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OpenText Service Manager [EOL] vs ServiceNow 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

OpenText Service Manager [EOL]
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
48
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
ServiceNow
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
225
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (1st), IT Asset Management (1st), IT Service Management (ITSM) (1st), Rapid Application Development Software (2nd), No-Code Development Platforms (2nd)
 

Featured Reviews

MEKKAB Raouf - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Technology Service Manager & Technology Integration DevOps at Djezzy
Excellent pricing with great change management and service management capabilities
We started with version 9.3, and now we're on 9.6 with the full solution, including the CMS. They have lots of options. They propose a full solution for technology and IT service management. We are a telecom company. We are a leader in the market, and therefore, we need to have all details about our own environment and assets. So far, Micro Focus answers all our needs. I'd advise new users to go directly to the SMAX solution, the last, last version of Service Manager. If they are a technical company or information technology company with engineers and developers, they can use it on-premise. If they don't have such competence in the company, they can ask for the solution on the cloud. It is easily available on Microsoft, Amazon, or Google clouds. I'd rate the product nine out of ten.
MT
Manager of Security Engineering & Architecture at a outsourcing company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Seamless data integration and advanced automation improve service delivery efficiency
I think that nothing needs to be improved with the product; you just need the user to commit and spend appropriate time to overcome that learning curve. Once that is done, the product itself is pretty wonderful. I've seen a very nicely built interface with ServiceNow, and I've also seen the ugliest version that feels outdated. ServiceNow does allow that team to exist. They should modernize their fonts and their layout, the UI friendliness. They did introduce AI, chatbots, and AI on the back end, so that's wonderful and extremely useful if you train it. If you don't train it, it's pretty useless. Assessing the impact of ServiceNow's automation on service delivery times is complicated. The engineers who operate on ServiceNow find it isn't straightforward because the data set is accessible by everybody. The problem is that understanding how to manage that data set requires an enormous amount of engineering skill set to run the product. I would not hand the key to the customer; I would highly recommend that ServiceNow take control of that. Instead of offering support for the software, they should offer administrative support for the software. They should provide professional service or some kind of support system that allows us to use their product at a faster pace. I'm sure they offer something, but it's often outrageously expensive, or they rely on another company to resell their product and offer professional service. It makes no sense in my opinion, and they should offer the team at the front to help customize the product to fit each company's needs, as every company has different demands and forms of submitting a request that need adjustment over time.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The design has been revamped in terms of GUI. The current interface is quite easy to read."
"It's a complete service management suite; a complete management product used by the company worldwide for us."
"Its flexibility and ease of customization are its most valuable features."
"The solution is simple to set up."
"It's easy to scale."
"This is now completely organized and standardized in one workflow, and people work on one ticket, so there's full transparency, no confusion anymore, time to market is much faster, and the email traffic is less."
"It's pretty well-structured in modules."
"Overall, HP will just give you a really great solution."
"I like the flexibility on ServiceNow; we use it for our help desk admin and our call center, but we also use it for our knowledge management system, which is our growth area, and we get to add our custom homemade apps plus vendor apps to integrate into it to get the total package that we need."
"I think it's a very, very well architectured platform, and that's the strength of ServiceNow."
"The features of ServiceNow that I find most valuable include its ability to easily access ticket details if you know the ticket number, monitor the timeline of when the ticket was created, and see the current status, which makes ServiceNow the best tool I have ever used."
"The ease of implementing the operational processes gives my clients the ability to streamline their day-to-day operations quickly, and allows huge visibility for managers and decision makers."
"The product is very robust, the solution offers very good customization, I can make very strong chains and format excellent business rules."
"I like the adaptability and the flexibility of the tool."
"I would say one of the best things on ServiceNow platform is the way how you can quickly automate delivery of services or goods to the end-user."
"It's enabled us to decommission a number of different systems that we were using such as incident change, problem management, asset management, financial etc. and it's enabled us to pull them all together so now we can develop an entire portal inside of ServiceNow."
 

