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BMC Helix Discovery vs Samanage comparison

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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

Automation Anywhere
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
668
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (2nd), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (2nd), Process Mining (1st), Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) (1st), Agentic Automation (1st), Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (2nd), AI Legal & Compliance (1st), AI Finance & Accounting (2nd), AI Procurement & Supply Chain (1st)
BMC Helix Discovery
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
IT Asset Management (9th)
Samanage
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (27th), IT Asset Management (19th), IT Service Management (ITSM) (25th), License Management (8th)
 

Featured Reviews

Venkat Sivaprakash - PeerSpot reviewer
Management Consultant at Accenture
Has significantly improved document-driven workflows and reduced processing time across finance and HR functions
Automation Anywhere has evolved significantly and upgraded itself to provide agentic AI and AI-based automation solutions for document automation. The product has matured considerably over time. We can create workflows that can call an API. We can include prompts in particular workflows for ChatGPT-related functions, connecting to an LLM and RAG to perform tasks. For document automation, modern features are available to train documents, ensuring high accuracy and repeatability over time. The system is very easy to use. I recently completed a course in document automation, typically designed for people involved in coding and technical aspects. Though I understand coding comprehensively, I don't do actual coding. The course was very accessible. Currently, extensive coding isn't necessary due to the hybrid model incorporating GenAI aspects, low-code, no-code capabilities, APIs, and numerous pre-built objects in Automation Anywhere. The features include GenAI-driven prompting methods and workflow creation capabilities. In these workflows, we can create decision boxes and call APIs without coding. We simply pull objects, drop them, connect them, and add minimal coding when needed. The most crucial aspect isn't coding but rather sizing the automation and fleshing out the details. Automation Co-pilot takes notes and performs automated analysis. It can extract details from videos, summarize conversations, and provide detailed information. During calls, it identifies instructions and performs tasks such as preparing reports and reconciliation. Automation Anywhere can also connect with Microsoft Co-pilot. Through Co-pilot, real-time operations can be executed, allowing direct interaction between vendors and automation through this component.
JP
Presales Manager at HCLSoftware
Comprehensive discovery has populated our CMDB and provides deep insight into asset relationships
The applicability depends on the customer environment. Usually it is straightforward to apply the policies. BMC Helix Discovery is seamless and has many plugins available. It is a good feature that they offer. I have heard about it, but I am not currently using it, though I know that they have that feature available. BMC Helix Discovery provides a lot of information that can be obtained from discovery, including the relationship between the CIs and how many CIs are orphans. The analytics capabilities are strong.
MC
Consult at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Detects incidents quickly, improves our SLA performance and solves issues faster
We mainly use it for incident logging. We'd like to add service request functionality, but we don't have the knowledge to configure the requests and the workflows properly. We'd like to integrate our workflows with the incident management, so we use it to manage our work better. We'd like to implement the service request feature. Right now, we just record everything as incidents. Some activities can take a long time, maybe one or two weeks. This makes it hard to maintain a good SLA, even if we work hard. So, response speed and workflow improvements.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Excel automation is one of the best features in Automation Anywhere. If we have to work with multiple excel sheets with lots of rows and columns, it gets really difficult to keep track of this is done manually. But Automation Anywhere makes it really simple and error-free."
"Automation Anywhere is frequently releasing new features to their product. I find this amazing as they provide frequent product updates, introducing new features to the frameworks and similar aspects."
"The bot creation process is relatively simple."
"AA has vastly improved my organization in gathering more business, reducing human efforts, and optimizing client business."
"Just for this use case, we had around 300 tickets coming in every month. We went live last month and the tickets went down to around 80 as of August 20th. While it might touch around 100, over a period of around six months it will become zero because we have not removed all the legacy data. We are just doing it from the go date of when we went live. The target is that it will be zero after three months. So, it's working well."
"From my developer's point of view, the tool is pretty strong."
"What I appreciate most about Automation Anywhere is the ease of use. Everything is easy to set up. I also appreciate the extensibility that it has."
"It is a great company with a great product and support."
"The solution is definitely useful."
"It provides comprehensive dependency mapping, which is essential for reducing the time spent and addressing problem-solving between data centers."
"Accuracy and clarity are vastly improved for the service lines."
"The solution's most valuable feature is service modeling."
"The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that it is easy to install and deploy."
"The ability of BMC Helix Discovery to save time and money for customers is all about resolution times and first fixes, linking heavily to the CMDB and ensuring that you have good clean data."
"It improved efficiencies and saved money by replacing manual methods."
"The solution is a giant when it comes to enterprise service management."
"Samanage has not only taken over asset and inventory management, but it also has the ability to function across departments, making it easy for end users to submit help desk tickets for IT, HR, and Finance."
"I would recommend Samanage from the IT support perspective because it's a great ticketing system and the only downside is the site shutdowns and the messy nature of the UI and UX."
"The solution has a great filtering feature."
"The best part is the ability to keep records, especially incident records. It's easy to use the tool to store data and monitor it."
 

