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it_user458958 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
Real User
The ease of use is great, whether it be for someone like me who's an administrator and developer, or just the end user in general.

What is most valuable?

The ease of use is great, whether it be for someone like me who's an administrator and developer, or just the end user in general. The fact that it's cloud-based, so you can access it from anywhere as long as you have a browser, or a smartphone. The overall ease of use is great.

What needs improvement?

The whole mobile aspect seems to be the key. People are still working, they’re not at their desks, so they need an easy way to work. I think that's going well in that direction. It seems like ServiceNow as a company has a pretty good vision on where they are, where they should be and it really matches up well with what we're looking to do.

For how long have I used the solution?

We've been using it for just about a year now.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The availability has been great. Any issues we've come up with we've been able to easily rectify with working with support, so I would say it's definitely great.

Buyer's Guide
ServiceNow
September 2025
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What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Right now we pretty much just deployed it for IT use. We're getting ready to deploy it for some of our organizations outside of IT like our broadcast operations, our repeater, even facilities, so I think the future is looking good.

How are customer service and support?

Probably the best that I've ever dealt with. Really knowledgeable. Usually pretty quick on getting back with you. Their website, wiki, and community are great. Probably the best support I've ever dealt with in my twenty plus years in the industry.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I've been in this industry so long. Prior to this I'd been working with Remedy for about fifteen years or so. This takes me back to the really old Remedy days when it was a really great product, before they were bought out by a big company, where there was a great community and great conferences.

How was the initial setup?

It's pretty straightforward. We worked with a partner, Logic Callus to help us get setup. We had a hard date because we were coming off of an existing cloud system, so we had to really push hard to make it in that time frame, but we were up and running incident change, problem, and service catalog in two months. Basically what we had allotted for. It was pretty seamless.

What other advice do I have?

I would tell you to take a look at it. It's a great product. Get a demo and get familiar with it, because you can pretty much do anything you need to do with it.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
it_user459030 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of IT at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
Real User
Originally we rolled it out for ITSM because we were using different tools which weren't integrated.

Valuable Features

Originally when we first rolled out, it was obviously the fact that we had full IT service management in one area. We were extremely scattered and had many different tools all over the place and none of them were integrated. That was our initial sell feature for us.

As time has gone on and ServiceNow has evolved and matured, we are loving the ease of the product. Each year, each version, each release they come out with is all that much more configurable for us. One of the biggest things for us is the fact that we've had the opportunity to be a partner with them and have had the opportunity to have some input and feedback on their product to begin with and have seen some of that that have come to fruition. In fact, I just saw a demonstration and there were several things that I know were a part of suggesting and the input that they received from their customers.

Room for Improvement

I hadn't really thought much beyond the improvements that I'm seeing that they're putting out in Helsinki. My organization is currently on the Fuji release. We were going to be upgrading to the Geneva release in July. One of the things we were coming here [to Knowledge16] specifically to look at is jumping on the release and going straight from Fuji to Helsinki. Considering some of the things that I just saw that they rolled out, I'm going to be pushing pretty hard for that.

Many of the things that we felt needed a little bit more shoring up was their CMBD product and their discovery, they seem to have covered that in the Helsinki release. I'm not really thinking of what the next step is going to be at this point. I was wowed with Helsinki, so at this point I'm looking forward to rolling that in and working with it.

Use of Solution

We implemented it back in 2011.

Scalability Issues

I like the scalability of it. We need an instance that we will have it within 24 hours. In fact, we have several instances in the Cloud. We have our production instance, we have a test instance, and we have four development instances.

Customer Service and Technical Support

I'm not necessarily involved in the day to day support that we would have to reach out to. Our architect is more involved with that. However, I do know that I have been the contributor of a few of the bugs that have been found. They seem to be very responsive, work with our developer and our architect team and work through the issues.

