other within it, it can be frustrating.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. It is so much better by leaps and bounds than everything else that I've worked with.

We are in support. Zendesk is being used by the IT group help desk and also by our team. We are an internal team that supports SharePoint, Salesforce and Tableau. So we use it for tickets for customers' issues. And then of course I see folks use it for the help desk for everyone else internally.

In terms of the most valuable features, we like the SLA options and the reporting feature because it runs a report.

Additionally, it has good management, the ability to sign tickets based on content, multi-channel support, the self-service portal, the integration with Salesforce, the setup process, and the product features as we are currently using them.

We go in there and we set up our requests for how we want it for each of our groups, meaning for the Salesforce team, and so forth. And then we change it accordingly, adding different features or attributes based on the need, and then run reports.

In terms of what could be improved, it was not easy to set up so we're only using a third of all of the features, and we wanted something that was easier to configure and set up. I asked my director how come we don't just keep Zendesk because it doesn't cost anything, we're already paying for the file. Why would we turn around and buy a Cadillac, like ServiceNow for IT? He said because we're only using some of the features. We don't have anyone who has the skill set to do the configuration. And the way the service model is with ServiceNow, we have a team that uses it in our organization. So we have the internal expertise instead of relying on a vendor for support.

I have been using Zendesk Guide for probably three years. I believe we've been on the Core Optimization package.

Zendesk has been very stable. Which is why I was trying to understand why we were switching. The director said that there are other features that we want that ServiceNow offers and Zendesk doesn't. So instead of me learning about the new features, he wanted to go with ServiceNow from an infrastructure standpoint.

We are a service IT company. We have Zendesk for our employees internally and for external folks, but it's just used internally and ServiceNow is being used as a practice for external customers. They are also using it at ProKarma. They have the means so that experts can set up whatever we need. The director made a decision to go over and start using ServiceNow internally instead of Zendesk. I think he was more interested in ServiceNow from a roadmap perspective.

In terms of scalability, that wasn't even something that we were considering, just that there were so many things that ServiceNow does that Zendesk doesn't from an IT infrastructure perspective. And we were looking at those features for future-state from the roadmap, security, asset management, and so forth.

We only have about 24 people interfacing with Zendesk. They are admin or developers. Then there's a few BA who are mostly either engineer support for the help desk IT or they  belong to one of those internal groups that we support, Salesforce developers, SharePoint developers, or Tableau developers and architects. These are the people who need to resolve the tickets when there's an issue.

Our IT director set it up. He said he has some basic things in there, a very simple workflow, an SLA, a change management, and I do a few reports. I have a couple of things where I set up the processes so that certain things get kicked back to IT to follow up on. But he said he set up something that was very simple and basic, and it's working for him. But he knew that there were more features that he should be using but he didn't know how to use them. And then we found out from the vendor that there were a lot of features that were grandfathered in and we're not even utilizing those features. At that point I think he made a decision that from an infrastructure perspective there are other features that he wanted that ServiceNow provides that Zendesk doesn't. I think it was more on the infrastructure and security sides.

We are still in a contract with Zendesk until the end of the year. And then they will make the decision whether to switch or extend the contract. So nothing has been done at this point. 

It took less than three months to set up, maybe about eight weeks.

I don't know about the deployment because they haven't made any significant changes. All I know is it took about eight weeks to create the processes and the flows that we currently have.

We did the implementation and maybe used some internal resources to set it up.

The licensing is yearly and it's less than 30 grand, I believe. We had a lot of things that were grandfathered in, so we were using a lot of things - Zendesk Guide Professional, Zendesk Explore Professional, Zendesk Gather Professional and Zendesk Sunshine Lite. All of these things are not being leveraged today. So it looks like we were just using Zendesk Support Enterprise, and the vendor was sharing with us basically what we had and what we were using.

