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BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management vs ServiceNow comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 28, 2025

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 Enterprise Servic...
Ranking in IT Service Management (ITSM)
24th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.2
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
ServiceNow
Ranking in IT Service Management (ITSM)
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
224
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (1st), IT Asset Management (1st), Rapid Application Development Software (2nd), No-Code Development Platforms (1st)
 

Featured Reviews

Ravi ShankarSundarasan - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Enterprise Cloud Architect at Blue Yonder
Integrated multi‑cloud discovery has improved incident control and change workflows
The best features BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management offers include scalability, robust ITIL service management, and excellent discovery for the multi-cloud infrastructure, particularly excelling in change problem management. In terms of features, particularly around change management, the product works very well, allowing me to create multiple kinds of changes such as normal change, expedited change, emergency change, and I can track the changes by logging into the respective portals. BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management has a positive impact on my organization by greatly improving workforce productivity; it creates dashboards for different personas within the organization, including the IT service management leadership team and the infrastructure operations engineering team, which is very useful for the day-to-day ITSM process. Specific metrics showing productivity improvement include our ability to reduce the number of incidents; since cloud workloads are always dynamic, BMC Discovery discovers the products every 24 hours, allowing me to get newly provisioned resources in any cloud platform used in Blue Yonder, which truly helps the infrastructure operations and engineering teams to easily track incidents and the recently provisioned resources.
SP
General Manager at sPerception IT
Adopting flexible workflows with customized automation delivers measurable benefits
There are things that I would like to see improved in ServiceNow, such as the pricing, as it is a very costly solution compared to other tools. Additionally, its presence in the local market is very limited; in Pakistan, for example, I don't see any vendor or distributor of ServiceNow available. They need to increase their sales spectrum globally so people can easily access them and engage them for client meetings and more. From a functionality perspective, the features in ServiceNow are acceptable as, at the moment, the ITSM modules rank highly, being 13 plus Pink Elephant certified, which is a good aspect to have. When providing advice to users, I would suggest they consider making strategic decisions about their per user pricing since it is very high. In our region, people normally start with 5 to 10 users, but the per user price is quite steep. Moreover, ServiceNow does not charge based on data uploaded or downloaded, so they should reconsider their pricing and data policies to align better with the financial capabilities of the region.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management has positively impacted my organization by sending event alerts."
"We had fewer breaches, ninety-nine percent service uptime, and all these features were very good."
"The support of BMC is generally good and better compared to some competitors."
"Overall, I find BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management to be a powerful and comprehensive platform that has significantly improved incident resolution, team coordination, and service delivery in our organization."
"BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management is truly an enterprise-class product that assists global enterprises in day-to-day incident, change, and problem management, improving workforce productivity while being scalable and resilient, supporting all multi-cloud infrastructure platforms."
"BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management has really shaped Mahle, my last company, and their IT operations support system in a very formal way."
"There are lots of modules around IT service management such as IT business management and human resource management (HRC)."
"We have found the service easy to use, although, we have ended up customising a lot of parameters."
"ServiceNow gives us a lot for free: workflows, organizational structures, service portal, forms, reporting, disaster recovery, and so on."
"If you stick to the out-of-the-box solution, it's an easy setup."
"I like ServiceNow's Workspace feature. With Jira, we had to edit a ticket by going into it. We couldn't perform edits from within the project plan. ServiceNow allows you to edit everything from one screen. It's like an Excel spreadsheet, but Jira requires you to drill down into the ticket. ServiceNow is more convenient if you are working on multiple projects and workflows."
"ServiceNow is one of the best tools in the industry for production support people, for incident and production ticket management."
"I think the technical support is pretty good. They can be a little bit slow sometimes, but overall I think they're good."
"The Workflow feature is the most valuable."
 

Cons

"Regarding my main use case or how BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management works with cloud environments, I believe it needs more interoperability and integration with data platforms such as Salesforce, Snowflake, and Databricks, which requires improvement."
"BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management could use improvements on the dashboard; having a ready-to-use dashboard that just needs asset information instead of building one from scratch would be helpful."
"For me, there was only one thing that could improve BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management."
"BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management is powerful, but there are areas where I think it could be improved, such as user interface simplification, faster AI learning, and context awareness."
"There are several areas where BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management could be improved. Currently, ServiceNow has an edge when it comes to the ease of discovering Configuration Items (CIs)."
"Their user interface is old-fashioned and outdated, and it can be more friendly for the eye. They can improve the user experience."
"To make ServiceNow better, they should reduce their pricing, especially because there's a lot of competition. Many customers have moved to ManageEngine because they cannot afford the license cost."
"Compared to other products that I have been using, it is not as user-friendly."
"ServiceNow might need to improve its capabilities to integrate with third-party tools."
"The solution's user experience could be improved concerning its UI and portals."
"The solution’s pricing is expensive and could be improved."
"When we are using the solution on mobile phones on their networks the performance is reduced with a delay of approximately 8 seconds. There is less delay using the desktop computers connected to the WiFi or to the network directly."
"Time to respond from support could definitely be better, as the global support timing sometimes causes delays in interactions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The licenses are expensive."
"The license model is based on a number of fulfillers (active users who play some role within the ServiceNow functionality). Therefore, you can serve as many end-users as you want, without additional costs."
"The setup cost is high compared to others, especially when the scope is not fixed."
"The price could be a little lower for the solution. Many of my customers have issues with the licensing process, they have to make it easier and straightforward."
"$230 per user."
"There are licensing fees."
"Isn't pricing always too much? We really do chafe at the ITIL licensing. ITOM is also pretty expensive."
"Initially, the licensing model ServiceNow came up with was very good. But now, from a licensing perspective, they are changing their model day by day. It is becoming a bit expensive for customers."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business55
Midsize Enterprise35
Large Enterprise166
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management?
While I am not very sure about the pricing, I have heard that the license cost of BMC is relatively lower than its competitors.
What needs improvement with BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management?
There are several areas where BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management could be improved. Currently, ServiceNow has an edge when it comes to the ease of discovering Configuration Items (CIs). In BMC...
What is your primary use case for BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management?
I use BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management ( /products/bmc-helix-enterprise-service-management-reviews ) primarily for IT service management. It supports modules like incident management, change...
Which solution is better for developing non-ITSM applications: OutSystems or Service Now?
The short answer is that OutSystems is far better for 2 main reasons. Firstly, with Service Now you are locked into that platform for good. The business model is to lock in and then keep pumping th...
Would you choose ServiceNow over Microsoft PowerApps?
Hi Netanya, I will choose ServiceNow because ServiceNow is a very good tool compared to Microsoft PowerApp. Because ServiceNow has a very strong module (Performance Analysis) reporting which will ...
What do you like most about ServiceNow?
The solution has a user-friendly interface.
 

Comparisons

No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
AAA, AstraZeneca, Becton, Dickinson and Company, Broadcom, Christus Health, Epicor, Equinix, GE Capital, Intuit, KPMG, Loyola Marymount University, OshKosh, Quantas, RedHat, Royal Bank of Scotland, Swiss Re, U.S. Department of Energy, Safeway, Yale University, and Zillow    
Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, Atlassian, ManageEngine and others in IT Service Management (ITSM). Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.