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BMC Helix Discovery vs Device42 comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

BMC Helix Discovery
Ranking in IT Asset Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Device42
Ranking in IT Asset Management
9th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management Databases (4th), IP Address Management (IPAM) Tools (5th), Data Center Infrastructure Management (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the IT Asset Management category, the mindshare of BMC Helix Discovery is 8.7%, up from 7.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Device42 is 5.9%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Asset Management
 

Featured Reviews

Shirish Kamalapurkar - PeerSpot reviewer
Very stable, fast, and powerful with valuable inventory management features
Our company uses the solution as an inventory tool for customers. The solution discovers your infrastructure and lets you know what servers and network devices are on it. It gives you details about applications, hardware, and software such as how they are connected and the dependencies between…
Krishna Gopal Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
Good reporting and discovery capabilities, and helpful for understanding device dependencies and asset management
Its price needs to be improved. It is more expensive than some of the other tools out there. Their support is good, but their knowledge base should be better. There should be a common area where we can search and find solutions for our queries or issues. We don't always need to raise a ticket with the Device42 support team. Currently, if you want to ping devices, you need to log into Appliance Manager. This feature should be available on the Device42 side. You should be able to use the ping utility without logging into Appliance Manager. The features that are there in Appliance Manager should also be available on the main Device42 server so that you have more control on one screen. You don't need to switch to another portal, but it is not something critical.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"A valuable feature concerns the ability to integrate with different solutions."
"The tool's accuracy of the results we receive looks promising in general. Its values are more than 95 percent accurate compared to other clients or different tools. I would say that Discovery offers a valuable mechanism to discover information."
"The speed at which it's able to collect a wide-range of information, then make it useful for you, like asset management, knowledge management, and incident management."
"BMC Helix Discovery is very intuitive."
"I've used other discovery tools, but I found BMC Helix Discovery to be more UI-friendly, and that's the most valuable feature of the solution."
"It is a stable solution. The stability is okay."
"BMC Helix Discovery comprehends the infrastructure you've procured and deployed within your environment."
"The initial setup is simple."
"The solution's automatic IT asset discovery and inventory functionality are top-notch. The thing I like is that it's open-source. If I need to change them — and they've given me links on GitHub to have them — I can go and change them to pull exactly what I want, as frequently as I want."
"Previously, our company had a lot of issues keeping track of all the data centers and the inventory, as well as the purchase orders. All of these were managed by other tools. The good thing about Device42 is that it can be used for all this together. We don't need to spend time checking many other tools and files."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"The Insights+ component is useful for us because it does business application mapping and helps us visualize it. It saves us time because we don't have to hunt for data."
"The asset inventory is great because previously we had devices all over the place. We have been able to do multiscans to find devices that we didn't know about, which was great."
"The IP address tracking [is valuable]... We have a lot of different devices and some of them have many IP addresses, so keeping track of which ones are assigned where is very critical for putting new devices on the network and giving them new addresses. All of our devices are statically assigned, so if we don't keep good records then we could accidentally assign a duplicate, which would cause problems on the network."
"Device42 has everything in one place and links it altogether. This helps when you need to figure out where things are going wrong, where things are happening, or how everything is linked together."
"A big plus for Device42 was the auto-discovery. With it, we have updated devices, updated systems, and up-to-date systems."
 

