According to a recent report by Global Industry Analysts, the ITSM global market is projected to reach USD $5 billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 8.9%—up from USD $3 billion in 2020. This growth is driven by a number of factors, including enterprises moving to hybrid digital infrastructures. These infrastructures require IT managers to oversee an increasing array of operational processes while ITSM vendors continue to differentiate themselves with advanced ITSM capabilities to incorporate business workflows, analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), virtual agents, chatbots, machine learning (ML), and greater ease of use.

What is ITSM Software?

ITSM is a set of software, tools, and approaches utilized by ITOps managers and leaders to better manage the workflows and tasks that underpin the delivery of IT services. These tasks include IT service and help desks and oversight of enterprise IT operations and infrastructures, all of which is aimed at providing comprehensive enterprise IT management while increasing productivity and efficiency, reducing operational costs, and improving the customer experience and satisfaction.

Also read: Implementing IT Service Management Changes with CloudOps

How Do You Choose an ITSM Tool?

Here are key features to consider when choosing ITSM tools and software: 

• Incident Management: Many types of incidents can occur in IT. Some are vitally important, while many are not. Incident management should be able to help IT identify priorities with automation features that simplify the process.
• Problem Management: Problem management assists IT via processes and activities that manage the lifecycle of problems that could happen in an IT service. The purpose is to prevent problems from happening and resolve incidents rapidly.
• Change Management: The number of changes taking place within the IT infrastructure can be confusing. If they are not tracked, a great many challenges are likely to result. For example, if a server virtualization project is initiated without detailing all the processes, services, storage connections, and dependencies involved, chaos could erupt. The latest change management modules sometimes provide risk analysis to highlight potential issues in advance.
• Service Asset/Configuration Management: Service asset and configuration management is all about maintaining an accurate record of all information about the many configuration items (CIs) required to deliver an IT service as well as their dependencies and relationships.
• Service Desk: A service desk provides a point of contact to ensure users receive help for requests that can vary from the routine to full-blown emergencies.
• Analytics: These days, data is no longer allowed to be locked inside an ITSM system. It is shared with external systems, and ITSM gains data from a great many sources across the enterprise to aid in achieving its core functions more rapidly and with a greater level of automation. Sharing of information enables advanced analytics related either for ITSM or for broader business management purposes.
• Extension Beyond IT: There are so many ITSM solutions out there that it takes additional functionality to stand out. Some offer intelligent search, chatbots, improved routing, automation recommendations, various types of analysis, support for complex processes, AI/ML, support for containers, and serverless computing. But more than that, ITSM capabilities are being extended beyond the traditional technology services (request, incident, problem, and change management) to areas of the enterprise such as facilities, fleet management, and HR.

Top ITSM Tools and Vendors

Based on the trends outlined in aforementioned reports and interviews with vendors, we have compiled a list of the leading ITSM solutions, with additional guidance for verticals like managed service providers (MSPs) and small businesses. Here are our picks for top ITSM software.

BMC Helix

BMC Software has arranged its ITSM suite in alignment with IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practices. The BMC Helix Suite includes modules for chatbot, digital workplace, discovery, ITSM, business workflows, and cloud-native microservices. It also comes with built-in AI and ML capabilities. Users can choose to deploy it on-premises, SaaS, multi-cloud, and hybrid. Its ITSM module can run on a choice of public clouds (AWS, Azure, IBM, BMC).

Key Differentiators

• Incident Management: Create and resolve incidents faster with intelligent, context-aware, and proactive incident matching.
• Problem Management: ITIL 4-compliant best practices for service management processes that embed mature practices into the user experience and back-end workflow.
• Change Management: Simplified change request processes with a guided process on mobile and web, drag-and-drop change calendar, and automated and contextual collision detection and impact analysis.
• Service Asset/Configuration Management: Scalable, service view configuration management for IT operations management (ITOM). Offers class structure, data and service models, federation, reconciliation and normalization, and agentless application and dependency mapping.
• Service Desk: Support a variety of service request workloads at scale, such as customer service in large banks.
• Analytics: BMC Helix ITSM has cognitive capabilities that automate classification, assignment, and routing of incidents as well as provides cognitive email analysis and response.
• Extension Beyond IT: Ability to track operating level agreements and contracts from external providers. It also extends to HR, facilities, and procurement.
• Market Strength: BMC has the largest enterprise installed base for core ITSM services. Not aimed at the SME market.
• Pricing: BMC offers a free trial with enterprise pricing available upon request.

Ivanti Neurons for ITSM

Ivanti Neurons for ITSM is a three-tiered cloud-optimized, scalable ITSM solution for automating workflows. The company’s Foundational tier offers easy-to-use incident management for dealing with inbound ticket requests; followed by the addition of the Intermediate tier to provide change and configuration management for IT service desk and ITOps; and rounds out with the Comprehensive tier to add greater management—including service level, financial, portfolio, and project management among others. 

Key Differentiators

• Incident Management: Ivanti provides fast, flexible incident management including analytics to deal with inbound ticket requests from any channel.
• Problem Management: Problem management utilizes information from other elements within the enterprise for automated problem resolution processes.
• Change Management: Ivanti offers user configurable support of change workflow and business processes and enough flexibility to modify or create new change workflows.
• Service Asset/Configuration Management: Service asset and configuration management enable the handling of IT changes quickly and efficiently.
• Service Desk: Ivanti was the original service desk solution in the 1980s. It includes dashboards, reporting, knowledge management, mobility, self service, and more.
• Analytics: Review events over selected time periods, track mean time between failure (MTBF) for assets and services, and report service availability against service-level agreements.
• Extension Beyond IT: Ivanti tracks external providers’ operating level agreements and the underpinning contracts.
• Market Strength: Ideal for organizations looking for a single solution to synchronize IP telephony/PBX and ITSM. Strong in healthcare, higher education, manufacturing, retail, and legal. 
• Pricing: Ivanti offers a free cloud trial, while price quotes are provided by call or email. 

