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ServiceNow vs SolarWinds Service Desk 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

ServiceNow
Ranking in IT Service Management (ITSM)
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
223
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (1st), IT Asset Management (1st), Rapid Application Development Software (2nd), No-Code Development Platforms (1st)
SolarWinds Service Desk
Ranking in IT Service Management (ITSM)
15th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the IT Service Management (ITSM) category, the mindshare of ServiceNow is 21.0%, down from 26.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Service Desk is 0.5%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Service Management (ITSM) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
ServiceNow21.0%
SolarWinds Service Desk0.5%
Other78.5%
IT Service Management (ITSM)
 

Featured Reviews

Nikhil Gohil - PeerSpot reviewer
Enables effective incident management and seamless workflow automation with valuable mobile accessibility
I haven't thought deeply about improvements for ServiceNow or what might be missing right now. There are so many modules and features in ServiceNow that I haven't explored them all, so it's hard to say what might be missing or should be improved. I suggest making the cost more affordable for smaller companies.
Rajendra Karad - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides superior visibility and efficiency with excellent analytics capabilities
What I appreciate the most about the product is that, as per the name given, it brings better visibility to the client in terms of their infrastructure, application, and performance. SolarWinds Service Desk is a quite matured product now, making it one of the best options on the market. The incident management feature is aligned to the ITIL framework. The asset management feature is also a very thoughtful framework they have implemented. Right from onboarding an asset till scrapping it, the complete lifecycle is cleanly maintained within the system itself. All the approval chains, their logs, and even the contract information have been made very easy for the users to maintain. The knowledge base feature is an out-of-the-box knowledge base, and additionally, we can integrate our own DMS. Machine learning is something that they have been following, and we can integrate an external DMS with that, which helps in searching SOPs and even the global knowledge base over the internet, allowing it to be searched within the same single window itself. Change management in SolarWinds Service Desk is linked with the service catalog, and since it also has a service portal, a self-service portal for users, introducing a service catalog that's integrated with the change management actually completes the flow and makes life easier for IT administrators.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"There are features included in the new release for intelligent software, like the chatbot. For HR services, the HR agent which is in that chatbot has been fantastic."
"The analytics - we like to keep track of how much work everyone is doing."
"ServiceNow was the first true enterprise to service management platform."
"Simplicity of Change Manager."
"You can put information in or export it out quickly, which is very useful when you have weekly or monthly reports."
"ServiceNow gives us a lot for free: workflows, organizational structures, service portal, forms, reporting, disaster recovery, and so on."
"ServiceNow is great. You can download the data into Excel and you can basically create reports. It's very flexible."
"In the Service Portal, the widget concept - and the way we have developed our widget - is pretty simple. We can leverage a lot on top of it."
"The solution is very stable."
 

Cons

"The setup was time-consuming and required a lot of internal resources."
"The pricing structure could be more budget-friendly."
"The solution’s user interface could be improved and given a better design."
"It's not user-friendly by default, but it can be customized to be customer-friendly."
"Very expensive."
"There is room for improvement in price."
"The contract module is quite rudimentary and doesn't support contract line items."
"Complexities in the organization made the initial deployment complex."
"The integration with other applications can use improvement because, for example, it was nearly impossible to integrate SolarWinds Service Desk with monday.com because we had to get an add-on from Zapier."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"In Tunisia, the companies find the licensing costs to be expensive."
"The licensing expenses are excessively high."
"Some time ago it was expensive, but large companies have special contracts. It's enterprise prices, and we're talking about millions per year."
"$230 per user."
"The price of this solution is expensive."
"For large-scale companies, the cost of ServiceNow is not expensive, but for small and mid-scale companies, it is higher."
"The price is okay for us. It's reasonable."
"I am from Brazil. For Latin American markets, ServiceNow is very expensive as compared to other vendors, such as VMware."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
9%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business54
Midsize Enterprise36
Large Enterprise163
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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.
What needs improvement with SolarWinds Service Desk?
The industry standard practices that this product is already certified for show that there will always be room for improvement since it is a service-led product, so we'll keep on giving feedback wh...
What is your primary use case for SolarWinds Service Desk?
Instead of Traverse, we are now using SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability, as we have replaced Kaseya Traverse with that. I recommend it to my customers. We are now dealing with SolarWinds Servic...
What advice do you have for others considering SolarWinds Service Desk?
I think the pricing of SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability is now comparative and suited to our business model, which is the reason we have moved to that. It has actually helped my customers' tec...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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    
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow vs. SolarWinds Service Desk and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
868,787 professionals have used our research since 2012.