You really need to know how you are trying to service your customers to make a decision on whether or not to go with it. We were looking at three products, ServiceNow, Zendesk and Service Cloud. And you wanted the infrastructure component, the Cadillac version, right? All three different, too. That was another thing you really need to know - what are your requirements? What are your needs? And also look at your future roadmap. To me, those should have been the driving factors for making a decision. Just to clarify, those three solutions are the possible replacements if we decide to phase out the Zendesk Guide. We were looking at Service Cloud and I don't know if we made a decision on it because we are already using Salesforce.

They have a help desk for it, but it came with a cost where you had to pay for every user who actually wanted to use it. We have 3000 or 4000 employees. They also had some type of restricted user license and that can be very expensive if the company is growing. But that would be good. It would be something just to follow up on to find out with ServiceNow. 

The total cost of ownership was a significant differentiator for Zendesk. I thought they were very reasonable. ServiceNow is very expensive, and adding each component every time you want to add a module and you're taking a lot of money. And they still decided to go with it.

One of the things that they showed me in ServiceNow is that they have an asset management component. That was pretty cool. So when you assign a computer to someone, they actually had a picture and they basically had a little card. Anyway, it was easy to click on and set up. I thought that would have been nice if they had some type of asset management component. I think we were using Salesforce to do asset management. Anything that's related to the HelpDesk, where they're tracking your device, your phone, that kind of stuff. So, it would be nice if that was included.

To be honest with you, I thought Zendesk was a very good product. I didn't understand why we were moving to something else when we weren't using all of the features. Usually you use everything and then you outgrow that solution and look for a new solution. But to me that wasn't the case. So the biggest lesson for me was all three products. This is not an apple to apple comparison. You have to know what your requirements are and the roadmap, which is what I mentioned, but I didn't feel that Zendesk fell short at all. I felt management was making a decision without knowing what the future roadmap looked like. Meaning, when I say, "What do you want for the future?", "I don't know, but we are thinking about the infrastructure component" and then they decided to go off and do ServiceNow.

So I guess my lesson learned is to make sure your requirements and your future-state roadmap are all in alignment with your strategy. And I didn't feel that that was the case because I felt that they were making the decision without any ROI analysis to back it up. I'm being honest. That's how I felt. But I felt Zendesk didn't fall short. So what's the issue? And they just said, "We don't know how to do all of this stuff, and we already have an internal group that uses ServiceNow with the infrastructure components. So we're going to go with that product." I said, "it is going to cost a lot of money. They said they were okay with that. They thought that they could still bring down the cost based on their usage. And they went with it.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Zendesk Guide a seven.

To make it a ten, they should offer some more teachers to compete with the other folks for Help Desk, and other components like asset management. That was another thing that Service Cloud does. It's totally different. I had a feature matrix that showed me those comparisons. There was something that Service Cloud does that makes them more integrated. There was an issue with integration between Salesforce and Zendesk, but the vendor said they fixed that issue and now the integration should work. So that was another concern about just integrating with the internal tool, making sure it's an easier API connector, making it easier to integrate with other tools.

This product is used for our entire IT ticketing system.

We are now going to be using a module for IT asset management and I have started working with incident management. In two weeks from now, when we transition to version 3.0, I will be implementing change and problem management functionality.

We have three departments that use the same ticketing tool.

One of the reasons that I chose this product is that it's a Pink Elephant-certified tool. It has pretty much every module for ITIL processes.

I find the graphical user interface to be pretty comfortable because it's been customized as per my needs. It displays the information that I require and how I would like to see it.

The product is user-friendly, simple to use, and very lightweight. Compared to other tools, it is very fast. With a single click, I can bring up a dashboard with everything displayed the way I want it. Overall, it's pretty easy to use.

Prior to using Infraon Desk, I was using email to support our customers. I would receive an email request and I would respond the same way. I also dealt with support contractors via email and all of these emails were recorded in both directions. For each issue, we had to keep track of who sent the emails, what the ticket was for, and what support was provided.

Once this tool was implemented, I moved everything to it. However, the transition was easy for my customers because they are still able to send emails to create tickets. I did not want them to have to move to another method of requesting support if they were already used to something. I still have the same support mailbox and the customers use it, as well as the dev team. What changed is that I convert the emails to tickets when they come in.

