No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

BMC Helix ITSM vs OpenText Service Manager [EOL] comparison

Why PeerSpot?
Sponsored
 

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

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 ITSM
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
78
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (7th), IT Service Management (ITSM) (9th)
OpenText Service Manager [EOL]
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
48
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

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.
KN
Senior Application Developer BMC at Balfour Beatty
Self-service portal significantly reduces resolution time and transforms service process with advanced features
We initially had a lot of tickets generated via the service desk through calls and emails. Now, we have almost moved out of email creations by introducing the DWP features on the Studio pages, with about 90% of the tickets coming in via our self-service portal. Recent upgrades offer different types of views for particular business lines, which was missing earlier. The new landing pages have allowed us to add banners, images, and internal videos, encouraging most customers to use these DWP self-service features. Resolution time has decreased significantly since implementing the self-service portal. Additionally, the availability of knowledge articles, chatbots, and the new Helix GPT feature has improved service processes.
MEKKAB Raouf - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Technology Service Manager & Technology Integration DevOps at Djezzy
Excellent pricing with great change management and service management capabilities
We started with version 9.3, and now we're on 9.6 with the full solution, including the CMS. They have lots of options. They propose a full solution for technology and IT service management. We are a telecom company. We are a leader in the market, and therefore, we need to have all details about our own environment and assets. So far, Micro Focus answers all our needs. I'd advise new users to go directly to the SMAX solution, the last, last version of Service Manager. If they are a technical company or information technology company with engineers and developers, they can use it on-premise. If they don't have such competence in the company, they can ask for the solution on the cloud. It is easily available on Microsoft, Amazon, or Google clouds. I'd rate the product nine out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"My experience with the deployment has been very good."
"I also very much like the integrating of this solution with other applications. We have some old web applications that we've been using, and we've been writing some of our own DLLs to integrate with it. It has worked really well."
"We're finding time savings as a benefit. One example would be a customer service rep who might get a question about an order, and it's usually through email. It can take a good three to seven business days to answer a customer's question about their order. When we automate it, it takes hours, if not minutes."
"We have more than 50 bots in the company, the FTE and ROI are very good, and in the future we have many projects in pipeline that we are about to implement, so definitely there is a good ROI and FTE savings for us."
"In my day-to-day applications, I can integrate Automation Copilot easily as I can embed it within Workday, BambooHR, and Salesforce, allowing business users easy access to Automation Anywhere without logging into multiple applications, thus saving 85 to 90% of the time."
"My company uses AA extensively for internal BPO work as well as we refer and deploy it to the customer as a RPaaS model, helping increase productivity, reduce overall operational costs, and deliver fewer errors while proving to be a reliable workhorse during the COVID situation."
"We have some bots which are saving a week or month of multiple employees' times."
"In human resources, we created several core SAP systems so that the basic users in human resources can reduce redundancies by 10 times with very little cost."
"The solution can perform well for large-sized companies."
"The main valuable feature is the flexibility of the product -- the ability of being able to make it do almost anything we need it to do to adjust to our business needs and to do it very quickly."
"We use the solution's Discovery tool to discover our assets, and we've used the ticketing tool for years."
"The interface is nice and it's simple to use, providing a good user experience."
"Compared with other solutions in the market, for example, Manage Engine, which has technical limitations, BMC is robust."
"The most valuable features I have found to be the activity logs and the other features where you are able to continuously address issues and are able to annotate notes inside to convey them to the customer."
"Initial setup is straightforward, and if you follow best practices, then future enhancements will be smoother."
"The solution's most valuable features are automation and orchestration."
"The modules were very utilitarian and it became like just clicking boxes to track changes, track approvals, or avoid any changes with support, which made it quite efficient."
"Micro Focus Service Manager is fine. It's a good solution for small accounts with minimal reporting. Micro Focus is a good option because you don't have to worry about the budget."
"It's easy to scale."
"The flexibility and the integrity of the product allow me to have a rock-solid platform for change, problem, and incident control."
"Incident management is the most valuable because we're using it to manage tickets for an accounting system."
"The design has been revamped in terms of GUI. The current interface is quite easy to read."
"It is a rich content solution and a good and complete solution, along with a lot of functionality."
"We improved our service levels and have been able to maintain them for the last four and a half years."
 