Cons

"The initial setup was not that great. The road was very up and down."
"The API integration should be improved further since it is a bit difficult at the moment to connect with the API in the enterprise version."
"There are a few features that we would love to have: running on the cloud, running on Linux, out of the box integration availability with larger ecosystems like Salesforce, Workday, or Microsoft."
"The user interface should be enhanced to make things simpler for the user."
"One thing about it that we have not found to be exceptionally useful are the built-in bot analytics, the Bot Insights. From our own extensive experimentation, as well as from what we've understood from other people using this solution, we've been able to come up with better solutions using our own in-house analytics and our own systems than through theirs."
"The only reason I wouldn't rate it higher is because a COE Manager still not getting the full benefit from it and because the premium is a little bit expensive."
"Getting buy-in was a major challenge because of the various people not aware of the technologies moving and getting buy-in from top management is a challenge."
"We have a third bot which takes longer being automated than it did with the human process."
"The CMDB could be improved. Getting data from the CMDB is the greatest challenge."
"The solution should have different portals and logins for each customer so only that customer's assets show."
"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."
"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."
"Resolution time is what's bothering me, as it's not always easy to get to the correct person or the right technical level needed to resolve the issue."
"There is still room for improvement in terms of stability."
"It would be nice to see more updates to the solution."
"The setting up process is not quite easy. It's quite difficult."
"There are definitely areas for improvement, but so far, so good."
"We've had some problems with the system shutting down about once a month. It sometimes takes five or 10 minutes to start working again but it can also take hours."
"The system shuts down about once a month which is frustrating."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I am not involved in the pricing, but based on what I hear from our central RPA team, it is not very expensive; it is also not cheap. Its price is in the midrange."
"We have saved a lot of money on taxes based on the stuff that we run."
"The control room access gives the ability to create different roles, which helps when purchasing additional licensing."
"One of the things that will be good for the community will be to get the free version to download, which came out just a month ago called Community Edition. So, you can actually download it and try it for yourself."
"The price is a little bit high but the support is good."
"Its price is competitive with all other products in the market."
"Overall, the pricing of Automation Anywhere is good."
"The Community Edition is a good offering from the company."
"I've heard that the solution was expensive earlier but is now much cheaper than its competitors."
"It's not a cheap product. But the benefits it delivers is that it's a fair price."
"You need a license to use BMC Helix Discovery. The license is paid yearly, though I have no idea how much it costs."
"We have a perpetual license for the solution."
"The licensing fee is very low."
"Operating cost is actually high compared to other products, actually. It's a little expensive only, but it's very good than other products."
"The price was fair compared to competitors. BMC is very affordable. There are optional consulting services to assist with implementation."
"BMC is available for a reasonable price compared to ServiceNow — it's half the price."
"It is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Construction Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
14%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business162
Midsize Enterprise86
Large Enterprise565
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise14
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It depends on your use case. Is it simply to automate a couple of processes? Is it to augment a human team? AA is ver...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
From my experience using AA tool, it depends on the applications that you want to automate, because there some applic...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It is a highly preferred RPA tool. You can check my Automation Anywhere Review to know more.
What needs improvement with BMC Helix Discovery?
The interface is quite old and can be outdated.
What is your primary use case for BMC Helix Discovery?
BMC Helix Discovery is used for discovery of the assets and configuration items so that you can populate the CMDB.
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Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise, Agentic Process Automation System (Now Certified for WorkSpaces)
Discovery, ADDM, Atrium Discovery & Dependency Mapping
No data available
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
Windstream Communications, News UK, Mercator Group, Wageningen University and Research Centre (WUR)
SXSW, PRA Group, Fandango, Inteva Products, Amherst College, Tensator
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC Helix Discovery vs. Samanage and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.