Initial Setup

When we started out, we did it in phases. Our very first phase was the change management application in a very condensed version of the incident management application. Phase two rolled out in late 2014. At that point, we went to a full incident management application. We revamped our change management application, rolled out problem service catalog, discovery, our CMDB. We have quite a few, some 38, applications that are currently turned on. They were pretty basic and we've been over the years developing and expanding those.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. We're partners
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
ServiceNow
September 2025
Learn what your peers think about ServiceNow. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: September 2025.
868,759 professionals have used our research since 2012.
it_user459036 - PeerSpot reviewer
Applications Analyst at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Vendor
The integration and automation are most valuable.

What is most valuable?

The integration and automation are most valuable.

What needs improvement?

Their debugging tool. Sometimes it's hard to debug some of the scripts because once Javascript fails, it doesn't really tell you why. It just skips over it and It keeps going. That's probably the biggest room for improvement.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used it for about a year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We've not experienced any downtime whatsoever.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We got ServiceNow to build apps for our company. That's what we're really using tit for our business relationship with customers outside IT.

How are customer service and technical support?

They're responsive, had no problems with them. Any time we did have an issue, we submitted a ticket, and they'll get right back to you and call you. I haven't had any problems personally.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We were using email. It was pretty bad and we were dropping the ball often.

What other advice do I have?

It's a great tool. I would say people need to get their processes correct before they get the tool because that really drives what ServiceNow is. You have to be somewhat oriented for the tool to work. Once you get oriented, it'll drive that process but if you had that process beforehand the tool is going to keep going.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
ServiceNow Engineer at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
The ability to create applications that follow a standard workflow is key for us.

Valuable Features

I would say the ability to create applications that follow a standard workflow as well as record producers. We handle a lot of requests from our entire university. The biggest thing is giving our users a service catalog with a bunch of simple items, most of them are record producers, some of them need a workflow, just allowing them to go in and very simply submit request. For us that's probably the most valuable feature.

Room for Improvement

They've gotten to a pretty good place with where they are right now. I think a lot of it is going to be that citizen developer, making things a little bit easier to interface with. I really like the new rest messaging they put in there that allows for much easier integrations. I like most of the new application stuff and the IDE. I'd say from here, just smoothing out that whole IDE development process, making it easier to make changes to global in the IDE if that's where they really want us. Some improvements are probably needed there but I don't have anything massive on my list that ServiceNow needs to do.

Use of Solution

I've personally used it for about four years.

Stability Issues

I had no issues. When there is potential for a downtime, they always email me and let me know. Even when I get those emails, I've experienced mild hiccups but beyond that, I've never been locked out for more than maybe 30 seconds in 4 years.

Scalability Issues

When we started, we had about 35-40 IT folks inside of ServiceNow, plus probably about a thousand end-users logging in for self-service. Now we've probably about quadrupled that at this point and run into very little snags. I would say the biggest thing with scalability for us from a ServiceNow perspective is just make sure your user data matches whatever you're using elsewhere. We use single sign on and we need to make sure that the user data in ServiceNow matches that so that users can actually get in when they're supposed to get in.

Customer Service and Technical Support

It's mostly good. I would say there had been times where it's taking a long time for a resolution. Sometimes that's probably just due to the fact that whatever I'm submitting is not that important. I'll happily admit that.

I've had some issues that have taken four to five months to get fixed. Again, we're not talking the show stoppers. When I needed something, I've had probably two cases in the last few years where it's just been absolutely integral, like I'd get an answer right now. They were pretty good in those situations.

Other Advice

I would tell you that for me and for what our business uses, I highly recommend it, but that you should look at their business case and see if you need a product as fully-featured as ServiceNow is because it comes at a cost. Depending on what your needs are, it's possible to look at other products. There are a lot of similar products out there. ServiceNow is probably not the cheapest but if you have a specific set of needs particularly the ease of building applications, request forms, stuff I mentioned earlier, I think it's the best product on the market.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
it_user459057 - PeerSpot reviewer
Supervisor of Training and QA at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
Vendor
I like the adaptability and the flexibility of the tool.

