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BMC Helix Discovery vs IBM Maximo comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
IT Asset Management (2nd)
IBM Maximo
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) (1st), Billing Software (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

BMC Helix Discovery and IBM Maximo aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. BMC Helix Discovery is designed for IT Asset Management and holds a mindshare of 8.7%, up 7.9% compared to last year.
IBM Maximo, on the other hand, focuses on Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), holds 28.7% mindshare, up 26.7% since last year.
IT Asset Management
Enterprise Asset Management (EAM)
 

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…
Jose Pedro Muñoz - PeerSpot reviewer
A very strong and powerful tool in the market preferred by a variety of industries
I rate the technical support a seven out of ten. Three levels of support in IBM. The first one is a fixed level, while levels two and three are very good. Here, level one is not very good, as it takes time to go from level one to level two and from level two to level three. So, level one is of low capacity.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution is very stable and powerful."
"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 initial setup was quite easy."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of BMC Helix Discovery is it operates well. It is well known and has gained recognition for its software."
"The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that it is easy to install and deploy."
"It immediately understands which component it is, and it provides the exact API details with all the components."
"It provides comprehensive dependency mapping, which is essential for reducing the time spent and addressing problem-solving between data centers."
"The most valuable feature is asset management maintenance as well as asset management overall."
"They have a real strength of tracking the asset itself along with the condition of the asset, the maintenance of the asset and who has access to the asset, etc."
"It can be particularly useful for power line operations, enabling linemen in the field to gather information and send it across the country as well as different parts of the world."
"Has a powerful audit combination that helps achieve high accuracy."
"The most valuable features of IBM Maximo are the overall power and interface, and there are a lot of different modules that we use that are helpful. Additionally, it's an integrated solution and it has a lot of capabilities."
"I have found Work Order management the most valuable feature. Additionally, it is a very robust and powerful solution."
"IBM Maximo is the best software for assets management."
"There are not many enterprise asset management systems on the market and not many that have the categories that IBM Maximo has."
 

Cons

"It is very complicated to use."
"BMC Helix Discovery needs more customization options."
"BMC Helix Discovery is a bit tough to use and administer."
"There isn't much that could be improved. The solution is pretty thorough, very easy to implement, and very easy to operate."
"BMC is agentless discovery, followed by hybrid discovery, which performs discovery across clouds, on-premises, and then dynamic service modeling."
"The support from BMC Helix Discovery can improve, it takes a long time before we receive any feedback. It can take days to months sometimes."
"The improvement which we require is to delete the Internet service. Till some of the features are coming, like, internally side. If you are taking one server to model, there are a lot of usages like three structures per diagram is coming, and we have to do the man lot of manual work. Instead of that, whatever our requirement, we should be able to provide the servers and get the structure. So this is what we want to implement with such data."
"The product falls short compared to storage discovery mechanisms offered by Tenable or ServiceNow ITOM. In the market, there are various applications available that provide different sets of features. Its drawback is that it doesn't give the database configuration customers need out of the box. Additionally, the classification of storage virtualization is relatively lacking. Therefore, there is room for improvement, particularly in the database areas."
"This solution could improve by integrating or embedding finances, charts of accounts, and invoicing."
"Areas for improvement include: an enhanced Service Catalog on Mobile; Agent intelligence; better dashboards for KPIs."
"The interface is not very easy or user-friendly and is in need of improvement."
"There are always ways to improve and make things better."
"IBM is a big company and they have a lot of products. Level One, the first level of tech support, is the one that is used to stop the tsunami. For everyone, it's always work to get past that."
"Could use some alignment regarding some standards and the tracking of the IT assets. Even though they have all of the information (i.e. where are the assets, who owns the asset, etc.), they were not mapping it to different cyber standards."
"The latest version is slow due to the power it requires."
"It's quite reliable, but new versions often are not too stable. They bring in enhancements but they break other stuff."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Operating cost is actually high compared to other products, actually. It's a little expensive only, but it's very good than other products."
"I've heard that the solution was expensive earlier but is now much cheaper than its competitors."
"The price was fair compared to competitors. BMC is very affordable. There are optional consulting services to assist with implementation."
"The licensing fee is very low."
"We have a perpetual license for the solution."
"The licenses are very complex and quite costly."
"It's not a cheap product. But the benefits it delivers is that it's a fair price."
"BMC is available for a reasonable price compared to ServiceNow — it's half the price."
"Explore the possibility of using DB2. You will avoid the cost of SQL Server or Oracle licenses."
"Where available, concurrent licenses can be more cost efficient and provide more flexibility."
"IBM has changed the licensing policy. As I understand now, they are going from a complex way of licensing to a more simple way of licensing."
"IBM Maximo offers a licensing application, and you have to comply with the license."
"I do not know about the price of the solution. However, this has been an expensive project overall."
"​Explore internal processes in order to evaluate the correct number of users in each Maximo module, then evaluate the different offers of pricing and licensing.​"
"You pay for what you get. There are lots of options depending on how you would like to implement Maximo."
"$USD700 per agent user."
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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%
Educational Organization
33%
Energy/Utilities Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
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 do you like most about IBM Maximo?
It can be particularly useful for power line operations, enabling linemen in the field to gather information and send it across the country as well as different parts of the world.
What needs improvement with IBM Maximo?
Though I liked it a lot, I think it was lagging a lot. It was very slow due to the lagging issues. So that was kind of frustrating, considering how slow it was while functioning. The aforementioned...
What is your primary use case for IBM Maximo?
It can be particularly useful for power line operations, enabling linemen in the field to gather information and send it across the country as well as different parts of the world. With IBM Maximo,...
 

Also Known As

Discovery, ADDM, Atrium Discovery & Dependency Mapping
Maximo
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Windstream Communications, News UK, Mercator Group, Wageningen University and Research Centre (WUR)
Royal Boskalis Westminster N.V., DTE Energy, Swedish Match, Projetech, Fingrid, East Coast
Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, BMC, Qualys and others in IT Asset Management. Updated: January 2025.
845,589 professionals have used our research since 2012.