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IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs LiveChat comparison

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 1, 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

Automation Anywhere
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
668
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (2nd), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (2nd), Process Mining (1st), Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) (1st), Agentic Automation (1st), Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (2nd), AI Legal & Compliance (1st), AI Finance & Accounting (2nd), AI Procurement & Supply Chain (1st)
IBM SmartCloud Control Desk
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (32nd)
LiveChat
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (23rd), IT Service Management (ITSM) (22nd), Live Chat (2nd)
 

Featured Reviews

Venkat Sivaprakash - PeerSpot reviewer
Management Consultant at Accenture
Has significantly improved document-driven workflows and reduced processing time across finance and HR functions
Automation Anywhere has evolved significantly and upgraded itself to provide agentic AI and AI-based automation solutions for document automation. The product has matured considerably over time. We can create workflows that can call an API. We can include prompts in particular workflows for ChatGPT-related functions, connecting to an LLM and RAG to perform tasks. For document automation, modern features are available to train documents, ensuring high accuracy and repeatability over time. The system is very easy to use. I recently completed a course in document automation, typically designed for people involved in coding and technical aspects. Though I understand coding comprehensively, I don't do actual coding. The course was very accessible. Currently, extensive coding isn't necessary due to the hybrid model incorporating GenAI aspects, low-code, no-code capabilities, APIs, and numerous pre-built objects in Automation Anywhere. The features include GenAI-driven prompting methods and workflow creation capabilities. In these workflows, we can create decision boxes and call APIs without coding. We simply pull objects, drop them, connect them, and add minimal coding when needed. The most crucial aspect isn't coding but rather sizing the automation and fleshing out the details. Automation Co-pilot takes notes and performs automated analysis. It can extract details from videos, summarize conversations, and provide detailed information. During calls, it identifies instructions and performs tasks such as preparing reports and reconciliation. Automation Anywhere can also connect with Microsoft Co-pilot. Through Co-pilot, real-time operations can be executed, allowing direct interaction between vendors and automation through this component.
KM
Computer System Engineer at Informatika d.d.
Has centralization and asset management features, and a helpful and knowledgeable technical support team
What needs improvement in IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is its graphical interface because it needs to be more user-friendly. IBM is a big company, but this solution is a little bit outdated. The most common comment I get from customers is that IBM SmartCloud Control Desk looks old and needs a refresh. Its frontend needs a little bit of work. The solution needs to be more modern. In the programming world, you see a lot of new technologies, but this particular solution is still on Java. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk isn't like web-based service request tools, and that's an area for improvement. What I'd like to see in the next version of the solution is a more upscale technology. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk has small issues with document links and attachments, and those could bother you when you're using it for a long time. A more user-friendly GUI is also another improvement I'd like to see in the next version of the solution, plus a better user experience, and it would be great if IBM could resolve the current issues I've noticed in IBM SmartCloud Control Desk.
Vikas Kejriwal - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineering Manager at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees
Clean chat interface has supported basic AI handoffs but now needs omnichannel and a free plan
LiveChat did not support omnichannel messaging or multi-channel inbox, and it was not offering any free plan. These limitations made me switch to another solution. I believe LiveChat should support at least a basic free plan so that potential customers can try out their features before paying for the full suite.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Human errors have been rectified due to bot usage."
"My impression of the impact on visibility in the automation lifecycle is that we help to standardize the process and become more productive in those activities and visibility."
"Automation Anywhere has a drag-and-drop feature eliminating the need for extensive coding."
"Being able to implement automation is valuable. We take the business logic and provide a solution to the client. Defining the intelligence pipeline is the most interesting and challenging aspect for me."
"AA has indirectly helped in re-engineering processes, which has made them more robust and efficient, and this has helped the business immensely."
"It's a perfect product; it's made my life very easy and a lot of people's lives very easy, removing hectic, repetitive, boring work and giving people free time to do the work they really want to do."
"We automated one process that was running with 109 people and reduced it down to 69 with automation."
"We have a very resourceful pipeline to use AA bots in our RPA projects and we are looking to be more engaged with the AA team in deploying these bots."
"The solution has been stable."
"What I like about the Control Desk is that everything is centralized, you have all the requests in one place, you know which ones are for whom and who is working on them, so you have one big package and nothing is lost."
"In general, it's been pretty stable."
"Overall, it's a good product that I would recommend."
"The solution is very easy to work with."
"The workflow capability is useful. It's not a manual helpdesk operation. It's fully automated, even when an alarm has occurred. It covers the complete cycle of initiation to resolving the events. This is its most strong feature that is easily integrable with a monitoring solution. It creates tickets, and the workflow feature is the most important one."
"The most valuable are its flexibility and agility. It's quick to change it, to adapt it to your needs. That's the most important for us."
"SLA integrations, reports, and integration with other applications are the most valuable."
"It truly does what I need it to do and anything else I would say, I would be making it up."
"Through the capabilities of LiveChat we are able to fully customise each live chat implementation to suit the goals of our clients."
"The best feature of LiveChat in my evaluation is the AI chatbot module that I prefer most."
"I majorly love the ticket and knowledge base features, which allow us to save automated answers to the most popular customer queries."
"In my experience, the best features LiveChat offers include a clean interface, robust analytics, and the ability to provide human-to-human website chat."
"Since we started to use LC we managed to increase our customer satisfaction level, increase sales and most important thing to speed up our interaction with our customers because it's all in real time."
"We can attribute most of our high ticket sales to this software."
"Customer Service: Top notch! The support team is available all the time and have been able to solve all our questions instantly."
 

