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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
228
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 (1st)
 

Featured Reviews

DL
Senior Consultant Project Management & Transition at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
It does what it should, but it's quite outdated.
I rate Micro Focus Service Manager four out of 10. I wouldn't recommend it. I would suggest ServiceNow. There may be solutions better suited for smaller companies. There are always alternatives because the architecture isn't terribly complex. The architecture is the same across solutions, and everything is linked. There are no modules to be bought from some other company in the past and integrated. ServiceNow also its disadvantages, but if you compare it to Service Manager, I can safely say ServiceNow is the future and Service Manager is the past.
Hemanthreddy Vakiti - PeerSpot reviewer
Data engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Structured workflows have improved SLA compliance and now support prioritized incident handling
I think the licensing and pricing of ServiceNow is quite expensive compared to other tools. For large organizations, it is acceptable, but specifically for small and medium organizations to track incidents or change requests, ServiceNow is quite expensive. Sometimes performance can be slow when workflows and integrations are configured for complex tasks. For advanced customizations or advanced features which we rarely use, the documentation is not up to standard. The documentation needs to be improved for advanced customization features. However, the platform is stable overall and the features are quite good. The user experience and performance concerns I mentioned are areas I want to be improved. When many workflows and interactions are configured, performance is slow. For the features it is providing, it is quite expensive. If these performance features are improved, we can easily pay that price and get the return on investment.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Service Manager gives us a single system where everything is centralized in one base."
"It gives us better understanding and control of service management."
"The design has been revamped in terms of GUI. The current interface is quite easy to read."
"We improved our service levels and have been able to maintain them for the last four and a half years."
"We can have all our requests and incidents registered in one system."
"It has an intuitive front end which allows us to roll out good customer end user experiences."
"We mostly use it as a platform for our service desk to streamline and optimize."
"Micro Focus Service Manager is a good platform, but ServiceNow is better because it's more flexible and easier, and it provides a lot of features and functions out of the box, ready to use."
"It's more about the ease of use of ServiceNow. Plus, everything is there in a single platform. If you need any additional functionality, you just need to enable the plugins without even installing anything on the servers"
"ServiceNow gives us a lot for free: workflows, organizational structures, service portal, forms, reporting, disaster recovery, and so on."
"ServiceNow is one of the few easiest platforms you can integrate with products like Ansible to automate your workflows."
"ServiceNow is a really great platform, and what I like about it is the integration capabilities that save a lot of time for our customers by connecting different systems with their suppliers."
"As a technical specialist, I can see that the product is really good and has lots of enhancements with each version."
"I like the workflow functions that are available in ServiceNow and the ability to actually integrate all of the information that you have such as travel tickets or assignment tickets for your team, onto your dashboard, depending on your setup, or if you create a ticket and a dashboard for your team."
"I prefer ServiceNow to the competition because of its ease of use, installation and configuration."
"The workflow makes things extremely efficient and it improves effectiveness."
 

Cons

"The solution does not interface well with other products and is difficult to implement."
"I don't see anything lacking."
"The user interface is very clunky."
"Their end-user interface and technical support features could be improved."
"My only concern is the flexibility of the product in smaller environments."
"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."
"It, still, has a bit of more of improvement possibilities in the codeless part."
"Service Manager would be improved with access to automation."
"Time to respond from support could definitely be better, as the global support timing sometimes causes delays in interactions."
"ServiceNow can be improved primarily in terms of licensing."
"Probably the biggest thing that is frustrating is the changes in their price structure, their price modeling."
"The pricing could be lowered. It's pretty high."
"The ability to embed help information onto the screens."
"The Service Portal could be improved."
"The customization that we are doing for the needs of our organization are difficult to do and could be improved."
"Customer Service: 8/10 - the vendor used to be really good, but with the massive growth of product use it’s deteriorated. Technical Support: 4/10 - the vendor used to be really good, but with the massive growth of product use it’s deteriorated."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The license is not cheap."
"Micro Focus Service Manager is a little cheaper than other options. You have to pay a monthly subscription fee."
"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."
"HP Service Manager has moderate pricing."
"I pay for Service Manager on a yearly basis, and the price is reasonable - I would rate it five out of ten."
"It's sold as a less expensive solution, but it has to be highly modified. That's where you get into the cost."
"The solution is expensive."
"I know that it's not too bad because people continue to use it and they are happy to renew up their contract."
"The price is okay for us. It's reasonable."
"The price of this solution is expensive."
"The platform offers a free trial, by providing a free developer instance once you sign up."
"There is an annual subscription to use this solution."
"Initially, the licensing model ServiceNow came up with was very good. But now, from a licensing perspective, they are changing their model day by day. It is becoming a bit expensive for customers."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Construction Company
10%
Marketing Services Firm
9%
Performing Arts
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

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 Enterprise171
 

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: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.