Cons

"There are certain limitations in the mapping feature of the solution."
"An area that can be improved is the IoT."
"A review of end of life data would be nice."
"Management of its own application infrastructure and integrations with other BMC tools."
"The CMDB could be improved. Getting data from the CMDB is the greatest challenge."
"The product is not fully automated."
"I would like to see the ability to scan some of the newer cloud platforms. I know that BMC has them on the roadmap, and they are coming soon, but they can't come fast enough. Being able to scan more of GCloud, Alibaba Cloud, or whatever the public clouds that our customers are buying, we need to make sure that Discovery can find them as well."
"If the dependency maps can go live and we can work through the process with a click, we're reaching the stage where issues are identified and mitigated. It would be ideal if we could utilize it to reduce vulnerabilities or address any other feedback."
"Device42 is a main part of our processes. We need reliability, not only in terms of the data but with the solution itself. It's really difficult when we have 10 minutes of Device42 downtime because none of our teams can work for those 10 minutes, and it's more time lost if there is longer downtime. An improvement would be to have a cluster implementation of Device42 to have high-availability and ensure that we don't have downtime in case of failure."
"In my experience I believe that the key concern is the pricing strategy of the solution. Instead other solutions such as lanweber are much more cost effective. Previously, Device42 operated on perpetualysis without any fees. But recently they have altered the pricing model to include a subscription fee which I see as a very costly affair. Therefore I would like to suggest that they evaluate their pricing strategy and licence scheme, conduct a market research and ensure that they provide the right product in the market at the right price."
"Configuring rPDUs in the data center for Device42 required us to add multiple discovery jobs. The rPDUs were referred to the ISPDUs and daisy-chained. They would automatically assign a unique SMP port, but Device42 didn't allow SMP ranges, so we had to create a discovery job for each rPDU individually. We submitted a feature request to mitigate that."
"If I want to delete an asset from a cabinet it does take a while. And if I'm doing it in bulk — say, for example, if we have one cabinet that has 20 servers in — if I want to remove all 20 servers, I have to do them individually, which is a bit time-consuming. If there were a way that I could just bulk-remove everything from there, that would definitely save some time."
"The resources table needs a few tweaks. We've raised a feature request for this. When you click on resources, it opens up the entire CMDB or the entire data stored in Device42. If that could be customizable, it would be good. We should be allowed to add our own columns to that by writing a script or something like that. There should be an option to add or limit whatever we want."
"The dependency mapping can be quite slow sometimes, if you've got a lot of things connecting to services. It can be very slow to build up the map."
"The only thing which I have noticed so far that is not good is that we had an issue with some reporting from the tool, reporting we had to export. We couldn't do it in the way we wanted to, so we tried to reach out to their support but it took pretty long until we understood how we can manage the reports. We still haven't received a complete explanation of what we need to do and how to do it."
"The reporting could be better. The Insights+ component is an improvement, but they even admit it isn't the greatest. The documentation on their website could also be improved, but Device42 is constantly changing, so the documentation would have to change almost daily."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have a perpetual license for the solution."
"You need a license to use BMC Helix Discovery. The license is paid yearly, though I have no idea how much it costs."
"The licensing fee is very low."
"I rate the pricing an eight out of ten. All BMC products are expensive."
"The price was fair compared to competitors. BMC is very affordable. There are optional consulting services to assist with implementation."
"The licenses are very complex and quite costly."
"BMC is available for a reasonable price compared to ServiceNow — it's half the price."
"We are on a three-year agreement with BMC Helix Discovery to use the solution. There are not any additional fees other than the standard license."
"Our licensing costs are on a yearly basis."
"The problem with using other vendor, like BMC, is the pricing. The price is so horrible and nobody wants to pay this money."
"Functionality-wise, Device42 is on par with industry standards, but price-wise, the solution is expensive. I'm rating the pricing for the solution as eight out of ten."
"I am not involved in its pricing, but I have seen their plans during a discussion with the customer. For 500 servers, they were asking 50,000 USD. The cost of BMC Discovery was less than half. For the same thing, they were charging only 10,000 USD. Its pricing needs to be improved. As compared to other discovery tools, such as BMC Discovery and ServiceNow Discovery, its price is a little bit higher."
"On a yearly basis, our licensing is $10,000. However, our license is now nearly full with devices. We need the next bigger license with 5,000 devices, which will cost us $19,000. We pay for a set of licenses, a maximum number of devices, and a maximum number of IP addresses. We have the smallest amount of features, which is enough for us at this time."
"It's in the top-three most expensive solutions in terms of cost, but it has all the features that are needed."
"We pay $100,000 per year."
"The product cost is low. It is quite cheap."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
18%
Energy/Utilities Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about BMC Helix Discovery?
I like the artificial intelligence and machine learning that it uses in the solution. Because once the solution discovers all the assets, all the infrastructure, and all the dependencies between se...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BMC Helix Discovery?
The price of BMC Helix Discovery is licensed by asset. It is challenging to maintain licenses, as every piece of equipment is considered a license. We pay attention to the growth of assets. The pri...
What needs improvement with BMC Helix Discovery?
I would like to see a lower price and better technical support.
What needs improvement with Device42?
The product must provide AI features. It would be very useful if I could create datasets or queries from an AI interface.
What is your primary use case for Device42?
I use the solution for physical assets management, IT management, and application dependency mapping.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Discovery, ADDM, Atrium Discovery & Dependency Mapping
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Windstream Communications, News UK, Mercator Group, Wageningen University and Research Centre (WUR)
Computershare, Concur, Doosan, Fitch Ratings Inc., Fujitsu, HomeAway, Jasper Wireless, Mercedes-Benz, Square, Twitch, UCSB, Zayo Group Inc.
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC Helix Discovery vs. Device42 and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.