ServiceNow is one of the best ITSM tools for businesses that comes with a rich set of features and functionality. However, everyone has unique needs and preferences. While many adore ServiceNow’s offerings, some are not satisfied with its performance, user interface, support, budget, etc. User experience may change from person to person or business to business. Therefore, people look for ServiceNow alternatives that can better serve their requirements, budget, and preferences. So, if you are one of them, this article on ServiceNow competitors will help you choose a better alternative so you can make the most of your ITSM tool.
What is IT Service Management (ITSM)?
Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) refers to the activities and processes that an organization performs to build, design, operate, control, and deliver IT services to the customers. In other words, ITSM is how a team manages and delivers its IT services end to end. It focuses on customer needs and continuous improvement to deliver outstanding service quality and customer experience. It differs from other IT management approaches such as IT systems management and network management. While ITSM focuses on customers’ needs, others focus on improving IT systems. Similarly, Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is different. It’s like a framework for ITSM that outlines necessary techniques and tools to help teams effectively deliver IT services. The idea behind the creation of ITSM is to deliver IT as a service, which extends beyond conventional IT support. Also, ITSM is a more inclusive system, describing all the processes, technologies, and tools used by IT teams to manage their IT services. It even specifies the roles and responsibilities of each department and individual involved in the IT services.
Why do businesses need ITSM Platforms?
ITSM is beneficial for your entire organization. It strives to enhance customer experience and boost your team’s productivity and focus on designing processes and technologies. That said, ITSM platforms are tools or software solutions with the capabilities of ITSM. You will find plenty of ITSM platforms in the market that offer several benefits to your organizations in managing their IT services. Here are some of the reasons why you need an ITSM platform.
Improves customer experience
Since ITSM focuses on addressing customers’ needs, IT teams continuously work on improving the delivery of IT services to end-users. They try to understand the pain points of end-users and make plans to solve those issues. This makes your customers feel valued and, at the same time, enhances your service delivery. Ultimately, this caters to improved customer experience.
Better IT efficiency
ITSM tools help improve IT efficiency by enabling the teams to handle every process effectively, from creating services and delivery to after-sales. It does so in various ways. An ITSM tool helps IT teams use IT resources effectively even if they are limited. In addition, it automates process workflow to keep everyone on the same page while eliminating manual tasks. It also streamlines tasks so that each team member knows what to do next and how everything is going. Furthermore, using ITSM tools helps you identify issues on time so you can fix them faster. Thus, when your IT service availability and response times improve, you will have all the resources available whenever you need them.
Increases productivity
As ITSM tools streamline tasks with automation and clear goals, your employees can deliver more in less time. They also can find issues faster and resolve them to cater to better customer satisfaction. This indicates improved productivity. In addition, they not only find it easier to understand business needs but also align to the goals and strive to improve their performance.
Boosts collaboration
ITSM tool boosts collaboration between team members as they can all visualize workflows and seek the same information about the issues they are going to tackle next. As a result, they can work together effectively to solve the issues, come up with better ideas, and work towards improving the processes. As a result, they can handle more development while ensuring quality.
Cuts down costs
A good ITSM tool comes with good reporting and analytics to measure useful metrics. It can reflect your strengths and weaknesses so that you can make improvements. It will also highlight the issues raised, how many are solved, customer satisfaction rates, security concerns, etc. So, when you tackle issues early, you remain on the safe side rather than suffering the consequences of a security breach or customer escalations. This helps cut down costs spent on resolving those critical issues. In addition, the automated processes enable you to save resources, which were spent previously on time-taking manual tasks with more employees working for longer durations to solve repetitive, petty tasks.
What is ServiceNow, and why is it popular?
ServiceNow is one of the leading ITSM platform providers, popular across the globe. There is a reason why this platform has made it to the Gartner 2021 Magic Quadrant for ITSM tools for the 8th time. This innovative ITSM tool helps you deliver resilient IT services focusing on customer experience and service quality. It comes with capabilities like efficient incident and problem management, change management, request management, mobile agent and application, virtual agent, predictive intelligence, and more. It is also a cloud platform to future-proof your organization’s IT infrastructure. Despite all the goodness of ServiceNow, it might not suit everyone since every organization has different needs and budget constraints. If you are one of them, you might be on the lookout for ServiceNow alternatives. Consider your wish granted! Here are some of the ServiceNow competitors you can try as an alternative.
