Device42 vs ServiceNow CMDB comparison

Device42 and ServiceNow are both solutions in the Configuration Management Databases category. Device42 is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.2, while ServiceNow is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.5. Device42 holds a 25.9% mindshare in CMD, compared to ServiceNow’s 19.8% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Device42 users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of ServiceNow users who would recommend it.

Device42

Read 34 Device42 reviews

5,796 Views
1,159 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

ServiceNow CMDB

Read 34 ServiceNow CMDB reviews

2,052 Views
2,052 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Device42

ServiceNow CMDB

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Device42 and ServiceNow CMDB based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Configuration Management Databases solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Device42 vs. ServiceNow CMDB Report (Updated: June 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Device42 vs. ServiceNow CMDB

June 2026

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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

Device42

Ranking in Configuration Management Databases

1st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Asset Management (5th), IP Address Management (IPAM) Tools (3rd), Data Center Infrastructure Management (1st)

ServiceNow CMDB

Ranking in Configuration Management Databases

2nd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Configuration Management Databases category, the mindshare of Device42 is 25.9%, up from 22.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow CMDB is 19.8%, down from 32.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Configuration Management Databases Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Device42	25.9%
ServiceNow CMDB	19.8%
Other	54.3%

Configuration Management Databases

Featured Reviews

Manmohan Rao

Associate Vice President at Hitachi Systems India Private Limited

Granular discovery has ensured confident workload migration and optimized cloud move group planning

Device42 offers the best features for workload assessment, particularly useful for cloud-to-cloud workload or on-premise data center workload, especially when planning for workload migration to the public cloud. For application and infrastructure discovery, Device42 has enabled me to know the number of machines running in the on-premise environment and has managed to capture complete utilization metrics or trends of their utilization. This has benefited me in right-sizing systems for my public cloud total cost of ownership (TCO) planning, providing me granularity to right-size these systems while planning a migration to the public cloud. Device42 has positively impacted my organization by providing granularity toward application discovery compared to other assessment tools, which is a differentiator since none of the other tools provide such granularity, leading to better decision-making for my migration to the public cloud. Device42 has improved my migration projects by providing granularity around system dependencies that gave me confidence knowing which systems communicate with each other parked in a particular move group. My move group planning became so robust that I am not leaving any system behind in the on-premise data center from my planning, which saves a lot of time and effort, leading to cost optimization—a value addition.

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reviewer2782440

ServiceNow Consultant at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

Automation features and integrated service mapping have streamlined incident and change management processes

There is probably room for improvement in ServiceNow CMDB. I'm so immersed in projects and solving direct customer issues that I don't think too much about potential improvements. Maintaining an accurate and up-to-date ServiceNow CMDB can be challenging due to incoming data from various sources, but ServiceNow has been developing small AI components to help with data discrepancies and deduplication recently. They have also improved integrations with other tools, providing many out-of-the-box integrations to different monitoring tools and CMDBs, which previously required coding experience for custom integrations. They are moving towards a more low-code or no-code approach, which is part of their goal as a company.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's nice to know that you can set up the scan, schedule it, and sit back."

"The way the solution’s automatic IT asset discovery and inventory functionality works is you set up a discovery job, then you can schedule it to run. I schedule all of the runs daily at different times so nothing is interfering with anything else. It's nice to know that you can set up the scan, schedule it, and sit back. You can check them every day and make sure everything ran, making sure nothing had errors, then you're good to go. Anything new is going to automatically be discovered, which is nice. It takes some of the stress off because you don't have to know, "If this team opened new servers, we need make sure now it will automatically pick them up." It is one less thing to worry about. It gathers a lot of data points."

"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."

"It has agentless discovery; you don't need to put agents on your servers. You can open one or two ports to discover all your infrastructure."

"They've also just created some new interactive dashboards. CEOs can see and interact with the data rather than scrolling through endless Excel worksheets to find what they need."

"The continuous asset discovery is good because it means not having to manually input all the small data, such as IP addresses, leases, etc. It helps and saves us a lot of time."

"A big plus for Device42 was the auto-discovery. With it, we have updated devices, updated systems, and up-to-date systems."

More Device42 pros

"The stability is about the same as other platforms; it's not perfect, but it's pretty good, and the scalability of the solution is good."

"It integrates with so many different things. ServiceNow CMDB assisted us in streamlining multiple processes."

"I like ServiceNow CMDB's discovery tools."

"There is a lot of documentation online regarding CMDB."

"We can use ServiceNow CMDB to create more tables that can provide granular information."

