OpenNebula vs ServiceNow IT Operations Management comparison

Why PeerSpot?

OpenNebula and ServiceNow are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. OpenNebula is ranked #24 with an average rating of 7.0, while ServiceNow is ranked #15 with an average rating of 8.1. OpenNebula holds a 1.5% mindshare in CM, compared to ServiceNow’s 1.6% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of OpenNebula users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of ServiceNow users who would recommend it.

OpenNebula

Read 15 OpenNebula reviews

3,579 Views
3,400 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

ServiceNow IT Operations Ma...

Read 46 ServiceNow IT Operations Management reviews

8,962 Views
2,241 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

OpenNebula

ServiceNow IT Operations Ma...

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

OpenNebula and ServiceNow IT Operations Management compete in the cloud and IT operations management space. ServiceNow IT Operations Management is considered superior due to its extensive features, appealing to businesses prioritizing functionality.

Features: OpenNebula offers simplicity in building private clouds, flexibility in supporting various infrastructures, and customization options that make it ideal for straightforward cloud solutions. In contrast, ServiceNow IT Operations Management provides comprehensive IT service management with sophisticated workflows, integrations with enterprise IT services, and extensive automation capabilities.

Room for Improvement: OpenNebula could enhance its customer service resources, improve scalability features, and provide more detailed documentation for user support. ServiceNow IT Operations Management could benefit from a simpler deployment process, a more user-friendly interface for non-IT users, and competitive pricing structures.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: OpenNebula is known for its straightforward deployment and strong support for open standards, which aids easy integration with existing infrastructures. Its customer service is adequate but limited compared to larger organizations. ServiceNow IT Operations Management has a more complex deployment due to its wide-ranging capabilities but offers extensive support and resources through its structured customer service program.

Pricing and ROI: OpenNebula's lower setup costs attract organizations with limited budgets aiming for cost-effective cloud management and substantial ROI. ServiceNow IT Operations Management requires a higher initial investment but delivers greater ROI by enhancing IT operations efficiency through its broad feature set.

To learn more, read our detailed OpenNebula vs. ServiceNow IT Operations Management Report (Updated: September 2026).

Buyer's Guide

OpenNebula vs. ServiceNow IT Operations Management

September 2026

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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

OpenNebula

Ranking in Cloud Management

24th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

ServiceNow IT Operations Ma...

Ranking in Cloud Management

15th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Event Monitoring (2nd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (15th), AIOps (3rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of OpenNebula is 1.5%, down from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow IT Operations Management is 1.6%, down from 1.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
ServiceNow IT Operations Management	1.6%
OpenNebula	1.5%
Other	96.9%

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

FOURES Jean-Philippe

Products Manager at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Reliable, simple to manage, and offers great technical support

The support of VXLAN fits with our network management. Thanks to this we can propose mixed solutions using virtual resources on OpenNebula and bare metal servers hosted in our facilities linked to each other on the sale network. This use case is very useful when some applications need bare metal power (Kubernetes workers, huge databases, AI models computations, et cetera). The cluster management is very useful for splitting our different clusters (mutual vs dedicated). We can manage deployments and capacity planning without pain. The API is also really simple and it helped us to develop the Terraform provider to manage OpenNebula like any other cloud infrastructure.

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reviewer2755671

Solution architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Significant enhancement in operations with powerful discovery and analytics, yet pricing structure poses challenges

ServiceNow IT Operations Management provides out-of-the-box dashboards. Along with the dashboard, it also provides the Operations Workspace, which is very useful for operations teams. There is a functionality called Performance Analytics, which we are also using to develop some dashboards for the senior leadership and operations team where they can perform trend analysis of alerts and events happening across the infrastructure and application landscape. These dashboards are really useful here. ServiceNow IT Operations Management's biggest plus point is that it is a platform. ITOM is just one module that ServiceNow IT Operations Management offers, but they provide seamless integration of ITOM with their other modules such as ITSM, where we can leverage the AIs for discovery, perform impact analysis, which essentially helps to enhance the overall IT operations and reduce the downtime and MTTR.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"OpenNebula freed my customer from doing the maintenance operations of the servers because now that can be done by his clients."

"It is quite easy to deploy."

"I also like the ability to build custom functions. I can define a function where I have two types of views and configure the dependencies. The virtual data centers concept allows me to define users. If a user wants to join certain kinds of machines, the host and the other user won't see them. It gives me the flexibility to define multiple views and data centers in one place."

"It has enabled us to decrease the optics by around 55 to 60%."

"The live migration feature has been great and is something we use very often."

"It makes maintenance very easy and stress-free for our teams."

"The ability to use it almost like a public cloud for an organization is a big asset, as it will create a value proposition and can control costs in a great way."

"I'll definitely recommend OpenNebula because it's an open-source solution that's effortless to set up, and the total cost of ownership is low."