Cons

"The first level of support is slow and it takes some time to receive support."
"It, still, has a bit of more of improvement possibilities in the codeless part. But, I can see that they are working on it, so that's quite good as well."
"We struggle with and the simplicity of getting reporting data at a high level, and output is not where it needs to be for us."
"Their end-user interface and technical support features could be improved."
"The greatest issue for us is to understand the roadmap."
"With the new version moving toward the codeless configuration is good, but it's losing flexibility."
"The stability could be better."
"The greatest issue for us is to understand the roadmap. We want to know whether we should upgrade now or should we wait three months."
"There was an outage at the ServiceNow data center servers, especially on the eastern site. Two weeks later we found out about it through some other call, not to the engineer and it was not notified anywhere on the system."
"Time to respond from support could definitely be better, as the global support timing sometimes causes delays in interactions."
"Their support is not experienced."
"I would say there is a lot of room for improvement when it comes to technical support."
"From an HR standpoint, if users can have a very integrated onboarding or offboarding process between ServiceNow and Workday, then it can give a very good employee experience."
"The solution should offer better security when it comes to storing data."
"I did some app training and got to see Helsinki. It was a little buggy, but I realize it's the next thing coming out, so it was good."
"The interface is not user-friendly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"HP Service Manager has moderate pricing."
"Micro Focus Service Manager is a little cheaper than other options. You have to pay a monthly subscription fee."
"The license is not cheap."
"I would say that identify your requirements and pay for the support to implement and test those requirements, and then hope that you did a good job because the cost of their service is fairly expensive."
"I pay for Service Manager on a yearly basis, and the price is reasonable - I would rate it five out of ten."
"The setup cost is high compared to others, especially when the scope is not fixed."
"While the option exists to pay for a monthly license, we are dealing with large enterprises and these typically involve multi-year licenses of ten or five years, at a minimum."
"The license model is based on a number of fulfillers (active users who play some role within the ServiceNow functionality). Therefore, you can serve as many end-users as you want, without additional costs."
"The cost is quite high."
"ServiceNow pricing is an art, not a science. The deal depends on how commercially savvy you are, which does make it something that is quite difficult to get right. It is most definitely an opportunity area for ServiceNow to improve and have more visibility around pricing of the different products within the platform."
"Getting the solution up and running is expensive."
"It's sold as a less expensive solution, but it has to be highly modified. That's where you get into the cost."
"Certainly, from a product-platform perspective, the price is not too bad."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Marketing Services Firm
12%
Performing Arts
10%
Educational Organization
8%
Construction Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise38
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business55
Midsize Enterprise35
Large Enterprise168
 

Questions from the Community

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Which solution is better for developing non-ITSM applications: OutSystems or Service Now?
The short answer is that OutSystems is far better for 2 main reasons. Firstly, with Service Now you are locked into that platform for good. The business model is to lock in and then keep pumping th...
Would you choose ServiceNow over Microsoft PowerApps?
Hi Netanya, I will choose ServiceNow because ServiceNow is a very good tool compared to Microsoft PowerApp. Because ServiceNow has a very strong module (Performance Analysis) reporting which will ...
What do you like most about ServiceNow?
The solution has a user-friendly interface.
 

Also Known As

Micro Focus Service Manager, HPE ITSM, HPE Service Manager
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

resultspositive, Globicon
AAA, AstraZeneca, Becton, Dickinson and Company, Broadcom, Christus Health, Epicor, Equinix, GE Capital, Intuit, KPMG, Loyola Marymount University, OshKosh, Quantas, RedHat, Royal Bank of Scotland, Swiss Re, U.S. Department of Energy, Safeway, Yale University, and Zillow    
Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, Atlassian, ManageEngine and others in IT Service Management (ITSM). Updated: March 2026.
884,933 professionals have used our research since 2012.