"I've realized that if you have a good full-fledged CMDB, being involved in understanding what causes problems is not very difficult."

"We were previously using spreadsheets to keep track of everything. ServiceNow CMDB has enabled us to consolidate all this information into one place, which helps with audits and reporting. It also improves visibility."

"One of the most valuable aspects of ServiceNow CMDB is its user-friendly interface and high degree of customization at the user level."

More ServiceNow CMDB pros

Cons

"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."

"It was hard to know which assets I'd already looked at because if I looked up another asset with a similar name, they would still pop up. I would have to make sure I was looking at the right asset. The search function should be improved."

"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."

"A con for Device42 is that Kubernetes integration is lacking. You pay for 10,000 spot licenses and if you're spinning up a Kubernetes cluster, or four or five or six Kubernetes clusters like we do, you're going to have 5,000 or 6,000 nodes in each of those, doing different types of business things."

"Since I was focused on deploying connectors and getting all the servers to be scanned, one of the biggest pains was when a job would fail, then the output (logging) was poor. For example, "Why did it fail?" In these cases, you get a generic error. It doesn't point you in the right direction and tell you why you got the error, which is really annoying. There have been times I asked, "Is there somewhere I can see a better log as to why is this failing?" That would be a really nice improvement."

"Device42 can be improved by adding more widgets in the dashboard with correct information."

"Price-wise, from what I understand from my leadership, Device42 has some cost and it is a bit high compared to other discovery tools such as BMC Discovery or BMC Helix."

"The architecture is a bit old-fashioned. Device42 is on one server, appliance, virtual machine, or guest. We are loading more into Device42 than it can hold. Overloading Device42 with REST API calls or tasks will directly impact every aspect because the server will be too busy to answer requests."

More Device42 cons

"We would like the solution to be made more easily scalable in future updates."

"ServiceNow CMDB could be easier to use. Beginners don't always understand the features. It would be helpful if ServiceNow offered more training or self-guided courses where people could learn to leverage the platform better. I've used ServiceNow for a long time, but I see new users struggling with these processes. There's a steep learning curve."

"The initial setup is a bit complex."

"Pricing is all over the place. That is one of the comments I can make regarding pricing."

"There's room for improvement in terms of integration."

"In general, the pain points are related to ServiceNow. There is a lack of development. ServiceNow is not a true configuration management tool. So, a lot of development is needed to get it to be the kind of tool that you would like it to be. It serves as a platform, and you only get out of it what you invest in terms of development. So, CMDB on its own isn't quite robust until you actually have a CMD project to make it robust. The same thing is there with asset management and all other parts of it. Out of the box, it's not competitive with a like-for-like application."

"Integration is complicated and requires advance scripting and customization to complete it. It would be good to have the ability to customize the UI."

"If you have multiple tools that are going to ingest data into the CMDB, you need to be careful of what rules we write to ensure that they fall in place."

More ServiceNow CMDB cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"We pay $100,000 per year."

"The product cost is low. It is quite cheap."

"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."

"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."

"The market sees ServiceNow as the Ferrari in terms of pricing. It's at the very top, and its cost is very, very high."

"It is always fluctuating. It seems to change every six months. Every time they come out with a new iteration, it changes. It is pretty complicated, and they should improve it."

"The product is pricey."

"It is really expensive. I don't know actually how much it costs, but in 2016, when a client decided to move from an old solution to ServiceNow and had to choose a supplier for ServiceNow, I had heard that it could cost $10 per hour, which is really expensive. I am not aware of any additional fees to the standard licensing fees. There is no standard ServiceNow solution. When a company wants to acquire ServiceNow, they already know which module they will choose. In a basic package, you would have Service Catalog, Incident Management, and Change Management. These modules are usually required in an IT company."

"In comparison to the cost of other solutions, you get value for your money with ServiceNow CMDB. It could definitely be cheaper though."

"The product price falls on the higher side of the spectrum."

"I would like it to be cheaper. If you've got a large environment, it can get quite expensive quite quickly. You still get a return on investment, but everybody has a tight budget. In terms of licensing, everything is pretty much known upfront. Being SaaS-based, there are no real additional gotchas that we came across."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Healthcare Company

Outsourcing Company

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

Outsourcing Company

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	9
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	20

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	9
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	23

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Device42?

The pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Device42 are relatively cost-effective and affordable. I do not know if a small organization would be able to afford it, but I presume it would also be co...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Device42?

I think Device42 can be improved by adding more features around the CMDB aspect and lifecycle management. I do not think many people use it for that functionality, but if they were to expand the su...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Device42?