More OpenNebula pros

"The most valuable features of the solution are discovery, cloud governance, event management, and service mapping."

"ITOM communicates information about incidents and maintains them. It handles tickets change, manages service networks, and reduces IT service downtime for the organization."

"It is a market leader and is very implementation-friendly. Developers have a clear understanding of how the solution works, and it is mature enough to handle different client needs."

"Customer service is excellent."

"The solution allows you to subscribe to the features you need and utilize CMDB, ITSM, and discovery on the same platform."

"ServiceNow IT Operations Management is beneficial for the discovery of all CIs in our environment."

"The Discovery feature is the most valuable. I only use the Discovery and Service Mapping features. I am using the minor subscription called ITOM Visibility, which includes the Discovery and Service Mapping features. It is easy to understand and easy to use. It has a lot of documentation. You can find a lot of help online, which helps me in finding what I need in a rapid way. You can find videos on YouTube channels and a lot of stuff and information in the online community."

"It is very stable and reliable; there aren't bugs or glitches, it doesn't crash or freeze, and it offers good performance."

More ServiceNow IT Operations Management pros

Cons

"I would like to see OpenNebula add more integration with REST API. XML-RPC API is good, but it becomes a pain to form a resting output."

"An area for improvement in OpenNebula is the number of features it has. The solution doesn't have that many cloud features compared to other solutions. You'd say, "Okay, simplicity over a rich feature list?" Some say, "No, I need a big machine or a cloud interface for my customers to manage resources. I don't have to go and do it for them." Some people do it that way, and it works, but I'd like to improve the limited features in OpenNebula."

"The protocol for clusterization is rough and doesn't work well."

"It should have a simple REST API like most other tools. It's the industry standard format. An XML-RPC API gives you an XML document that you have to convert and then do something with that. REST API endpoint provides outputs in a JSON document. I would also like to see support for user data or heat templates, which OpenStack offers, but OpenNebula doesn't have this yet."

"The front-facing API can be improved to support lots of requests when the platform is huge with lots of virtual resources."

"As with all enterprise software licensing, the pricing is not intuitive and must be negotiated; grandfathered contracts are better than anything offered today."

"Most of the competitors are offering some sort of billing software to transform their installation to work as a small-sized public cloud, but those offerings from OpenNebula are still missing."

"There are small things that are hard. For example, making sure that it is going to be installable on public clouds."

More OpenNebula cons

"I believe that technical support could improve a bit. I would rate it a six."

"The most complaints we have received from our clients are the solution's discovery aspect. I've heard a few concerns from the customers where we have to integrate with a third-party tool to make a full-fledged discovery along with ServiceNow. ServiceNow alone does not do the total capacity of the discovery. The discovery portion of ServiceNow IT Operations Management is not in-depth as what the customers are looking for. The information that it gathers from the assets is a little more limited than what other tools provide."

"Regarding ServiceNow, there is room for improvement in terms of customization, particularly in the area of self-customization."

"ServiceNow IT Operations Management is not very affordable. It is affordable for organizations with a minimum of 5,000 users plus."

"There is room for improvement in service mapping within ServiceNow ITOM. When we have more time, we'll look to extend that and apply it to business-critical services like email."

"ServiceNow could be more prescriptive on how customers can leverage some of the benefits."

"ServiceNow IT Operations Management could do a little bit better with integrations. Integrating ServiceNow IT Operations Management with CMDB processes needs a little more work."

"I advise others not to customize a lot while using the solution."

More ServiceNow IT Operations Management cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing for OpenNebula used to be free, but now it's no longer free. A customer contacted me asking to move to another provider because of the changes in the licensing terms for OpenNebula. I have no information on how much the OpenNebula license is because the customer pays for it, and I only do the integration."

"OpenNebula gives good value for money."

"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."

"We use the Community Edition, rather than the Enterprise Edition."

"OpenNebuoa has recently come up with a new subscription model that is economical and a lot of new customers are choosing this as it is an easy subscription model."

"The solution is open source so is free."

"There are additional costs, you have to pay more for everything."

"I would rate the product's pricing a five out of ten since there are vendors who are cheaper."

"We obtained discovery licenses at about seven dollars Australian per unit, which we found to be reasonable and competitive."

"It is expensive. It is around 10 Euros per server per month."

"The solution offers yearly licenses and a subscription model for add-on features."

"The solution is costly compared to the products offered by its competitors."

"While not entirely sure, I believe the solution costs at least a million dollars annually."

"It is moderately expensive. The pricing itself and the licensing options are depending on the model and the customization."

More ServiceNow IT Operations Management pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Comms Service Provider

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

10%

Outsourcing Company

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	7
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	3

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	12
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	29

Questions from the Community

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Earn 20 points

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ServiceNow IT Operations Management?