Cons

"Automation Anywhere is not as flexible as Process Studio."
"Automation Anywhere could improve the developer experience by making bot debugging more intuitive and providing clearer explanations of errors."
"With our current version, we are experiencing issues with the access of the Control Room. Therefore, at the moment, we cannot really scale."
"The solution should have a more robust forum to help users navigate the solution, learn about it, and get help when they need it."
"I would like to see more complex use cases coming out for our industry."
"Getting buy-in was a major challenge because of the various people not aware of the technologies moving and getting buy-in from top management is a challenge."
"I would like to see them continue building out documentation with more video-aides."
"Though the courses in the certification's learning hub are great and awesome, there is some more space for adding more explained contents."
"The user interface is not very interesting. If you look at other products like JIRA and ServiceNow, they have made it much easier for the end-users. Maybe not ServiceNow, but JIRA is quite flexible. From a presentation point of view, IBM should make more user-friendly interfaces."
"The user interface is not very interesting."
"The time calculations can be improved. While working on reports, it was taking the time only in seconds, which was hard for me to work out. While creating some dialogs in the service portal, you have to use certain data types in some fields. It was very tricky to make them work. I was testing a certain type of input, and it didn't work. It didn't show me the domain that the fields have to show. I had to make the change to the database, and only then it worked. It was a tricky thing to make them work with the dialogs. Their technical support can also be improved in terms of response time."
"Overall the user experience, as opposed to the system and databases, could be improved. It does work as it should and it's good, but they should invest more in the user interfaces to be less data oriented and more appealing for the user."
"The product is kind of clunky to use."
"The reporting in relation to updating could be improved upon."
"The main issue that we hear from our customers is that the self-service user interface is a little bit old, possibly due to the fact that IBM is such a large enterprise company. People say that they think they're in the year 2004, because you can very clearly see that the technology is lagging behind modern trends."
"What needs improvement in IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is its graphical interface because it needs to be more user-friendly."
"There have been times where Live Chat's servers have had DDOS attacks and have made communication difficult."
"LiveChat did not support omnichannel messaging or multi-channel inbox, and it was not offering any free plan."
"The service needs to be more popular than it currently is."
"The biggest friction point I have experienced with LiveChat so far is the lack of a free plan."
"I'd like to be able to create teams and filter the reports by team, in addition to the ability to currently filter by group, date, agent, tag etc."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing that we received from Automation Anywhere in the beginning was very economical for us. We've seen a lot of benefit from what we spent to what we're receiving. From the beginning, it's been a very low-cost implementation for us."
"It is subscription-based. They have different schemes. The price depends on how you negotiate with the local partner or local representative in your country."
"They are already coming out with a community license, which is really good. That's something that I wish to have."
"The licensing cost of Automation Anywhere is better than UiPath and Blue Prism."
"The pricing strategy for us is one license for development. It is more complicated than that depending on the options you choose."
"It's a bit expensive compared to other RPA tools on the market."
"Automation Anywhere is affordable."
"With the rebate processing automation that we did, it has provided us a savings of around an hour or two a person on a daily basis, which is quite a lot of savings."
"The licensing we have for IBM Control Desk is on a yearly basis. They have a concurrent license and an administrative license. And with these, you get all the products. There aren't any additional fees for extra add-ons or anything like that."
"It's basically for a big company because of the costs. A small company can't afford the licensing cost. For medium and large companies, it's the best product. The price of the license is on the higher side compared to others."
"The license for IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is paid yearly and is on a per-user basis. You buy the product and pay for its license yearly. IBM is changing the licensing structure, but for now, it's a yearly license. There's no additional cost. It's just the license that you need to pay for to use IBM SmartCloud Control Desk."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Performing Arts
11%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Construction Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
17%
Construction Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business162
Midsize Enterprise86
Large Enterprise565
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise2
 

Questions from the Community

How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It depends on your use case. Is it simply to automate a couple of processes? Is it to augment a human team? AA is ver...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
From my experience using AA tool, it depends on the applications that you want to automate, because there some applic...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It is a highly preferred RPA tool. You can check my Automation Anywhere Review to know more.
Ask a question
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What needs improvement with LiveChat?
LiveChat did not support omnichannel messaging or multi-channel inbox, and it was not offering any free plan. These l...
What is your primary use case for LiveChat?
I started using LiveChat six months ago when we explored it. My main use case for LiveChat was to implement it as an ...
What advice do you have for others considering LiveChat?
We conducted a demo with LiveChat during our evaluation period. When I opened LiveChat during my evaluation, I checke...
 

Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise, Agentic Process Automation System (Now Certified for WorkSpaces)
SmartCloud Control Desk
chat.io
 

Interactive Demo

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
St Vincent's Health Australia, Kalibrate Pty. Ltd., Cognizant Technology
Our product is used by over 29,000 companies in 140 countries worldwide. List of our customers includes brands such as: ASUS, Samsung, ING, Roku, LG Electronics, Better Business Bureau, Kaspersky Lab, Daimler, Air Asia, Tele2, Adobe, Orange, Zalora, HarveyNorman, Bombardier and many more.
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs. LiveChat and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.