My main use case for Device42 is that we use it as a CMDB and affinity map to check out network topology or determine when we need to decom something in a life cycle. We use it for many different p...

See all answers

What needs improvement with ServiceNow CMDB?

I believe that related to the solutions in the Now Assist platform, we can put more autonomy on that. Some reconciliation can be automated. AI Assist is the current improvement now. I don't have an...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for ServiceNow CMDB?

I primarily work with ITSM, HR, SPM, AI, Now Assist, CMDB, and CSDM modules, covering almost all of these areas. I use the integration with ServiceNow CMDB with all the processes that we have imple...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering ServiceNow CMDB?

I help customers evaluate their CMDB health. We use the CMDB health to make that analysis, to see the relationships, what is missing with the processes they have, and any mis-ownership issues. So, ...

See all answers

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Compared 4% of the time

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Compared 4% of the time

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Compared 15% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Device42

August 2026

Download Device42 product report

Buyer's Guide

ServiceNow CMDB

July 2026

Download ServiceNow CMDB product report

Overview

Device42 empowers enterprises with automatic IT asset discovery, application dependency mapping, and agentless discovery, streamlining asset management, improving decision-making, and supporting migration initiatives.

Device42 automates network discovery and provides comprehensive IT data management, making it indispensable for asset and infrastructure management. The platform’s integration capabilities, such as with ServiceNow, allow seamless management of physical and virtual environments. Its application dependency mapping is a critical feature for efficient cloud migration, while advanced search and dashboards enhance operational tasks. Device42's ease of deployment coupled with integration into cloud services offers robust operational insights and simplifies onboarding.

What are Device42's key features?

Automatic IT Asset Discovery: Enables detailed information collection on hardware and software.
Application Dependency Mapping: Facilitates tracking of application dependencies for effective cloud migration.
Agentless Discovery: Assists in uncovering assets without the need for specialized agents.
Network Topology Visualization: Assists in visual representation of network connections.
Cloud Integration: Simplifies the integration with cloud services for enhanced insights.

What benefits should be evaluated in Device42?

Improved Decision-Making: Optimizes resource utilization and boosts strategic initiatives.
Seamless Integration: Enhances connectivity with platforms like ServiceNow.
Efficiency in Auditing: Eases compliance and auditing processes.
Simplified Onboarding: Streamlines initial setups and deployment.
Enhanced Operational Insights: Supports better management through comprehensive data visualization.

Device42 is widely used across sectors for IT asset and infrastructure management, where automation in inventory and documentation aids compliance and resource optimization. It excels in industries requiring integration with existing systems and comprehensive network solutions. Application dependency mapping bolsters cloud migration efficiency in enterprise environments.

Device42

ServiceNow CMDB offers a user-friendly interface with customizable features, seamless integration, reliable performance, detailed discovery tools, and robust data governance. It is essential for effective asset management and IT service optimization.

ServiceNow CMDB serves as a central management facility for configuration items supporting processes like incident, change, and asset management. It provides scalable tracking of IT hardware assets, integrates discovery, and manages relationships among configuration items to enhance infrastructure and service visualization. With strong data governance, automation capabilities, and integration with business modules, it supports cloud and on-premises environments effectively.

What are the most important features of ServiceNow CMDB?

User-Friendly Interface: Customizable and easy-to-navigate, allowing for efficient management.
Seamless Integration: Interfaces with Microsoft Active Directory and business tools effortlessly.
Automation Capabilities: Automates processes to enhance operational efficiency.
Reliability: Offers consistent performance and detailed discovery tools.
Data Governance: Strong regulatory compliance and data management.

What key benefits or ROI should users expect?

Asset Tracking: Centralized asset management with scalable solutions.
IT Service Management: Enhanced project and service portfolio management.
Centralization: Consolidates configuration data for improved decision-making.
Scalability: Adapts to growing business needs and large data sets.

ServiceNow CMDB is implemented across multiple industries to manage complex IT infrastructures. In finance, it supports asset tracking and compliance. Healthcare uses it for critical configuration management and reliable discovery. Tech companies benefit from its integration capabilities and process automation to maintain competitive edge.

ServiceNow

Sample Customers

Computershare, Concur, Doosan, Fitch Ratings Inc., Fujitsu, HomeAway, Jasper Wireless, Mercedes-Benz, Square, Twitch, UCSB, Zayo Group Inc.

Wayfair, Siemens, Allianz, Experian, Vitas Healthcare

Buyer's Guide

Device42 vs. ServiceNow CMDB

June 2026

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