Valuable Features

I like the adaptability and the flexibility of the tool. We've had a number of ideas, "Hey, I wish there was a way we could do this." and "Oh, well, let's make that happen." Then very quickly we were able to figure out a way to make it work and now there's a way we can make that happen. That's the best thing about it.

Room for Improvement

I think the biggest thing that I've seen is when we've moved to the knowledge-based version three, which happened relatively recently, there were a lot of new improvements that came with that, but there were a lot of things that actually seemed like a little bit of a step back. What we're hoping is that some of that's just like, "We wanted to present you with this new tool and we're going to add some of these things back in later on." There's a lot of the flexibility that we've come to expect from ServiceNow that seem to be gone in that new version.

Use of Solution

I've personally used it for about three years.

Stability Issues

We have the occasional problems with slowness, but I can't remember a single instance where it's been completely down.

Scalability Issues

For the foreseeable future, I think it's what we're going to stick with.

Customer Service and Technical Support

The support's been excellent. Our local rep has been excellent and I haven't personally reached out to technical support or anything, but I have been using the community and that's been great to have. The Wikis is an excellent resource so there's a lot of resources out there.

Initial Setup

I wasn't there in our initial setup but our upgrades have been relatively painless.

Other Advice

I would absolutely recommend it. We're a little bit of a unique case in a lot of ways because we were on ServiceNow a couple years ago and we actually moved away from it, because we're running Salesforce for the rest of our university for case management. There was a mandate that we wanted everything to be in Salesforce, so we actually moved away from ServiceNow to Remedyforce. It was a disaster and about a year later we moved back to ServiceNow. I think it's an interesting demonstration of the fact that it's such a good product that even after we moved away from it we came back.

A lot of pain and tears went into that migration. We didn't really want to do another migration eight months later, but it was so worth it to do it. It's absolutely worth the investment of time and effort to do it.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
it_user459087 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engagement Manager at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees
Consultant
It can be taken out of the box and used with minimal custom configuration.

Valuable Features

It's ease of use, extensibility and just the ability to take it out of the box and use it with minimal custom configuration.

Room for Improvement

The documentation needs work. The wiki is woefully inadequate. I support federal customers, there's a separate US government approval process to use instances, and we're behind the rest of the public community. For instance, we don't even have permission to use Geneva yet, and Helsinki is already out. I know they're working on it and it's going to be faster, but right now it's a challenge. You see all these new features and we can't go out and use them until the government says we can.

Use of Solution

I've been using it since 2009.

Stability Issues

We've had no issues with the performance.

Scalability Issues

It's been able to scaler for our needs.

Customer Service and Technical Support

They're inconsistent. Depending on who you get, they may or may not be able to immediately provide the kind of response you need and sometimes they take a while to do it.

I wouldn't say that I use the community a lot. I think our developers do, and I'm not a developer. They go out and use it more than I do.

Initial Setup

It was easy to set up.

Other Advice

I would recommend it. I think the biggest challenge with all of the functionality that exists in ServiceNow today is to figure out where to start, and having a narrow strategy so that when you do buy it you don't try to do everything at once and get nothing done. A lot of the sessions around here [at Knowledge16] have done a good job in outlining that and driving their experience. I definitely recommend it.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
it_user459021 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Developer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees
MSP
It's a simple platform to get up to speed on.

Valuable Features

It's very easy to customize and build off of. It's a simple platform to get up to speed on. Every company I've worked for has enjoyed their idle focus. The usability is a valuable feature, a lot of customers just enjoy the usability of it.

Room for Improvement

Since I've been working with the product for a long time, it feel like in the old days it was kind of a smaller, cult-like following. You had a more family-like community. Now it's gotten so big and it's kind of lost a little bit of that. I guess that's good for their business.

They seem to be trying to branch out and do a lot more than just ITSM which is usually what the core focus is, so sometimes there might be a little bit less emphasis on that. Personally I haven't seen that, but other people have mentioned it. It'll be interesting if they try to be all things to all people. They've gotten more polished, more professional, larger and a lot more sales-oriented when they went public. I don't really have many bad things to say about them.

