ServiceNow Now Platform Reviews

Currently, I work with ITSM and HR modules in ServiceNow, with some integrations with other third-party solutions, and the core of my experience is based on that.

For example, my recent project is related to HR, and we are helping the customer define all the HR processes based on the customer's requirements. We have managed all the cases in the organization for 120,000 users. It's a global client in the world, and we are responsible for creating and defining all the processes to manage all the cases in the organization.

In HR, we are across all the features of the HR model. We have created the portals for each one of the countries in the customer and all the service catalogs. After that, for particular customer processes, we are using HR to define them and implement them in that firm.

The simplicity is great. Based on my experience with other solutions in the market, the most important is the simplicity of implementing all the features that we have in ServiceNow and helping customers to simplify the work process in the daily journeys that they have.

It is easy to set up the product.

The interface is perfect.

It's very stable.

The scalability is great.

In ServiceNow, it's difficult to mention some points, as I have other experiences with other solutions, and the gap between ServiceNow and the other ones is huge. There are no missing features. 

The price is a bit high and can be a bit of a barrier for some customers.

I've used the solution for about four years. 

The solution is very stable. You are talking about 99.9% of the stability that that solution has. It's great.

The solution can scale well. It is very good.

They offer very good support. With ServiceNow we can define priorities based on impact and the urgency in our cases. We are open to ServiceNow support and ServiceNow manages responses very well.

The implementation of the process is very straightforward and simple. 

How many people you need for deployment and maintenance depends on if you are looking only for the base implementation. I'd say two or three people are enough to deploy the solution. It does vary based on the requirements of the project and customer, however, two or three people are enough.

The solution is very expensive. 

We are a partner. We deal with different versions of the product. Right now, we are using San Diego.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It's not something for everybody. However, we have a team of people that can justify a proof of concept. The company needs to be mature to get some real functionality out of it. If the company doesn't have the maturity, it may be a bad investment. 

The incident management has been the most useful feature for us.

I want ServiceNow to be more customizable, especially the incident management module. The fields cannot be added right now. If you want the users to input different kinds of fields which are specific to a certain product, it is difficult to do.

I have been using this solution for three years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. 

The technical support of ServiceNow is really good. I'm very happy with it.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. 

The pricing of this solution is done annually and it is very expensive.

This is a great workflow tool that offers great support. The reporting capabilities need to be improved, otherwise we need to pay for performance analytics. 

I would rate it a seven out of ten. 

I mainly use Now Platform for change management and IT services, like if there are any issues with logins.

Now Platform's best features are collaboration, configurability, and customizability. I also like that there are multiple ways you can access ServiceNow data through the API.

I've been working with Now Platform for two months.

Now Platform is very stable.

Now Platform is scalable.

I previously worked with BMC Remedy, but I prefer Now Platform as it's more user-friendly.

The initial setup requires a lot of customization based on the individual company's processes. I would say the setup process is medium complex and would rate it as three out of five.

I would give Now Platform a rating of nine out of ten.

I am actually a development expert within the ServiceNow platform. So I implemented ServiceNow for some of our customers as well as within our company. I help them to implement some applications customers and configure what they need from the suite of management applications available within ServiceNow.  

The most important thing we use this solution for is IT service management where users implement processes like incident management, problem management, or chain management. Incident management and problem management at its simplest can be a system whereby any user in an organization can report a defect. Say I am a user and my email is not working and I want to raise a ticket to get the problem solved. I use ServiceNow for raising that ticket. Another example is that if I want to implement new software, I need may need to raise a change request, so I do that in ServiceNow. 

We are always on the latest version. There is a new version every six months, so there are two releases every year. That means every time there is a new release I have to upgrade, update my knowledge about the changes by becoming familiar with the changes, and then we have to upgrade the program for the customers as well.  

The workflow feature really has a lot of value because you can create workflows in a simple, intuitive way. With a few clicks, you can actually develop quite a complex workflow using tool and product life cycles and so on. So, the workflow feature, in my opinion, is the strongest feature in the ServiceNow platform.  

There are several areas of the product that could use improvement. From a vendor point of view, I had an opportunity to work with them on their licensing model. It still needs some improvement in the way the licensing model works because it is a little bit complex and difficult to understand. They change it from time-to-time and sometimes they do not communicate those changes effectively to their partners. Put simply, the licensing model is something that can be simplified and made more visible to both the partners and the customers or end-users. Currently, the product is comparatively quite expensive and lowering the cost would likely produce a better response from customers.  

I know that the company is at work on many new things right now. But one thing I would expect to see in the next few releases is vertical-specific solutions. For example, say solutions for banking or healthcare-specific solutions. I believe they are going to come up with at least a draft version of this type of solution for some industries over the next few releases.  

We have been using this solution since about 2016. So it is almost four years now.  

I have complete confidence in the stability of the platform. It is very stable.  

ServiceNow is very easy to scale — that is if the customer has the money to spend. It is quite easy to take on new licenses. It is very scalable.  

Our customers can be any size business but in my personal experience, I work with medium to large customers. The solution is something that is used on a daily basis.  

