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Device42 vs ServiceNow CMDB 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

Device42
Ranking in Configuration Management Databases
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
IT Asset Management (8th), IP Address Management (IPAM) Tools (5th), Data Center Infrastructure Management (4th)
ServiceNow CMDB
Ranking in Configuration Management Databases
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
33
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Configuration Management Databases category, the mindshare of Device42 is 20.9%, up from 19.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow CMDB is 27.3%, down from 39.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Configuration Management Databases Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
ServiceNow CMDB27.3%
Device4220.9%
Other51.8%
Configuration Management Databases
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2783919 - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Vice President at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
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.
reviewer2782440 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution's agentless approach to asset discovery is very important for us because installing agents on physical or virtual devices is not easy in our company. We have to escalate these kinds of things to different levels of security. Not having to install agents makes it easy for us."
"The import/export for bulk operations is a valuable and good feature."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"The topology layout is the most valuable feature."
"I like the tool's agentless discovery feature. The tool configures the devices based on the documentation provided. I am also impressed with its auto-discovery feature. The tool also keeps on tracking and finds whatever is in the environment."
"Device42 is a fantastic tool for workload discovery, and I believe everyone should start using it if they have plans to do so; it is a top-notch tool in the market."
"Device42 is a fantastic tool for workload discovery, and I believe everyone should start using it if they have plans to do so; it is a top-notch tool in the market."
"The Insights+ component is useful for us because it does business application mapping and helps us visualize it. It saves us time because we don't have to hunt for data."
"I deal mostly with asset management, and ServiceNow helps me do my job more effectively."
"The product's most valuable feature is its ability to extract the details of organizational hardware and provide the latest setup updates."
"ServiceNow CMDB is fully integrated and complete. ServiceNow has modules for everything an IT service company needs, and it's flexible."
"The solution has a single database, architecture, and data model."
"I like ServiceNow CMDB's discovery tools. If you have discovery tools and the discovery tools are built around a philosophy of mapping, then we can implement a top-down architectural mapping of the elements in the upper structure and create your CI."
"Portfolio management is very useful for us."
"One of the most valuable aspects of ServiceNow CMDB is its user-friendly interface and high degree of customization at the user level."
"There is a lot of documentation online regarding CMDB."
 

Cons

"It would be nice for the agent to have an installer versus a single file across multiple systems."
"If they could make it so their remote connector could do as much as 10,000 devices, that would be better."
"From a documentation and reporting standpoint, at present, it is useful, but I feel that it can be improved because it currently feels incomplete in certain areas."
"When servers have two network adapters, automatically discovered will be only one network card because the other one is a backup. Device42 has some problems to find the other connection."
"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."
"The breadth and depth of the solution's discovery of IT asset information means the system does most of the work, but they need to work on improving the database discovery part, especially for Oracle Exadata."
"Mapping items wasn't as intuitive as importing in Device42, so this is an area for improvement."
"I think the graphical representation of all associated machines needs improvement to better illustrate how these systems have dependencies on each other."
"Because I'm a SME, the most important thing is the technical help that I can get, so better, more useful technical support would be good."
"There could be room for enhancing customization capabilities."
"We have various service levels and SLAs for our customers like platinum, gold, etc. Each SLA has an associated hardware and computing configuration. We cannot define that in ServiceNow for each customer. For example, a customer with 100 servers might be in the platinum category while a client with 25 would be in gold."
"There is some customization we need from the customer side."
"If you select any CI, the associated applications with that CI should also be made available for users since, currently, the tool lacks such a feature."
"Definitely, the price needs to be lower because there are clients that I work with who cannot afford ServiceNow. I have to end up proposing alternate solutions to fit their budget."
"We would like the solution to be made more easily scalable in future updates."
"The tool is not user-friendly. It has a lot of features and you can get lost in it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The problem with using other vendor, like BMC, is the pricing. The price is so horrible and nobody wants to pay this money."
"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."
"The product cost is low. It is quite cheap."
"We pay $100,000 per year."
"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."
"It's in the top-three most expensive solutions in terms of cost, but it has all the features that are needed."
"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."
"Our licensing costs are on a yearly basis."
"In comparison to the cost of other solutions, you get value for your money with ServiceNow CMDB. It could definitely be cheaper though."
"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."
"The market sees ServiceNow as the Ferrari in terms of pricing. It's at the very top, and its cost is very, very high."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise17
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise20
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Device42?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Device42 is that it is really reasonable. Compared to other competitors, it does not cost much, and I would recommend it from a cost perspe...
What needs improvement with Device42?
The features I appreciate most about Device42 are the agent-based service providing more granularity and metrics. However, I foresee areas of improvement for the agent-less solution, which could be...
What needs improvement with ServiceNow CMDB?
I would like to improve ServiceNow CMDB through better implementation and parameterization. ServiceNow has capabilities, and I wonder if they have included some AI capability to detect data that ar...
What is your primary use case for ServiceNow CMDB?
I mostly deal with ServiceNow CMDB, orchestration, and also project management with ServiceNow. I also provide support for operations in Jira.
What advice do you have for others considering ServiceNow CMDB?
I am a consultant, not a reseller. I used to work for a company, but now I am a consultant. There is project management, ServiceNow CMDB, and orchestration features. Today, we have integrated it wi...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

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
Find out what your peers are saying about Device42 vs. ServiceNow CMDB and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.