To this point, I have not come across any security issues. Maybe once I start using the IT asset management module, CMDB data management, and the self-service portal, I will see whether I come across any problems. So far, I have had no incidents and things have been secure.

Infraon Desk is very flexible in nature and can be customized for my needs. The fact that I can customize it the way I want is the best part of the tool for me. The customization took longer than I expected to complete, although it may be the team that I was interacting with. They might not have had enough manpower in place. If enough resources are available then the customization is easy.

All of the information that I need for monitoring the entire platform is available on a single dashboard. This is very helpful with respect to managing.

The multi-channel ticketing options that this solution provides are very important to us because it's all about how we engage with our customers and what options we offer for them to communicate with us. Nowadays, there are many collaborative platforms and many methods for ticket logging. Every system of this type should be flexible enough to provide a mobile app, at least for Android and iOS, and not be confined to using Windows alone. Similarly, self-service portals as well as integration with Slack, as this product has, are important options that many people use. 

The version that I am using is very basic and I wouldn't say that it has extraordinary services capabilities that I've never seen before. I think that when I move to the improved platform in version 3, I might see more enhancements. My experience with version 1.0 is that it is not very extreme in terms of functionality.

Better connectivity and integration with more collaborative platforms would be helpful.

We have been using Infraon Desk for approximately two and a half years.

For the upcoming migration to version 3.0, there is a two-week period allotted and there is a four-day interruption anticipated. However, this is not confirmed yet.

We use Infraon across three departments, and it functions using a similar workflow for all three. That said, the requests may arrive in a different way. For example, a request going to one department may be different if it is an application request versus a customer service request. The latter might require more user-friendliness.

At this point, we only allow access to Infraon Desk from within the organization. As such, I have not explored options such as SLA tracking for third parties. It is my in-house technicians that use it, primarily. 90% of the users are IT and the other 10% is made up of various roles.

I don't expect that our usage will increase, at least in terms of needing to purchase additional licenses. Once the self-service portal is released and is used in production, I expect that between 14,000 and 20,000 people will explore it.

The post-installation support is flexible and very good. They're ready to support me when it comes to upgrades, and when I want further customization done, they help me with it.

I have not been in contact with support for reasons other than implementation, customization, and upgrades.

Overall, they are pretty supportive. I get responses from them, irrespective of the time or day of the week. I am happy with the support that I get.

In my 14 years of experience, I have used every ticketing system that is available on the market. I started with CA Unicenter and have since had experience with products such as Jira, Remedyforce, ServiceNow, Kaseya, and others. 

ServiceNow was my first choice and Infraon Desk is similar, although it is more customizable. Infraon Desk was the best choice for my budget, considering the features and customization that I wanted. It is also lightweight and with all things considered, it is the best choice for me.

In my previous company, I was using Infraon as a network monitoring tool, rather than as a ticketing tool. Prior to using Infraon Desk, the support tickets at this company were done manually via email. 

We had a couple of discussions with the vendor team and I explained to them what was required in our workflow, as well as what our customers require. They gave me a heads-up as to what could be done, what couldn't be done, and exactly what aspects could be completed only to a certain extent. In general, I didn't find that there were any challenges and what was discussed initially was there in the final product.

The length of time for deployment, which included requirements gathering, was approximately a month and a half. Our strategy involved launching it and then slowly upgrading and customizing it to match our requirements.

My first goal was email-to-ticket conversion, where I had the support tickets on the platform, rather than sitting in my mailbox. After this, I worked on customizing the dashboard, and then the solution went live. There were initially one or two dashboards.

Once it was in production, I thought about the service catalog for the different teams within IT. I customized the workflow and the goal of it was to have a single, plain workflow for each incident. Defining the SLAs was the final step.

I was the person responsible for the implementation. It was only myself on this site and there were perhaps two or three people from the vendor on the backend.

We did not use a third party to assist with deployment. However, I did originally make contact with Infraon through a consulting group named AspireNXT.

The people at AspireNXT are very good and I have been working with them since I started the company. When there is a gap in understanding with Infraon, for example, they fill it for me.

