Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Espressive Barista vs ServiceNow Virtual Agent 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

Espressive Barista
Ranking in AI-Powered Chatbots
8th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (33rd), AI-Agents for HR (3rd)
ServiceNow Virtual Agent
Ranking in AI-Powered Chatbots
1st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the AI-Powered Chatbots category, the mindshare of Espressive Barista is 3.1%, down from 6.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow Virtual Agent is 5.1%, down from 20.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
AI-Powered Chatbots Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
ServiceNow Virtual Agent5.1%
Espressive Barista3.1%
Other91.8%
AI-Powered Chatbots
 

Featured Reviews

Jim Lobao - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager for End User Support Services at Five9
Has helped enhance our support ability, reduced our resolution time, and reduced our service desk costs
Espressive Barista's natural language processing and conventional AI still have room for improvement. We haven't yet found anything that resembles true AI that can learn autonomously without human intervention. However, Barista does help us identify and address some of these areas, allowing my team to step in and create intents and responses to questions. When a user asks a question that Barista doesn't immediately understand, we can recognize the pattern, capture it, and link it to a common intent. This is highly beneficial for acquiring such data, but it's a reactive approach and still requires curation. Natural language processing still has some way to go. One of our challenges is that our internal employees haven't yet adopted a natural way of interacting with Barista. Getting people to be concise and to the point, rather than being verbose as if they were interacting with a human, has been an ongoing challenge. While they may feel comfortable being conversational in Slack, expecting a human-like response, Barista is a different entity. Barista isn't interested in their recent vacation; it just wants to know they're locked out of their account. So, some users may assume Barista understands their intent when they say, "I'm back from vacation and locked out of my account." Barista, however, may interpret this as a request for the holiday schedule. Therefore, we're gradually educating our users to adapt their communication style for better success with Barista. Conversely, we desire Barista to adapt its behavior based on the interaction, the language used, and the way people communicate. I wholeheartedly desire an AI that can continuously learn and adapt to our organization's evolving needs. This is the most challenging aspect, as it involves understanding our organization's terminology, procedures, and toolsets. We've made significant progress in this area. However, from an NLP standpoint, we still face challenges with our nearly 3,000 Slack channel users, each with their unique communication styles. People ask questions in various ways, and sometimes there are misunderstandings. They want to interact with us naturally. However, we still struggle with natural language processing. People don't always realize that the bot is a virtual agent designed to be concise and efficient. Sometimes, less is more. It's been a difficult transition for people to grasp that they're conversing with a virtual agent, not a human. They still expect human-like interactions, such as discussing their weekend or holidays or simply pasting screenshots of errors. However, the bot can't interpret screenshots. If they provide the error code and some context about the application, the bot can better understand the issue. So, the key challenge is bridging the gap between human expectations and the bot's capabilities in terms of natural interaction.
KaustubhPartha - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Process Consultant at Advance Solutions
Virtual agent has transformed support workflows and saves employees valuable time every day
The only concern about ServiceNow Virtual Agent is that it helps in the notification, but in most companies, employees do not always work on ServiceNow. There are administrators and end users. What happens with end users is that if your screen is open with the service portal and ServiceNow Virtual Agent on your screen, you do get your notifications. But if you accidentally close the window or the browser and start to work on something else, even if ServiceNow Virtual Agent responds, the notification is not sent to that person. ServiceNow has changed the game by bringing Now Assist and other AI related aspects where they have leveled up on the virtual agent capability. I would say that ServiceNow Virtual Agent as an individual entity can be improved in certain aspects. The biggest improvement needed for ServiceNow Virtual Agent is that it is currently only available on the service portal. If a person logs into ServiceNow and they are a fulfiller, in order to access ServiceNow Virtual Agent, they will have to open their service portal and keep it open until they receive the notifications. If ServiceNow Virtual Agent is available on the classic UI itself, the moment any fulfiller logs into ServiceNow, they do not have to additionally go on to the portal. That would be more helpful and would save some time. ServiceNow in general is doing a good thing across all the modules. I do not have any negative feedback to provide. The whole AI thing that has come after the Xanadu upgrade and then the Zurich upgrade, things are slowly improving and the way ServiceNow is building the build agent and other aspects, I do expect some really interesting and innovative features in the next year from the Australia release.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Its ability to recognize phrases has gotten smarter over time."
"I like Expressive Barista's integration with Microsoft Teams."
"When it comes to neutral language processing and conversational AI, it's very good, very solid... We all have different ways of speaking or writing in English and the application does a very solid job of recognizing what's being asked regardless of how it's being asked."
"The bot is pretty easy to update and keep up to date. Espressive itself is pretty easy to work with."
"With respect to its natural language processing capabilities, it recognizes things that you wouldn't think it would recognize. Even in cases where it doesn't, it's pretty easy to go in and make the adjustments that are needed."
"The most valuable feature is its scalability."
"The solution is available to support us instantly as required."
"Our developers have used the Barista Control Center to extend the platform by adding content, and they've found it fairly easy to do and manage"
"Virtual Agent gives us connectivity that can reach out to any middleware."
"For me, it's very valuable that many of the IT solutions that normally service desk agents provide and that take a lot of their time can be done. For example, password reset normally takes a lot of time for service desk agents, and that is something that can be very easily automated so that they can focus on something that adds more value. Password reset or helping with password reset looks simple, and maybe naive, but it takes a significant amount of time for service desk agents. That is something that helps a lot."
"What's best about ServiceNow Virtual Agent is easy implementation. It's a drag-and-drop process where you can set up a chatbot over the UI. I like that ServiceNow Virtual Agent is a low-code solution. For ServiceNow Virtual Agent integration, you'll only need to write short lines of code, so that's easier. As ServiceNow Virtual Agent is under ServiceNow, it's easy to raise an incident, look for a knowledge base article, etc., so this is another pro of the solution."
"The ITSM topics were valuable. They reduced service desk usage and freed agents. They saved 40% to 50% of the time, and the agents were able to do other tasks instead of just replying to customers, replying to their emails, or logging the incidents themselves. That percentage of work was now done directly by end-users who were also happy because they were able to get the query response within seconds instead of waiting in a queue or waiting for an agent to reply."
"Virtual Agent frees up resources. When properly populated, it's a great asset because it can provide answers 24/7, and you can operate it with reduced staff. You save money. Over time, you can have it learn to address newer questions as you work with it from a support staff standpoint."
 