We have been in touch with their technical support and it is quite responsive and they are very good about providing solutions. We have a dedicated technical support desk that is quite approachable. For now, everything is quite good.  

Before ServiceNow, I used other solutions, but mostly they were custom-built applications. For example, I used to code and develop an application from scratch. ServiceNow is the first product I have used software that is a dedicated service desk product.  

I would say that from my point of view that configuring ServiceNow is pretty simple. But there are also a lot of things to consider. If you want to build a complex system, the configuration process can be complex as well. If you understand the software, you get a standard set of functionalities, but you can configure that for your own needs. For example, I had a situation where I knew a particular customer had some different requirements than what was provided out-of-the-box for the standard version. In this case, I was able to configure ServiceNow to match their needs. I can write complex scripts or I can do programming to build new processes within ServiceNow. But the implementation is different for every customer.  

How long the implementation takes becomes a very open-ended question because they have so much existing functionality already in the product that may need to be configured and the need for customization depends on the user's requirements. There are so many factors involved that I can not really define an absolute amount of time required for standard implementation. It depends on the use case. The basic installation of the application itself can be done in ten minutes and the solution can be made to be up and running within three months. However, if you want to have a complex, custom-built chain management process, it can take years.  

I am from a software development company and I work as a consultant as well as an architect for projects. Our operating model is that we work directly with the customer and we do the consultancy, we get into workshops with customers and discover their requirements and then our development team starts working on those requirements. So we have two levels. One is as a consultant who helps to finalize the requirements and the other is as developers who satisfy the requirements that have been defined.  

As far as how many people it takes for the deployment of the platform, that can not be determined as a set number either as it requires knowing the scope of the project and perhaps other factors like the expected timeline.  

We use a public cloud, but as our customer, you get a private instance. So you can think of it as an environment you can have in the cloud that is indicated for a particular customer.  As a customer, you do not get visibility as to whether it is in a public or private cloud. From a customer point of view, you do not know that or it is invisible to you. But in the backend, it now maintains their data and the platform using both AWS and Azure in the background and they use the cloud for that.  

The licensing price for ServiceNow is somewhat high. The pricing depends on the number of users. For a similar type of application, the price of licensing for ServiceNow is on the high side. Actually it is 20% to 30% more than the nearest competitor.  

There are technically not any additional costs besides the licensing fees from a customer point of view for the product. But, if they want to implement an application in ServiceNow, they may also have to pay for a developer's team to implement the solution. Once development is complete, they probably have to spend some amount for supporting and maintaining the application and customization, so that will also be included as an additional cost for the company using the solution even if it is not a direct cost for the product.  

We have evaluated other products but within my company, I only work with the ServiceNow project and I have been doing this for the last four years. Sometimes part of our customer engagement requires that we do comparative studies. For example, we had a request from a client to do a feature comparison with the Pega platform. I got some detailed information from Pega's product development and other resources to compare with ServiceNow and did the comparison in that way. But in terms of development or implementation experience, I do not have any direct experience with Pega.  

The foremost thing I would like to recommend to people considering ServiceNow is not to try to reconfigure or customize the out-of-the-box process too much. Stick to the out-of-the-box processes that are provided as much as possible and use minimal customizations. We used to say to our customers to use maximum configuration but minimum customization.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate the ServiceNow product overall as at least an eight.  

We use the solution for workflows. We'll build custom workflows and key and ticket queues. It's used to cover data center needs - everything from 800-number incoming calls to full outage and incident reporting. It handles a lot of aspects, including shipping and receiving as well as property management workflows. It's being used as a client-facing workflow system. 

Any kind of customer setup can be done on ServiceNow.

It can do anything so long as you throw enough money at it. 

It can integrate anywhere, and you can make any kind of workflow or SLA management.

Compared to Jira, ServiceNow is too heavy. It's not user-friendly. The solution isn't ideal for non-technical people. 

It's not quick or cheap. 

While it is very customizable, it's hard to get there.

Technical support could be more helpful. 

The technical support is not super helpful. You need to do a lot of work yourself. 

Neutral

I'm beginning to consider Jira as an alternative. It's lighter and easier to use. Also, Jira does a lot more updates centrally to their system than ServiceNow does. However, I haven't yet vetted it as an ITSM.

The solution isn't very user-friendly and is a very heavy lift for when you are starting and setting up custom setups. 

In terms of maintenance, our IT department is only so big. It does require maintenance in terms of customization, and that can be a lot. 

The solution is expensive. 

We're customers and end-users. 

It doesn't offer an on-premises option. It's all SaaS.

I'd advise potential users to look at it carefully and take time, depending on your runway. If you are an enterprise that has a full year of runway and the resources for ServiceNow and needs customizations, it may be fine. If a company isn't at the enterprise level, it might prefer a more streamlined ITSM option. 

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. It really can do anything in terms of workflow and ticketing. It's just hard. It really depends on how many resources you can throw at it in terms of time and money.

We primarily use the solution for ticketing or reporting.

It's like a No-Code Development Platform or Rapid Application Development Software.