Freshservice
Modernize your IT service management with a fast, intelligent, value for time, and intuitive solution – Freshservice. It can help you achieve greater ROI, increase efficiency, and deliver memorable customer experiences. Drive your service efficiency with powerful automation and no-code workflows. You will get an integrated platform for your ITSM to improve time and bridge silos. This will help enhance the visibility of your workflow, reduce costs, and get business agility. You can deploy the solution rapidly with Freshservice’s no-code platform and get migration services and expert onboarding. Its out-of-box features also allow you to enable easier adoption of the deployed service. Furthermore, improve your employee productivity and unify customer experiences with its AI-powered enterprise platform. The drag and drop integrations make your work smoother and a time saver. Eliminate the gap between operations and service management to improve reliability. Freshservice enables you to identify alerts in time, deliver end-to-end customer experience, and collaborate with context to prevent various issues. Whether you are a growing organization or a large enterprise, this ServiceNow alternative can help you avail of many benefits. Start your 21-day free trial and get the advantage of all its features.
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus
Script your ITSM success on on-prem or cloud with ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus. This ServiceNow competitor will turn your IT teams from daily struggling to relax back to providing the best customer service. ServiceDesk Plus provides central control and excellent visibility while empowering you to deal with various IT issues. This way, you can ensure that your businesses will not suffer from downtime. In addition, you could be capable of delivering smiles to millions of your end-users, IT folks, and stakeholders. Along with this, you can manage a complete lifecycle, improve agent productivity, reduce outages, and meet the SLAs of your IT tickets. Analyze the root cause of issues, classify them, and solve problems quickly. The tool will also help reduce repetitive incidents in IT and streamline operations like planning, approval, implementation, and automatic workflows. Ensure there will be no failed or unauthorized changes in your systems with this tool. You can discover, manage, and track your hardware assets in a single place. In addition, enable license compliance, avoid vulnerabilities, and optimize asset utilization with ServiceDesk Plus. You can also build and publish your IT service catalog with multi-stage approvals and SLAs. Manage and track all the configuration items to map their relationships and dependencies. Use custom and canned reports to gain true insight and monitor the performance using customizable and real-time dashboards. Start your free trial for any pack you choose that meets your needs. Its paid plans start at $8/month.
Jira
Empower your IT Ops, business, and Dev teams to collaborate easily with high velocity using Jira Service Management. This solution can quickly respond to the changes and deliver fast employee and customer experiences. Accelerate your workflow with Jira Service Management and meet your unique needs. Empower everyone, including each member and the entire team, so that you can effectively set up a service desk and adapt at scale. This will help you provide better service experiences without the complexities. With a collaborative and open platform, you can track the work of every team member across the enterprise. You can also link critical issues across Jira and get data from other development tools. As a result, it will be easier for your operations and support teams to respond to changes, incidents, and requests using a rich set of information. Manage risks, offer better customer impact, expedite your development work, deploy changes with ease, and eliminate toil with a full audit trail for each change. In addition, Jira supports your workflow with added functionality and processes so that you can work on the same tool. You will also get a single place of truth from where you can get data and support the reports. Get a better overview and understanding of your company with all the processes running using the ITSM tool. You will find 1000+ trusted integrations and applications and can customize the Jira Service Management solution to meet your needs. For 3 agents, Jira offers a free subscription. For those who want to take the service desk and ITSM, it costs $20/agent/month. There is also the option of a free trial.
BMC Helix ITSM
Get the next generation and industry-leading service management from BMC Helix ITSM to provide better ROI on the cloud of your choice. It is a people-centric and powerful solution that utilizes emerging technologies, such as Machine Learning and AI. You get predictive service management via the assignment, routing, and auto-classification of incidents. Use its multi-cloud capabilities to broker releases, changes, and incidents across cloud providers. The tool integrates with the leading agile DevOps tools like Jira. You will get automated actions and cognitive email analysis on behalf of users. Apart from this, also you will find deployment and operational efficiencies through containerization. You will be able to understand its working way and how it delivers the best service experience for faster innovation. Moreover, resolve incidents effectively with proactive, context-aware, and intelligent incident matching. You can bring key information to the support personnel and customer exactly where they need it. You will also get lifecycle management of the knowledge articles for up-to-date information and effective curation. BMC Helix’s multi-cloud service management allows you to deliver a unique service experience across multiple cloud environments. You can quickly and easily turn robust reports into an awesome dashboard. From data centers to desktops, document all the activities and coordinate them for the change requests across the entire IT landscape. This ITSM solution offers more features like release management, digital workplace, asset management, configuration management, service request management, and service level management. Start with BMC Helix by taking a free trial.