We have seen a return on investment although we have not compiled an official report to assess it.

The price of this solution is reasonable and it was well within my budget. There was a front-end implementation charge in addition to our standard enterprise licensing fee.

I am currently working on Version 1.0 but in two weeks, the company will be upgraded to version 3.0. It has much more advanced features available and the upgrade is already in progress.

One of the features that I am looking forward to in the latest version is the chatbot. Having a bot say "Hi", and then take the inputs and automatically raising a ticket is something that will be very helpful. 

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is to explore it. Many people have not tried it and instead, implemented something that they have used before, or have heard about, such as ServiceNow. I also did this but after exploring Infraon Desk, I was confident that it could do everything that I wanted. I definitely recommend it.

To summarize, I'm entirely happy with the product. That said, I can't rate it perfect because of the features that are currently unavailable in the version that I am using.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

As a solution architect and developer working on service management and HR, many of my projects cover the development of modules for

• operations management,
  
• project management,
  
• finance management,
  
• resource management, 
• governance,
  
• risk and compliance,
  

and more, typically within the sphere of business management in general.

For me and my team, ServiceNow Now Platform has many capabilities that we  leverage to bring solutions to the problem statements in these areas, mainly according to agile methodology.

If we are required, for example, to extend an application to external or internal users of your company, we would use ServiceNow to help with this process. Specifically, in this case, we would use HRSD (HR Service Delivery) which interlinks all of your own employees, external users, and others. The CSM part of ServiceNow aids in linking all your business services that are being used by service providers and everyone else, and it enables you to derive your own organizational service management structure exactly as you want it.

ServiceNow also provides a powerful system that gives you ample information on what has broken and where, and offers plenty of solutions for fixing those things, particularly when it comes to orchestration, which really extends your capability for automation. You could say that it brings a sort of intelligence into your organization with its various features and functionalities. 

Having implemented ServiceNow Now Platform for many global clients with millions of users over the years, I have seen it in use across vendors, former resources, internal resources, external resources, and amongst these in many different ways and through many different applications.

Our standard deployment environment nowadays is via the cloud, and we don't keep anything on-premise. However, I have previously implemented ServiceNow Now Platform on-premises during the initial stages of working with ServiceNow in the banking sector where we deployed it on-premise, but they eventually never released it. This work mainly involved the ITSM and operations part of ServiceNow Now Platform.

We also utilize ServiceNow to help take care of cloud and asset management, such as when dealing with the licensing for Azure, Amazon Web Services, and so on. Then there's the work I've done with ServiceNow Security Operations, which involved using various SecOps modules for security incidents, etc., and which required integrations with tools such as Tanium, Splunk, and Azure Security Management. Here we used ServiceNow to generate the events, security incident alerts, and more, and currently we still have remediation tasks being completed in ServiceNow, where the risk assessment features and other solutions are in place to orchestrate everything.

The customer service management aspect of ServiceNow Now Platform lets you create your own custom organizational service management structure just the way you want it, while providing a troubleshooting system that helps you figure out what's broken and how to fix it with multiple possible solutions. ServiceNow's orchestration mechanisms also help to extend an organization's automation capabilities in such a way as to bring a real sort of intelligence to the table.

At this point, over and above what ServiceNow actually is, the key is that it's really nothing but a web service. Whether it's a form or anything, the best part is that you can easily leverage anything of ServiceNow for any application anywhere just by calling the REST endpoints and handling the request messages.

Let's say you want to onboard new users or customers, import new company details, or add any different type of data — with ServiceNow Now Platform, this becomes easy. As a concrete example, suppose you have some users on Active Directory, some on LDAP, and some on your own cloud, you can integrate all of these users and uniquely manage them with ease thanks to how mature ServiceNow is in terms of scalability and flexibility. 

Concerning the new features that they're releasing, it does feel as if something is missing in terms of customization options.

Something else I have noticed is that ServiceNow don't give you much support when it comes to implementing functionality that you have developed yourself.