Regarding pricing, while I initially felt the prices were high when we moved, I now see that it is reasonable considering that we are not just using an ITSM tool; we are improving processes and com...

See all answers

What needs improvement with ServiceNow IT Operations Management?

ServiceNow IT Operations Management can be improved by focusing on adoption, as some companies still use other tools, and we had to onboard them initially, addressing challenges such as data migrat...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for ServiceNow IT Operations Management?

As an implementation expert and former CIO, I handled implementation from an IT best practice perspective for different companies.

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 14% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs OpenNebula

Compared 8% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs OpenNebula

Compared 6% of the time

BMC Helix Cloud Security vs OpenNebula

Compared 5% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs OpenNebula

Compared 5% of the time

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OpsRamp vs ServiceNow IT Operations Management

Compared 4% of the time

ignio AIOps Platform vs ServiceNow IT Operations Management

Compared 4% of the time

Moogsoft vs ServiceNow IT Operations Management

Compared 3% of the time

Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) vs ServiceNow IT Operations Management

Compared 3% of the time

BMC TrueSight vs ServiceNow IT Operations Management

Compared 3% of the time

More ServiceNow IT Operations Management Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

OpenNebula

September 2026

Download OpenNebula product report

Buyer's Guide

ServiceNow IT Operations Management

August 2026

ServiceNow IT Operations Management report

Download ServiceNow IT Operations Management product report

Also Known As

No data available

ServiceNow ITOM

Overview

OpenNebula offers scalability, ease of deployment, and integration capabilities that enhance cloud management for enterprises. It supports both virtual and bare metal resources, providing a versatile cloud management experience.

OpenNebula provides a robust platform for building, managing, and automating private and public clouds. Its compatibility with platforms like VMware, KVM, and containers makes it ideal for businesses hosting virtual private clouds and deploying Kubernetes clusters. OpenNebula's API and SDK facilitate automation and integration, allowing organizations to connect with IT systems effectively. Despite its strengths, improvements in object storage, REST API integration, and UI enhancements are needed. The documentation can be disorganized, and users encounter challenges with upgrades and community support.

What are key OpenNebula features?

Scalability: Easily manage resources for growing cloud environments.
User-Friendly Interface: Simplifies cloud management tasks.
Integration: Connects seamlessly with IT systems using robust API and SDK.
Hypervisor Support: Works with multiple hypervisors and container platforms.

What benefits do users find in OpenNebula?

Efficiency: Streamlines cloud operations, reducing management complexities.
Versatility: Offers support for both virtual and bare metal resources.
Community and Documentation: Though needing improvement, provides valuable resources for users.
Cost-Effectiveness: Lightweight nature minimizes resource expenditure.

OpenNebula implementation spans industries where cloud automation and management are critical. Companies utilize OpenNebula for deploying private clouds and managing infrastructure. Its support for Kubernetes clusters is beneficial in tech-driven sectors, highlighting OpenNebula's adaptability to different operational needs.

OpenNebula

ServiceNow IT Operations Management offers a scalable platform for managing IT infrastructure with features like discovery, dashboards, and service mapping. Ideal for incident, change, and problem management, it enhances operational efficiency and reduces IT service downtime.

ServiceNow IT Operations Management provides comprehensive solutions for consolidating events, automating workflows, and monitoring IT systems. Users utilize it for managing ticketing systems and conducting impact analysis through service mapping. The platform supports integrations with other modules, boosting efficiency with its intuitive interface. While highly functional, improvements in interface design and pricing are necessary, especially in integration with non-IP devices and cloud providers. Enhanced AI, machine learning, and discovery and monitoring functions are also needed.

What are the most important features?

Discovery: Automatically detects and maps IT infrastructure components.
Dashboard: Offers out-of-the-box reports through a user-friendly interface.
Service Mapping: Aids in assessing the impact of IT changes.
Event Management: Consolidates events for better management.
Orchestration: Streamlines automation processes to optimize workflows.

What benefits or ROI should be expected?

Scalability: Supports dynamic growth in IT operations.
Enhanced Efficiency: Improves workflow automation and event management.
Reduced Downtime: Minimizes service interruptions to maintain productivity.
Cost Reduction: Lowers operational costs by optimizing resources.

IT Operations Management by ServiceNow is widely implemented across industries like finance, healthcare, and manufacturing to optimize IT processes, enhance monitoring, and streamline infrastructure management. It is particularly effective in automating workflows and improving service reliability.

ServiceNow

Sample Customers

Akamai, BBC, Fermilab, Terradue, Surf Sara, Produban, Netways, ESA, China Mobile, BlackBerry, Deloitte, Fuze, Telefonica, Trivago, Nokia, Encore Tech, Beeks.

servicenow, TransAlta, NATS, Symantec

Buyer's Guide

OpenNebula vs. ServiceNow IT Operations Management

September 2026

Free Report: OpenNebula vs. ServiceNow IT Operations Management

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