It's user-friendly. It's easy to use even if you don't have prior experience using the platform.

The initial setup is very straightforward. 

It's stable and reliable. 

Technical support is helpful. 

Reports could be generated in a more user-friendly or simple way. If we could merge two data tables, which is a bit complicated here in ServiceNow, that would be ideal. 

There is no facility in ServiceNow to transfer a ticket from one team to another team, and there is no tracking. We'd like more ticket management. 

Bug and defect management are not available in ServiceNow. 

I've been using the solution for the last two or three years. 

The solution is stable and reliable. The performance is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The look and feel will keep changing. However, the product and the quality of the product are really good.

I'm not sure about the scalability. I've never tried to scale the product.

We have more than 1,000 users on the solution. It's used on a daily basis. 

It's very easy to chat with support or log a ticket with them. They get back to you with answers. They are helpful and knowledgeable. 

Positive

I initially used the HP ALM tool. It's very good for tracking bugs and finding defects. The issue with Service Now is that every time you come across a problem, you need to make a ticket, and that's a challenge. 

The initial setup is very straightforward and simple. It's not overly complex. 

I'd rate the initial setup a five out of five. 

I'm not aware of the exact pricing. 

We're a customer. 

I would rate the solution nine out of ten. 

I'll definitely recommend this solution to others since it's user-friendly. It's very easy, so you can create very good reports in it. You can track your data in a very efficient way. It's a very good tool.

Incident management, change request management, HR-related features, product management, and asset management are all valuable features.

We do analytics on top of these features as well.

The Robotic Process Automation features are not mature enough. ServiceNow could work toward that because we can leverage RP only from this platform.

Predictive intelligence could be fine-tuned as well.

All of the features are already there in ServiceNow, but they need to be mature enough to be utilized by bigger organizations.

We partnered with ServiceNow almost 15 to 20 years ago.

It's quite stable, which is actually the reason why we use it heavily.

It's quite scalable.

ServiceNow's technical support has been quite helpful. They assign account managers, and we are able to escalate issues as well.

The initial setup is straightforward. Because we are using the cloud version, we don't have to install it on the end user's machine; we just provide the URL and access to it.

We have a technology and operations team with 25 to 30 people for the global maintenance of the solution.

Some parts of the implementation process are done in-house. For others, we partner with consultants.

Most of the features are included in the licensing cost. However, if we need extra plugins that are not available at the ServiceNow Hub or store, then we have to pay extra for those.

ServiceNow Now Platform is quite useful, scalable, and flexible. The user interface is very good.

I would recommend it to other organizations and rate it at eight on a scale from one to ten.

We use this solution for taking calls, logging calls, and assigning calls.

We have just moved over to ServiceNow Out-of-the-Box, which is the general platform.

This solution is deployed in a hybrid-cloud environment.

In the past, we only had a solution that we could use locally. This solution has helped us to go global with our IT service management support. We were able to scale it much quicker and support the organization globally.

We have seen a big improvement in the experience that we want to create for our end users. The catalog used to be separated from the IT service, but now we have both of them running from the same platform. This means that we can quickly deploy solutions based on the request from our users.

The integration makes it easier for the end-users, as they can track the status of their incidents and their requests, and they can put in a new request. This one platform, where the end-users can manage all of their demands and see all of their devices, including their cell phone contracts, makes our lives easy. The end-users used to have multiple reference numbers and now there is one that a request or incident is linked to. They get updates, similar to the Amazon platform, where you can see the status of your order and you know how far away they are.

The most valuable feature of this solution is cataloging the requests, which allows us to speed up the process and improve the user experience.

The knowledge management feature is now continuously learning from incidents.

In the next release of this solution, we would like to see mobile capability.

We would like to see AI used to automate some of the functionality in this solution.

We are impressed with the stability of this platform. We are part of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Even with multiple languages, it was easy to adopt and to provide users in their respective countries with language enabled according to their needs.

This is a very scalable solution.

Technical support for this solution is excellent. We have had the technologists visit us. They were part of the implementation. Overall, the support we are receiving from this vendor is excellent.

When we implemented and set up this solution for the first time, we did some customization. Now that we have adopted the Out-of-the-Box version, it means less customization. We are taking an "As-Is" solution so that we can use more capabilities for customizing it.

We made use of a service integrator to assist us with the implementation and deployment. We didn't deploy with our own team. These people were qualified and know the product very well, so our experience was very good. The platform providers were also supporting the service integrators.

We did evaluate other options before choosing this solution, but we found this to be an excellent product. We call it the SAP of IT Management.

We chose this product mainly because of the capabilities that it offered, and how they matched what we needed.

The biggest lesson that we learned through implementing this solution is that it is important not to customize. Rather, take the product offering best practices and adopt it with its own processes. This makes scaling much easier. Whereas if you customize it and if you build your own version, it becomes difficult to scale, support, and do the official upgrades. This is why we have taken the Out-of-the-Box version and have adopted the processes that come with it. It is working and we don't have to change it too much.

This is a very good solution, but there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.