ServiceNow Discovery vs WhatsUp Gold comparison

ServiceNow and Progress Software are both solutions in the Server Monitoring category. ServiceNow is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.0, while Progress Software is ranked #16 with an average rating of 8.7. ServiceNow holds a 3.3% mindshare in SM, compared to Progress Software’s 2.2% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of ServiceNow users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 85% of Progress Software users who would recommend it.

ServiceNow Discovery

Read 44 ServiceNow Discovery reviews

3,616 Views
1,916 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

WhatsUp Gold

Read 25 WhatsUp Gold reviews

3,998 Views
600 Comparison Views

85% willing to recommend

ServiceNow Discovery

WhatsUp Gold

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 6, 2024

WhatsUp Gold and ServiceNow Discovery are both prominent network management tools, but they cater to slightly different user needs. ServiceNow Discovery has an edge due to its comprehensive features.

Features: Users like WhatsUp Gold for its intuitive monitoring capabilities, ease of visualization, and user-friendly interface. ServiceNow Discovery is praised for its in-depth automation, extensive infrastructure mapping, and comprehensive discovery processes.

Room for Improvement: WhatsUp Gold needs enhancements in scalability, deeper integration with other tools, and improved fault management. ServiceNow Discovery requires better reporting functionalities, a more intuitive setup process, and enhanced speed during asset discovery.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: WhatsUp Gold is often noted for its straightforward deployment and responsive customer service. ServiceNow Discovery can be complex to set up but offers robust long-term support once implemented.

Pricing and ROI: WhatsUp Gold has competitive setup costs and provides a solid return on investment for small to medium businesses. ServiceNow Discovery, though more expensive, is considered worth the investment due to its powerful enterprise-level functionalities, providing substantial ROI benefits in large-scale deployments.

To learn more, read our detailed ServiceNow Discovery vs. WhatsUp Gold Report (Updated: January 2026).

Buyer's Guide

ServiceNow Discovery vs. WhatsUp Gold

January 2026

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Helped 881,082 peers since 2012

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

ServiceNow Discovery

Ranking in Server Monitoring

5th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Asset Management (6th), Cloud Resource Discovery Services (1st)

WhatsUp Gold

Ranking in Server Monitoring

16th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (29th), Network Monitoring Software (30th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (29th), Configuration Management (19th), Log Management (31st), Cloud Monitoring Software (24th), Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) (10th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Server Monitoring category, the mindshare of ServiceNow Discovery is 3.3%, down from 5.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of WhatsUp Gold is 2.2%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Server Monitoring Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
ServiceNow Discovery	3.3%
WhatsUp Gold	2.2%
Other	94.5%

Server Monitoring

Featured Reviews

reviewer2759271

Manager, Solution/Service Delivery at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Has supported enterprise needs well and addresses discovery across environments

Small companies will not be able to afford ServiceNow Discovery from the pricing perspective. Hence, they will not opt for ServiceNow Discovery as a solution, either as an ITSM solution or ITOM solution. It will not be affordable. I am specifically talking about the Middle East and Africa region. ServiceNow ITOM is particularly not very strong in terms of monitoring capabilities. They do not have any monitoring tool. They use event management from getting events from other tools. In that front, they had a roadmap for going for an open-source solution, but I have not seen that materialize. There is a lack of tools perspective for monitoring. Perhaps they do not have a plan because there are hundreds of tools available, and they prefer to focus on integration and event management.

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Erik Cheng

Technical Manager at Quan Hung Gourmet

Efficient monitoring with detailed customization, yet complexity remains

The best feature of WhatsUp Gold is the automatic generation of topology and its integration with virtualization and wireless. I have used the automated device discovery with this topology feature. The interactive map feature helps me manage the topology because sometimes we cannot draw the topology correctly, so we need to manually edit the connections. The alerting system is very tunable and customizable, but it's a little complicated to use. Many customers cannot manage it by themselves and need support from us, the provider. We always use the dashboards in the SOC, where we constantly display a dashboard or multiple dashboards. This allows us to know immediately if the connection or bandwidth is full or if the connection is broken.

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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

"The best thing about Discovery is maintaining all the CIs in one place. I can sort the data, export it to Excel for manipulation, and build reports like how many computers or servers we have and their capacity."

"The biggest advantage of ServiceNow is the value that it brings."