Cons

"There is still a way to go for Automation Anywhere where we can see improvement."
"Product support for our customers needs improvement. They should increase the support personnel."
"Overall, I am pretty satisfied with Automation Anywhere. The UI is pretty straightforward. However, the customer service could be improved."
"Automation Anywhere can be improved in terms of complex logic implementation."
"The scheduling is a little difficult at times. Rather than setting up individual instances, it would be really nice if we had the ability to set repetitive jobs easily. Right now, if you want a job to run every 15 minutes, you have to schedule it a lot of times. I'd rather have the ability to just say 'run every 15 minutes.'"
"For improvement, I would like to see Automation Anywhere integrating with multiple other technologies. As of now, it is integrating with .NET. When it come to future technologies, I want Automation Anywhere to integrate with Python scripts, and make the execution easier. That will be very helpful, having our cognitive technologies interacting with Automation Anywhere."
"The overall product in Automation Anywhere is good, but they need to improve a little bit on the overall architecture side."
"On the document automation side, the document learning features are not as robust as one would expect them to be. When I am doing document automation and a document fails due to low confidence in populating a field, it requires manual correction."
"Any software has a lifecycle. To me, BMC is a dated architecture."
"Encountered issues with scalability and stability."
"Regarding reporting, when sharing information with leadership, we utilize BI support and data or more analytical tools. These tools provide accurate and comprehensive reports, covering various aspects. Reports are either sent directly through email or automated using scripts. It would be beneficial to integrate similar capabilities into BMC for future use. Many applications we work with already have a centralized virtual automation tool, such as Control M, but manual effort is still required. Improvements in automation for accurate and efficient reporting in BMC would be valuable."
"Version 20.02 was stable, but I don't think 20.08 is quite stable because we have identified many bugs and reported them to BMC."
"If you want to have to migrate from on-premises to Helix or from Helix to a ServiceNow, or from cloud to on-premises, it's easy but it requires additional tools."
"SmartIT could include PR. This would help us greatly in bridging the gap between Remedy's views and SmartIT."
"There is a text editor that we use to enter our incident description or service request description, and it should be richer in terms of features."
"Our middleman provider limits the available functionality so we cannot even do our own analytics."
"Load balancers were not delivered in Phase 1 (time/cost constraints), and that caused negative user experiences."
"We still find ourselves wrapping customizations around it more than we would like, and we still find the upgrade path more costly and time consuming than we would hope."
"We aren't able to take emails that come in and turn them into tickets, especially when it comes to attachments. When an email has an attachment, like a screenshot, it is a very cumbersome process, and it does not work very well. I shouldn't have been paying technicians to cut and paste attachments from an email into the ticketing system. It should do that automatically. Other solutions are able to do that. This is something that needs to be improved. Test manager and knowledge management areas are probably amongst the worst parts of this solution. We try to use this solution for knowledge management, but it is not user-friendly. Therefore, it has limited ROI as you need to spend time to try and fully capitalize on the knowledge management system."
"We're coming to end-of-life on the product we've got."
"I don't see anything lacking."
"The licensing model could be made more flexible."
"Part of our reason for moving away from Service Manager is that HP was not on the leading edge of the technology and was consequently being surpassed by SaaS offerings."
"I've heard that it's been fairly complex, but I haven't done it myself."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Automation Anywhere is cheaper than UiPath and Blue Prism. From a market point of view, Automation Anywhere is reasonable. Any organization can adopt Automation Anywhere."
"It's cheaper than other similar solutions."
"I would rate the price of Automation Anywhere a six out of ten, with ten being the most expensive."
"From my experience, I can say that the initial setup cost is easily recovered over a period of time once the bots start running in production."
"We have purchased licenses, but are trying to obtain more bot programmer licenses."
"Our licensing costs are setup on an annual basis."
"The licensing needs to be made simpler or shortened."
"Our annual licensing costs are about $500,000."
"The price of BMC Helix ITSM is expensive."
"I am not sure the exact price we pay for the solution but I know it is in the high seven-figure amount annually."
"It is not very expensive and not very cheap. It is somewhere in-between. Some of the features are more expensive. There are also additional costs. If you want to use most of the features, you need to pay more."
"The solution's pricing should come down."
"If you are looking for some kind of professional services form the OEM then you would have to purchase that."
"There are licenses to use this solution."
"Please always get the latest quote from a BMC partner or from BMC. Check for the latest offerings."
"We did not compare the price of BMC Helix ITSM to other vendors. However, it has a mid-range price."
"HP Service Manager has moderate pricing."
"Micro Focus Service Manager is a little cheaper than other options. You have to pay a monthly subscription fee."
"I pay for Service Manager on a yearly basis, and the price is reasonable - I would rate it five out of ten."
"The license is not cheap."
"I would say that identify your requirements and pay for the support to implement and test those requirements, and then hope that you did a good job because the cost of their service is fairly expensive."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions are best for your needs.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

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

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 Business20
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise54
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise38
 

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 ITSM?
Although BMC Helix ITSM is a strong enterprise platform, there are areas where it could be improved. One key area is ...
What is your primary use case for BMC Helix ITSM?
My main use case for BMC Helix ITSM is validating and automating core ITSM workflows, such as incident, change, and s...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BMC Helix ITSM?
My thoughts on the pricing and licensing cost of BMC Helix ITSM are that it is flexible.
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise, Agentic Process Automation System (Now Certified for WorkSpaces)
Remedy ITSM, Remedy, Helix Remedy, BMC Helix IT Service Management
Micro Focus Service Manager, HPE ITSM, HPE Service Manager
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
Brookfield, HealthSouth Corporation, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics, Mercator, SAP, Stanford University
resultspositive, Globicon
Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, Atlassian, Teclib' and others in IT Service Management (ITSM). Updated: October 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.