Use of Solution

I've personally used it since 2007. I worked at a company called Progress Energy. It was in Raleigh, North Carolina. They were an early adopter and we luckily fell into it at the right time.

Stability Issues

It was never bad, but in the early days there was definitely more outages, and we had an SLA. I think initially we even got some money back from them in the early early days in Progress. I'd say over the past five years or so that the reliability's been excellent.

Scalability Issues

I've had no issues with scaling, especially in the last five years. Availability seems to really have helped. We still have some performance issues, but sometimes those could be network related and not vendor related. Sometimes it's our development which is causing the trouble. I would not blame ServiceNow for any kind of performance issues that we've had.

Currently, we're not really scaled up at this particular point, so I don't foresee that being an issue, but we could encounter that later.

Customer Service and Technical Support

I'd say it's fairly good. The bigger they've got, the more I guess standardized their high systems become. Usually if we have something that really shows up on our radar, we can get a hold of somebody and get it addressed. In the earlier days when we had more of those, we also had pretty good luck at being able to get some senior engineers on problems that we had, even if they were self-inflicted problems.

Implementation Team

We've used ServiceNow professional services and I've really enjoyed working with them and some of the other high-level partners, but to be honest with you, my current company isn't big on contractors. It's kind of an act of parliament to get them to bring somebody in from outside.

Other Advice

Being more technical myself, would say that having a clear and consistent view of your requirements, what you want to do, and to try to stay out of the box at first as much as possible. This is the third company I've worked for who uses ServiceNow and we always try to over-customize it at first, because everybody has very defined processes. Over-customization of the tool will hamstring you in how you can take advantage of stuff that they release. They always seem to release something that you're wanting to build right after you build it.

It's been a challenge because a lot of people think they know better, and everybody does it their own way. Staying out of the box initially is really helpful. Any tool can be made bad if you put garbage in. That's the biggest issue I've seen.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
it_user458949 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Support at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Vendor
From my standpoint the process flexibility is one of the key aspects of the solution.

Valuable Features:

From my standpoint, it's the process flexibility. We're at a really low maturity level, especially for the age of our company - we're about fourteen years old. From a service and support standpoint we're still in that one maturity level, idol-wise. It's been a blessing with ServiceNow to be able to nail down our various business processes. The support ones we weren't working and they were all over the place. 

ServiceNow was need to get everyone working the same way through tickets and requests. The ability to have something consistently flexible enough for us to put some structure in and get folks all working the same way across multiple departments, but still have the flexibility for them to feel like they're getting what they want when they're getting what we want.

Room for Improvement:

We're anxiously awaiting setting up Helsinki for the health service portal. I think we were originally Fuji, and we did some custom branding and it was a nightmare. Designers got involved and it made it horrible. We've gone back to stock because we had seen what's coming with Helsinki. That's what I'm looking forward to with the customization.

Use of Solution:

We've been using it about a year and half now. My role is mostly as a sys admin and some development of the forms, requests and business rules.

Stability Issues:

Rock solid. We have a dev instance where only a couple of us work in development of a few things and ideas. Then in our production instance we do not yet have a mid-server or anything implemented. We're about to, but we are integrated with Centrify for some of the sign-on. From our support desk folks, it's been solid for them. Everybody gets what they needs. It's one of the things in our organization that always works.

Scalability Issues:

I don't see it really being an issue. We probably have 80 odd idol license users from about 10 or 12 actual support desk folks, but there's also some folks doing project management and ERP. We have 3,500 odd employees, but they're not all going to be licensed users. We've got a lot of support corporate users. Scalability hasn't been an issue and I don't see it being one.

Initial Setup:

Very straightforward. It's almost point-click-done. You have to think a little bit, but that's mostly planning.

Other Advice:

I recommend it to anyone to do any service management. 

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free ServiceNow Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: September 2025
Buyer's Guide
Download our free ServiceNow Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.