SolarWinds
Eliminate barriers to the employee support services with SolarWinds, which provides a modern ITSM solution for you. With its unique features and functionalities, you can manage everything like a pro. Update your technology and asset inventory automatically. You will also get inventory updates to prepare yourself better for the Microsoft license audit and make your work easier. In addition, you can improve operations continuously by focusing on essential metrics that this tool offers. Get a full-screen view of your technology infrastructure with configuration management database software. With a clean dashboard, you can view every statistic of your service desk. Also, the employee service portal is a one-stop-shop where your employee can submit, search, or connect with an agent. SolarWinds introduces enterprise service desk solutions for the enterprise environment. With its hardware inventory management, you can view the location, usage, and configuration. It supports more than 40 languages, and you can customize it according to the location and view new trends globally. Choose the right plan for your team, starting from $19/month/technician. Avail of a 30-days fully functional free trial.
Micro Focus
Drive your business digitally with an ITSM tool by Micro Focus that can be a good ServiceNow alternative. Since business success depends on your team’s capability to transform and run IT simultaneously, Micro Focus empowers your team with an effortless yet powerful ITSM solution to focus on success. Eliminate complexity with its cutting-edge technologies and avoid vulnerabilities and cost overruns. It includes Digital Factory, a delivery model for different digital offerings that gives a new approach to enhancing digital transformation. IT teams are now equipped with repeatable processes and reusable tools to build experiences, solutions, and new services. When you create a digital factory, domain expertise grows, duplicate toolsets disappear, and consistent governance reigns. For simplifying and unifying your IT operations, you can use the OPTIC platform. It will help you convert IT into a modern intelligence center, benefit from smart tools, and extend industry best practices while maintaining cloud agility. Satisfy the hunger for digital IT operation with a personalized, intuitive, and no wait service portal by availing of a free trial.
SysAid ITSM
Give more control and power to your team and IT department with SysAid ITSM. It lets you say goodbye to the big issues with advanced service desk automation. It offers impressive solutions and features to manage assets, meet unreasonable demands, and handle your service desk without panic attacks. SysAid ITSM gives you the right tool for the right operation to stay on the top. It also provides automation to focus on the right steps. Boost your productivity with more automation and less repetition. With its easy and fast implementation, you can get up and running quickly and meet your specific needs by configuring SysAid. You can also improve employee and agent experience by providing next-level tools and high-level support to solve issues faster. ITSM includes an ITIL package, workflow automation, third-party integrations, advanced customization, service level management, etc. Make your service delivery smoother, spend time wisely, and resolve each issue faster with SysAid ITSM. See SysAid in action by taking a free trial through your work email.
Ivanti Neurons
Modernize your service delivery technique for IT with Ivanti Neurons, which offers complete flexibility to deploy in the on-premises, hybrid, or cloud combination. With better experiences, you will get better outcomes and deliver world-class service across your enterprise. Eliminate manual processes and automate workflows to make your business more efficient, secure, and compliant. Ivanti Neurons can easily scale and adapt to the organizational environment to meet specific needs. Whether you need an IT helpdesk/ ticket solution or perform an advanced ITIL service management process, Ivanti Neurons have an offering for you. Enjoy better support with Ivanti’s cloud-based automation bots and resolve previously ignored or unreported employee issues. Additionally, give more power to your service desk teams so that they can resolve many incidents on a single call. Gain complete visibility to enhance performance, user experience, quality of service, and stay connected from anywhere. Start your free trial today and modernize the ITSM system to deliver better service. You can also book a free demo of Ivanti Neurons’ ITSM solutions.
Conclusion
ITSM tools are beneficial for organizations to manage their IT service delivery while offering better employee productivity, customer experience, and cost reduction. So, if you are looking for a ServiceNow alternative, choose any of the ITSM platforms mentioned above that fits your requirements, budget, and preferences.