That said, I think ServiceNow has become a major contender in this market and many other solutions are simply following in ServiceNow's wake. There are a lot of improvements happening all the time, and the way in which it has grown over a decade of development really tells its own story. Nowadays, it's a constantly-evolving centralized application that provides ample solutions for both businesses and developers.

One example of an area in which I have seen their improvements is in AI, which, after the past few years, is finally becoming mature and enabling better automation and intelligence at the end-users' side. 

I have been using ServiceNow Now Platform for about four or five years.

The stability is quite advanced and much improved these days. Previously, I saw that there were a few glitches or immature functionality being introduced, but right now it's being standardized according to the industry, particularly in areas such as AI automation. I believe they have improved a lot since they started.

ServiceNow Now Platform is really quite a scalable solution, whether you're talking about leveraging ServiceNow for other applications or onboarding new users, customers, companies, data, etc. You can do these things very easily, even when you're working with multiple disparate technologies such as AD, LDAP, or your own access control system in the cloud, and all of this is handled in a mature, reliable manner.

Having been in a team where many of us have experience with ServiceNow for 10+ years, I have seen how it has grown and evolved into the scalable platform that it is now. Through all the implementations I've done for different global clients, I've seen millions of users using it successfully.

There are sometimes instances where you need the support for whatever reason. In general, I would give them a four out of five rating.

Positive

The initial setup is easy. Let's suppose you already know what you have to keep where, after that it's such a simple process that any average Joe who knows how to initiate his own service management can easily update the information and get working on it. It's not a big deal, and the installation gives you everything you need to get started with a guided setup such that anyone can quickly jump in and initiate ServiceNow. The way it is developed means that it's quite effortless for users to onboard themselves quickly and easily, simply by adding the required information.

As for the actual deployment, it's a matter of how you plan it. There are many implementations that start out according to the greenfield process. By greenfield, I mean arranging your environment from scratch and then introducing your company details, group details, UTI, and so on. Once that is achieved, you can easily add any other applications you want. And, of course, the internal modules such as discovery can be brought into your organizational scheme with even further ease.

ServiceNow is not open source, so there is a license you must pay. As for how much it costs, what I have observed is that it often depends on your subscriptions. Suppose that you go with some subscriptions such as IDSM or any type of package like it, then the license cost will be impacted accordingly. Similarly, the cost is also adjusted based on your headcount of how many users will be using it.

Compared to other contenders who give you the cheapest in the market, you will find a huge difference when it comes to ServiceNow and its subscriptions. However, I would definitely say it is worth the money.

My advice to others who are looking to get started with ServiceNow Now Platform is to reach out to your implementation partners, because they will have the experience and solutions required to help you get where you want to be with this product. ServiceNow is a vast application, but thankfully there are a variety of different solutions that can be easily adopted and managed according to your particular organizational structure.

I would rate ServiceNow Now Platform a ten out of ten.

Our primary use case for this solution is an IT ticketing system. We have a lot of entities within the company use this system, such as procurement, HR, legal, etc. IT also uses it for a few other projects like asset management, change management, or any ITSM model/method.

We have a lot of automation running from our HR system to IT Care Center. When a ticket has been raised to us, we can notify hiring managers on the status of every employee. We also get notifications in Slack for every ticket opened. 

IT Care Center has helped us simplify our IT service management. It is much simpler compared to the situation that we had before, e.g., designing a form, changing a form, doing a bit of adjustment, creating new categories, and onboarding new departments to IT Care Center.

We have reduced the number of tickets that we received based on IT Care Center analytics. I created a few dashboards for IT and the management teams. Therefore, I managed to reduce the number of tickets compared to last year and the previous year. The yearly reduction was approximately 10 to 15 percent each year. Every quarter, we are checking the tickets. For the top 10 categories, we are automating the top 10 pain points. So, if we have a lot of tickets for a specific app, then we are trying to automate them with a script. We are doing some pre-tasks. For example, if it's regarding new hires, we set everything in advance and have managed to decrease the number of new hires tickets by 10 to 20 tickets for the first three months of deployment.

