Device42 vs ServiceNow CMDB comparison

Why PeerSpot?

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 23.3% mindshare in CMD, compared to ServiceNow’s 19.5% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Device42 users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of ServiceNow users who would recommend it.

Device42

Read 35 Device42 reviews

6,897 Views
1,310 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

ServiceNow CMDB

Read 34 ServiceNow CMDB reviews

2,298 Views
2,298 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: September 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Device42 vs. ServiceNow CMDB

September 2026

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Helped 920,769 peers since 2012

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 (3rd), 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 November 2026, in the Configuration Management Databases category, the mindshare of Device42 is 23.3%, down from 23.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow CMDB is 19.5%, down from 28.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Configuration Management Databases Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Device42	23.3%
ServiceNow CMDB	19.5%
Other	57.2%

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.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Before Device42, the company didn't have any kind of asset management software at all, but now that we have Device42, we're integrating every single office into it so we know exactly what's where, which is a huge improvement that has probably halved the time it takes to do the management side of our IT assets."

"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."

"Device42 is a fully-featured tool that includes everything we need with powerful auto-discovery and intelligent application dependency mapping, and it is great in saving time and cost."

"Asset management is a difficult, time consuming thing, however, Device42 has helped me streamline that so I can focus on other areas that need improvement."

"The pricing is reasonable."

"Device42 saves a significant amount of time, with onboarding and discovery being reduced significantly, specifically around understanding how to build out a client's circuits and network topology."

"The asset inventory is great because previously we had devices all over the place. We have been able to do multiscans to find devices that we didn't know about, which was great."

"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."

More Device42 pros

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

"Portfolio management is very useful for us."

"The support of the whole infrastructure is one of the main features that makes ServiceNow CMDB suitable for every type of company. It integrates with all other modules like change, business management, HR, and customer service management."

"I deal mostly with asset management, and ServiceNow helps me do my job more effectively."

"ServiceNow CMDB works great for large and small businesses."

"There is a data mixer that's called Management and Commission and Discovery, which helps us auto-populate the information directly by pinging that particular CI and capturing that information, so we don't have to go for manual updates every time."

"The initial setup isn't too complicated."

"The CMDB for us is fed by our discovery tools, and it lets us be able to track the changes that we make to any incidents or escalation points that we have associated with a CI."

More ServiceNow CMDB pros

Cons

"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."

"Device42 is a main part of our processes. We need reliability, not only in terms of the data but with the solution itself."

"Their pricing model is very poor. For instance, software licensing, at one point in the distant past, was a standard feature."

"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."

"It gets a bit confusing sometimes when you're trying to map things to a certain spot when you are trying to configure it."

"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."

"Configuring rPDUs in the data center for Device42 required us to add multiple discovery jobs. The rPDUs were referred to the ISPDUs and daisy-chained. They would automatically assign a unique SMP port, but Device42 didn't allow SMP ranges, so we had to create a discovery job for each rPDU individually. We submitted a feature request to mitigate that."

"I would say it is ninety percent stable, but with every new upgrade or version release, I find that there are many bugs."

More Device42 cons

"You need to perform additional planning because their recommendation is not to add columns to the core tables."

"In ServiceNow, we are not there yet. It's less mature."

"The reporting function could be more advanced and has room for improvement."

"I'm still learning about CMDB's capabilities, so I haven't seen anything that I want added yet."

"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."

"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."

"The solution is scalable, however, there is some room for improvement regarding the vCenter and the Virtual Machine Center, for which we are actually struggling right now."

"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."

More ServiceNow CMDB cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

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

"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."

"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 problem with using other vendor, like BMC, is the pricing. The price is so horrible and nobody wants to pay this money."

"Our licensing costs are on a yearly basis."

"It's in the top-three most expensive solutions in terms of cost, but it has all the features that are needed."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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

14%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Healthcare Company

Outsourcing Company

Financial Services Firm

16%

Outsourcing Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	10
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...

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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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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Device42

October 2026

Download Device42 product report

Buyer's Guide

ServiceNow CMDB

October 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

September 2026

Free Report: Device42 vs. ServiceNow CMDB

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