"The most valuable feature is its integration with CMDB, as it collects all the data."

"It does a good job of collecting the data that's necessary for data centers, and IT's operations."

"The most valuable feature of ServiceNow Discovery is its performance."

"The initial setup is pretty easy."

"We mostly use the solution's ITSM and ITOM capabilities in most workflows."

"It has been stable since deployment."

More ServiceNow Discovery pros

"We no longer have to manually search for problems because we are alerted when something in the network goes down."

"It handles the basics of monitoring."

"The threshold alerting is the most valuable feature."

"The most valuable feature is the auto-discovery function."

"The solution effectively monitors network devices and servers."

"The documentation is very good."

"It is easy to access and discover devices, as well as monitor them automatically. The topology discover is also a useful feature."

"The interactive mapping interface for scrolling, zooming, and drilling down on an element to learn about a network issue is good. When we see a network there will sometimes be a spot that has one link. You can go into a particular part of the topology map, scroll in, and see exactly which module it is."

More WhatsUp Gold pros

Cons

"The solution needs to improve the cost of the solution. There are a few different solutions and they do act the same and have the same types of capabilities, however, the cost is quite high."

"ServiceNow ITOM is particularly not very strong in terms of monitoring capabilities. They do not have any monitoring tool."

"I feel that credential-less discovery could be improved."

"The service mapping component is less developed than it is in other solutions, and is in need of improvement."

"ServiceNow Discovery should be updated to provide its users with more out-of-the-box information and attributes to support the routers and switches from Cisco."

"I cannot tie CMDB at this stage with strategic planning regarding ServiceNow Discovery ability to maintain accurate data in CMDB."

"What needs improvement in ServiceNow Discovery is the reporting UI because I didn't find it as friendly compared to other tools. Other tools have better reporting UI than what's currently in ServiceNow Discovery. What I'd like to see in the next release of ServiceNow Discovery is more user-friendly out-of-the-box reporting that would be helpful for non-technical users. Some users such as managers would want to just do a few clicks to access the reports and shouldn't be required to do search queries, but right now, reporting in the tool isn't very user-friendly."

"The current limitation requires having mid servers or discovery servers in each data center for proper discovery, hindering the ability to discover assets across continents such as Asia Pacific and Europe."

More ServiceNow Discovery cons

"One of the biggest things that made us start to look at another product is we're not able to have an end to end monitoring from a user perspective throughout the system and back to the user. All the monitoring is from inside out, we need something that also can give us from outside in."

"Setting up WhatsUp Gold is complicated and not easy because it requires managing SNMP and many complex settings in the devices it's monitoring, and fine-tuning it to fit our needs is also not very easy."

"The point system is not clear and clarity around this would improve our understanding of the system."

"I would like to see them do an enhancement to the application monitoring. A lot of other products do better application monitoring so they should do some improvements to the application monitoring."

"The product is old and not updated."

"Improvements are needed in integration, especially for WhatsApp call and messages."

"I would like to see better integration with switches so that you can see what is connected to each port, what the traffic is, and have a network map automatically generated."

"The initial setup of WhatsUp Gold is a medium range of difficulty levels. However, if it is your first time it could be difficult."

More WhatsUp Gold cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product pricing is fair and reasonable for the value it provides."

"This is expensive, but it meets our needs."

"This solution is a paid option within the ServiceNow framework."

"The product is not cheap."

"ServiceNow Discovery has very broad pricing, so it becomes costly. It would be better if it had a pay-as-you-use licensing model because the total cost of ownership is quite high."

"ROI (Return on Investment) is good. ServiceNow don't disclose the price publicly. They'll assess your organization's needs and then come up with a price."

"It costs a lot. It is probably close to over a hundred thousand. It's an expensive platform, but you can't compare ServiceNow's Discovery functionality to other discovery tools. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison of ServiceNow to a configuration management tool to an asset management tool because it does those things, but it's not those things."

"You need a subscription to ServiceNow Discovery, so you can use its features. You can also use specific plugins with the tool, and some of the plugins are free. I don't have information on how much my company pays for the subscription to ServiceNow Discovery."

More ServiceNow Discovery pricing and cost advice

"The choice of version depends on the number of points, or devices, that you want to monitor, and this makes the product expensive."

