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Device42 vs ServiceNow Discovery comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

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 IT Asset Management
9th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management Databases (4th), IP Address Management (IPAM) Tools (5th), Data Center Infrastructure Management (6th)
ServiceNow Discovery
Ranking in IT Asset Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (2nd), Cloud Resource Discovery Services (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the IT Asset Management category, the mindshare of Device42 is 5.9%, down from 6.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow Discovery is 5.8%, up from 3.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Asset Management
 

Featured Reviews

AHMEDKASSAB - PeerSpot reviewer
Allows us to determine the exact placement of assets based on the building maps and the room details
In my experience, I believe that the key concern is the pricing strategy of the solution. Instead, other solutions are much more cost-effective. Previously, Device42 has altered the pricing model to include a subscription fee which I see as very costly. They should change their pricing strategy and license scheme, conduct market research and ensure that they provide the right product in the market at the right price.
Ayobanji Iluyomade - PeerSpot reviewer
Service helps organizations with network discovery and IT infrastructure management but troubleshooting challenges remain
ServiceNow Discovery was adopted by my organization. We use ServiceNow Discovery for discovery and ITSM The most beneficial features of ServiceNow Discovery for maintaining my IT infrastructure are the CMDB top and discovery of network switches. The areas of ServiceNow Discovery that have room…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"A big plus for Device42 was the auto-discovery. With it, we have updated devices, updated systems, and up-to-date systems."
"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."
"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 IP address tracking [is valuable]... We have a lot of different devices and some of them have many IP addresses, so keeping track of which ones are assigned where is very critical for putting new devices on the network and giving them new addresses. All of our devices are statically assigned, so if we don't keep good records then we could accidentally assign a duplicate, which would cause problems on the network."
"The most valuable part is the ease of use. There's no training involved. It's pretty simple and straightforward."
"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 has everything in one place and links it altogether. This helps when you need to figure out where things are going wrong, where things are happening, or how everything is linked together."
"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 finds public cloud infrastructures globally and updates the integration management database, service catalogs, and asset management details."
"ServiceNow Discovery is useful for discovering the servers, like the servers of Windows and Linux, from the client network."
"It has given us an understanding of each layer from a server application."
"I am impressed with the tool's incident problem change management."
"I find that the Discovery and scripting features are the most useful."
"The product's discovery feature is valuable due to its accuracy, reliability, and the high prestige associated with the information it provides."
"The workflows are beneficial as they allow tasks to be assigned to respective teams without the need for coding."
"In the past, I found troubleshooting difficult in ServiceNow Discovery because I didn't have much exposure to the platform during that time, but then I explored some troubleshooting features, and I found that it wasn't that tough, so this is one of the qualities I like about ServiceNow Discovery. I also like that log reading in ServiceNow Discovery is much better than other tools. Another valuable feature of the tool is that you don't need to install many tools to deploy ITSM. You only need to subscribe to the modules to deploy the proper ITSM in your organization."
 

Cons

"Mapping items wasn't as intuitive as importing in Device42, so this is an area for improvement."
"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."
"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 only thing which I have noticed so far that is not good is that we had an issue with some reporting from the tool, reporting we had to export. We couldn't do it in the way we wanted to, so we tried to reach out to their support but it took pretty long until we understood how we can manage the reports. We still haven't received a complete explanation of what we need to do and how to do it."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to see API management as an additional feature in the tool's future versions. It will give more API security."
"If they could make it so their remote connector could do as much as 10,000 devices, that would be better."
"The service mapping component is less developed than it is in other solutions, and is in need of improvement."
"I would rate technical support for ServiceNow Discovery as four. This rating is because there are features on the tool that never worked and despite calling our support, there were no results."
"ServiceNow is very costly."
"They can expand on the plugins for some of the other tools."
"I am not seeing significant ROI beyond breaking even on what I spend."
"In future releases, I would like to see more AI-oriented enhancements in the solution. It would automate most of the things that we have to do manually write the scripts and go on the teleservice, what to do. So if we have something in place and if we can train the module, then AI would be a good thing."
"ServiceNow Discovery could improve the interface. The navigation bar could improve. It would be helpful to have a landing page to go to find all the elements in one place."
"Without improvement in the patters, applications can't be discovered"
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"The problem with using other vendor, like BMC, is the pricing. The price is so horrible and nobody wants to pay this money."
"The product cost is low. It is quite cheap."
"Our licensing costs are on a yearly basis."
"We pay $100,000 per year."
"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 price could be better. It's a bit on the pricey side."
"The pricing is determined based on the CIs."
"ServiceNow Discovery's licensing is not a very small investment, but it definitely pays off."
"As per a general discussion I had with the stakeholders, I figured out that it is a costly tool. There is a need to make additional payments apart from the licensing fees for better support services from ServiceNow."
"Setting up and licensing for ServiceNow can be expensive, especially for enterprise service management."
"It costs a lot. It is probably close to over a hundred thousand. It's an expensive platform, but you can't compare ServiceNow's Discovery functionality to other discovery tools. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison of ServiceNow to a configuration management tool to an asset management tool because it does those things, but it's not those things."
"ServiceNow Discovery is expensive, but the company has a monopoly and we need to use the solution. We use it because we do not have a choice."
"You need a subscription to ServiceNow Discovery, so you can use its features. You can also use specific plugins with the tool, and some of the plugins are free. I don't have information on how much my company pays for the subscription to ServiceNow Discovery."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
9%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Healthcare Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Device42?
The product must provide AI features. It would be very useful if I could create datasets or queries from an AI interface.
What is your primary use case for Device42?
I use the solution for physical assets management, IT management, and application dependency mapping.
What do you like most about ServiceNow Discovery?
The solution can prioritize the discovery of IP ranges. The product automatically places all Discovery CIs into the correct class within the CMDB.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ServiceNow Discovery?
I think the price of ServiceNow Discovery is cheaper than BMC.
What needs improvement with ServiceNow Discovery?
The areas of ServiceNow Discovery that have room for improvement are getting custom reports on the relationship between CIs that are not on the same table.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Computershare, Concur, Doosan, Fitch Ratings Inc., Fujitsu, HomeAway, Jasper Wireless, Mercedes-Benz, Square, Twitch, UCSB, Zayo Group Inc.
York, National Grid, DXC Technology, experian, BEACHBODY
Find out what your peers are saying about Device42 vs. ServiceNow Discovery and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
861,524 professionals have used our research since 2012.