Cons

"The reports provided by the solution are not customizable."
"I would like to see improvement to the out-of-the-box verbiage, with the questions going to the right place."
"Espressive Barista's natural language processing and conventional AI still have room for improvement."
"My only comment would be if they wanted to use this as an IT service management tool, maybe they could think about Barista making tickets and having change management and problem management capabilities."
"The knowledge management could definitely be improved."
"Expressive Barista could improve by adding native integration with WhatsApp, one of the top communication channels in South Africa. When we're trying to sell Barista to customers, we have to tell them that the solution doesn't have out-of-the-box support for WhatsApp. We can develop it, but then we need to have a conversation about how much that will cost."
"What would make things easier is more detail, out of the box, about what is helping out of the box. We're struggling a little bit to get that data. We want more information about what Barista has brought in that the employees are using, out of the box. We want more visibility into the things that we ourselves haven't done the interaction for."
"I would like to see the continued expansion of all of the automation capabilities."
"There were occurrences where the machine was not recognizing the topic correctly and not routing the users to the correct topic. It was specifically related to the Spanish language."
"They can help the developers with ready-made structures or JavaScript structures or topics that can be integrated into the basic package. That would help a lot."
"Lacks integration with AI search or any enterprise search machine."
"Right now, out of the box, ServiceNow Virtual Agent has no natural language conversion. You can't convert from one language to another. If that functionality were available in ServiceNow Virtual Agent, that would make the solution better and easier for users. For example, if a user is typing in Chinese and the service desk staff is using Hindi, there should be a dynamic conversion of the languages, so there'd be good and accurate communication between the end user and the service desk team. The additional feature I'd like ServiceNow Virtual Agent to have in its next release is language conversion because that's where it's lagging. It's one of the most critical features that clients ask for. I'm in a consulting firm, and I'm helping people implement ServiceNow Virtual Agent. As a consultant, people often ask me this question: "How do you remove the language barrier?""
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is affordable."
"The pricing isn't overly burdensome. It's going to be interesting to see how new models come in with new capabilities but, as it is, as a base system, it's pretty good."
"User-based licensing has been working well for us, and we believe we are deriving significant value from it."
"The price for the licensing is fair."
"It is expensive. It's not a cheap thing."
"Based on what I know, when you purchase ServiceNow ITSM, ServiceNow Virtual Agent comes out of the box with it. You don't have to pay extra for the ServiceNow Virtual Agent license. So, there's no extra cost."
"ServiceNow Virtual Agent was included in my company's basic ServiceNow package, so when you get a ServiceNow license, you can use ServiceNow Virtual Agent for free."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which AI-Powered Chatbots solutions are best for your needs.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
26%
Retailer
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Healthcare Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Large Enterprise6
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What needs improvement with ServiceNow Virtual Agent?
The only concern about ServiceNow Virtual Agent is that it helps in the notification, but in most companies, employees do not always work on ServiceNow. There are administrators and end users. What...
What is your primary use case for ServiceNow Virtual Agent?
I am still working in ServiceNow implementation. I was previously a solution architect, and now I work as a business process consultant. I currently work with the Human Resources Service Delivery p...
What advice do you have for others considering ServiceNow Virtual Agent?
ServiceNow does have a list of templates that people use, and ServiceNow does not recommend customization. However, customization opens the world to many possibilities. For example, if a company is...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Virtual Assistant, Passage AI
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
MGM,Novant Health
Find out what your peers are saying about Espressive Barista vs. ServiceNow Virtual Agent and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.