The most valuable IT Care Center features are the ones that we requested especially for our environment. We have integrations with Slack. We also have integrations from our computer management systems that run daily and sync with IT Care Center.

I am using the APEX forms and entities. For example, when I want to design a special form for a special entity or department in the company, sometimes I go to the APEX and develop a form, workflows, schedules, emails, etc. I can develop these from scratch. ;When we moved from ServiceNow to IT Care Center, it was very important for us to have a system that we could develop ourselves. Because in ServiceNow, we had to develop everything with an external company, and we don't want dependencies.

We have tickets that are being closed with Canned Response. Once the ticket has been closed, we get an article to act/work on. This has reduced tickets, e.g., once a user receives a Canned Response, then they can save the link to the article, etc.

IT Care Center must improve the UI because it looks old-fashioned all the time. They must improve the design and maybe provide more admin training.

They should have full integration with SSO services, like Okta, creating a full service solution.

It is not responsive for mobile. Currently, it is half HTML and half browsing in mobile. The display is not suitable for use. This needs to be fixed. 

It would also be great to have more administration features because they only support Windows environments.

I have been using this solution for two and a half years (since January 1st, 2019). 

The solution is quite stable. We have had two or three downtimes since we started using it.

IT Care Center is very scalable. If the company grows, it can support an increase of servers and resources.

900 people are end users of this solution in our organization, and 49 of them are administrators of it. 

IT Care Center is very easy to use when it comes to flexibility and customization. I still need some support, like on really new features or stuff that I still don't know how to use, because there is a lot of work on the APEX platform. I can't do everything. However, from the two or three sessions that I had with the support, I learned to create and develop a form, workflows, etc.

IT Care Center's tech support was great for us during and after deployment. Every time that I needed help, they were available.

We have requested things from them that weren't on their roadmap.

We switched to IT Care Center from ServiceNow because we couldn't do anything with Service Now without professional support. The main reason that we selected That's IT: We did an RFI and received the best results from That's IT. 

With ServiceNow, we had to pay for every little thing. This costed a lot of money. With IT Care Center, it is one license and everything is paid.

The initial setup was straightforward. We managed to move from the old system to the new one in two weeks. We exported all the data from the other system and loaded it into the new one. Creating the form, category, and entity were straightforward. 

We implemented this solution with the help of a vendor. Overall, five people from their side and three or four from our IT department worked on deployment. 

We have seen a return on our investment with this solution based on the analytics that we have. We have a lot of dashboards. We managed to improve processes internally. We have a one stop shop for every solution.

We reduced our costs compared to our previous solution, which was really expensive. We managed to reduce costs by half by switching to IT Care Center, not including any professional services.

IT Care Center's price was in the middle, where Freshservice was the lowest and SysAid was the highest. The solution's price is fair. Regarding the value that we are getting from the system, it is a win-win situation for both sides. We have really contributed to them over the past few years when developing new integrations with the Slack onboarding system. 

Under the basic pricing model, there are no surprises. If you want something special, then you have to pay extra.

We evaluated SysAid and Freshservice. We didn't go with Freshservice because this solution wasn't mature enough for our environment. While SysAid was mature enough, the UI and workflows were quite complex. SysAid's price was also quite high.

For our organization, it is important that all IT Care Center modules are included in a single license. If you are looking for a one stop shop, you don't want to pay every time for a new feature. You want the flexibility. If you are looking at an ITSM system that has a lot of out-of-the-box capabilities, you want everything in one place. If you want to implement a new model, you shouldn't have to pay for it. 

How you use IT Care Center will depend on how your organization builds. I saw some really nice projects and implementations on Microsoft environments that an admin developed from scratch, like working with APEX and building out of the portal. This product has a lot of capabilities. If you are using the out-of-the-box solution, then you must suit it to your organization. If you are building from scratch, it can do amazing things. 

I don't have any automations in IT Care Center. I have a few daily things running from our directory which sync all users to IT Care Center, but nothing like automated workflows yet.

I would rate this solution as a seven and a half or eight out of 10.