"Pricing is reasonable compared to other products."

"It is per device, per year. The pricing is very clear. If you have a service agreement, you get all of your major upgrades and minor upgrades. It was under $10,000 to go all-in with all of the different add-ons for it."

"There are some subscription charges that are quite heavy. I need to pay for support every year and these charges can be quite expensive. Aside from the initial cost for the tool, you need to pay additionally for support."

"The pricing can be on the expensive side when considering competing products."

"This is a well priced solution."

"The price of WhatsUp Gold is good."

"The most valuable feature is the cost compared to other solutions."

More WhatsUp Gold pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Government

11%

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	16
Midsize Enterprise	5
Large Enterprise	23

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	9
Midsize Enterprise	5
Large Enterprise	14

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about ServiceNow Discovery?

The solution can prioritize the discovery of IP ranges. The product automatically places all Discovery CIs into the correct class within the CMDB.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ServiceNow Discovery?

The pricing information for ServiceNow Discovery was requested but not provided.

See all answers

What needs improvement with ServiceNow Discovery?

A CMDB debugging tool to give indication about the errors that appear would be appreciated.

See all answers

What do you like most about WhatsUp Gold?

The interactive mapping interface for scrolling, zooming, and drilling down on an element to learn about a network issue is good. When we see a network there will sometimes be a spot that has one l...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for WhatsUp Gold?

Clients find the licensing calculator confusing, but we simplify this for them by collecting relevant information first. The licensing is based on devices, providing better cost-effectiveness than ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with WhatsUp Gold?

It would be great if WhatsUp Gold could add features that simplify management with AI, as it is currently too complicated to manage.

See all answers

Comparisons

Tanium vs ServiceNow Discovery

Compared 18% of the time

Lansweeper vs ServiceNow Discovery

Compared 14% of the time

BMC Helix Discovery vs ServiceNow Discovery

Compared 10% of the time

Flexera One vs ServiceNow Discovery

Compared 7% of the time

Microsoft Configuration Manager vs ServiceNow Discovery

Compared 6% of the time

More ServiceNow Discovery Competitors

PRTG Network Monitor vs WhatsUp Gold

Compared 5% of the time

LibreNMS vs WhatsUp Gold

Compared 4% of the time

ManageEngine OpManager vs WhatsUp Gold

Compared 4% of the time

Nutanix Prism vs WhatsUp Gold

Compared 4% of the time

NinjaOne vs WhatsUp Gold

Compared 3% of the time

More WhatsUp Gold Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ServiceNow Discovery

January 2026

Download ServiceNow Discovery product report

Buyer's Guide

WhatsUp Gold

January 2026

Download WhatsUp Gold product report

Overview

ServiceNow Discovery finds applications and devices on your network, and then updates the CMDB with the information it finds. Discovery is available as a separate subscription from the rest of the Now Platform.

ServiceNow

Explore and manage your entire network infrastructure effortlessly with WhatsUp Gold's robust layer 2/3 discovery, creating a detailed interactive map from the edge to the cloud. Monitor devices, wireless controllers, servers, virtual machines, applications, and traffic flows across various environments. Real-time alerts ensure optimal performance, allowing you to meet or exceed SLAs. The platform offers customizable maps, dashboards, and alerts for easy network management. Quickly resolve issues with intuitive workflows, reducing Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR). WhatsUp Gold's integrated log management provides easy visibility and control of device log data, allowing monitoring, filtering, searching, and alerting on syslogs or Windows logs. Archive logs to comply with regulatory requirements and preserve historical data, all through a user-friendly interface. Streamline network monitoring and issue resolution with WhatsUp Gold, making network management efficient and hassle-free.

Progress Software

Sample Customers

York, National Grid, DXC Technology, experian, BEACHBODY

Artoni Trasporti, Austin Independent School District, Banca Marche, Burke County North Carolina, Cambridge University School of Clinical Medicine, Clayco, Community Integrated Care, Desca, Deutsche Bergbau, Flexi-Van, Gropper, Hamleys, Hammonds Furniture, Knowledge IT, Idras S.P.A., Sibeg, Swann Engineering, Trivium Lindenhof

Buyer's Guide

ServiceNow Discovery vs. WhatsUp Gold

January 2026

Free Report: ServiceNow Discovery vs. WhatsUp Gold

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