EasyVista Service Manager

The EasyVista Enterprise Service Management Platform includes ITSM, Enterprise Process Automation (service manager), Advanced Intelligent Knowledge Management (self help), and Micro Apps technology (for building apps, portals, and dashboards). It is available as SaaS and on-premises.

Key Differentiators

• Incident Management: Automatic knowledge search locates any related known errors, knowledge articles, news, or major incidents. Resolutions from knowledge can be copied to current incidents.
• Problem Management: Alerts can be received from third-party monitoring tools, analyzed, and can trigger events such as a simple recording of the events, a notification, or the creation of an incident.
• Change Management: Changes are categorized based on change catalog records that also define the related workflow. Impact analysis lets you understand the impact of a change based on the CMDB relationship.
• Service Asset/Configuration Management: Assets and configuration items (CIs) are linked to define the dependency map. Business services are tracked and linked to CIs.
• Service Desk: Request management starts with the service catalog. Workflows are configured and associated with every service.
• Analytics: Microsoft Cognitive Services are used to interpret user needs.
• Extension Beyond IT: EasyVista Service Manager is used to support the offering and delivery of various enterprise services such as IT, HR, and facilities.
• Market Strength: EasyVista is primarily focused on the small and medium-size enterprise (SME) market with many customers in the public sector, education, healthcare, and insurance. It is strongest in the European market.
• Pricing: EasyVista offers a free demo with pricing provided on request.

CA Clarity Service Manager

CA Technologies (now owned by Broadcom) is a veteran of the ITSM market. Its ITSM solution, known as Clarity Service Manager, offers intelligent search, chatbots, improved routing, automation, sentiment analysis, and image analysis. It includes a variety of service workflows and is particularly strong on analytics, work prioritization, knowledge management, portal development, mobile capabilities, and camera support. In addition, ML aids in queue awareness and automatic categorization of incidents and requests.

This ITSM tool is on-premises only and part of a larger suite, which includes additional products. Its multi-tenancy approach makes it popular among MSPs. 

Key Differentiators

• Incident Management: Incident generation can be automated through integrations with email systems, command line interfaces, web services, event monitoring, and CTI tools.
• Problem Management: You can create a standalone problem, a problem from an incident, and attach an incident to a problem. You can also select the impacted CI.
• Change Management: CA Technologies includes a robust CMDB and integrations between the service desk and Clarity Configuration Automation, Clarity Service Operations Insight, and Clarity Client Automation.
• Service asset/configuration Management: Integration between Clarity APM and Clarity SM enables sharing of business-critical information to form a view of assets and CIs.
• Service Desk: Mobility and collaborative self-service bring users together to share information and resolve issues on their favorite devices, often without opening a ticket.
• Analytics: xFlow gives analysts the ability to understand the complete state of the IT environment, a way to prioritize work, and the context to make decisions.
• Extension Beyond IT: Users have begun to leverage it for a variety of use cases, such as HR, procurement, and facilities.
• Market Strength: CA Technologies has traction with MSPs that use the product to service many hundreds of clients. Overall, it is primarily a large enterprise solution.
• Pricing: Contact sales for software and hardware pricing. 

Micro Focus Service Management Automation X

Micro Focus SMAX is a single suite for ITSM, enterprise service management, and IT asset management. It incorporates containers and Kubernetes to decrease ticket volumes as well as automated service support for IT and non-IT processes, workflows, and tasks based on ML and analytics. It can be run in the cloud (AWS, Azure, Google) or on-premises or consumed as a service. It drives change management by using prescriptive analytics to decrease change failures and reduce service outages.

SMAX has codeless configuration and can help develop new applications without developer skills. A self-service portal comes with social collaboration as the single point of contact for business and IT users for support and requests. Intelligent search, chatbots, and a strong CMDB are included.

Key Differentiators

• Incident Management: Restore normal service operation, access incidents from the landing page, automate reporting and track incidents, and issue alerts or escalate an incident.
• Problem Management: Identify the underlying reasons for one or more related incidents, enabling IT teams to create workarounds, identify known errors and define solutions.
• Change Management: Create and manage requests for change to the service assets and configured items registered in the CMDB by providing templates and change models to implement changes.
• Service Asset/Configuration Management: SMAX helps you organize and track the individual assets that support business services.
• Service Desk: The service desk is a centralized location for all employee issues related to IT. Its interface enables users to independently request support, search a self-help knowledge base, and browse a service catalog.
• Analytics: SMAX comes with an embedded Micro Focus IDOL Intelligent Data Operating Layer, which allows for the search and processing of text taken from both structured data and unstructured human information.
• Extension Beyond IT: Micro Focus SMAX includes enterprise service management features to extend ITSM to other business services.
• Market Strength: Micro Focus SMAX is primarily aimed at large-scale environments with higher process maturity and strong regulatory compliance reporting and audit requirements.
• Pricing: In addition to a 14-day free trial, Micro Focus offers pricing on request.

SolarWinds IT Service Desk

Solarwinds’ IT Service Desk management software is an ITSM solution that offers incident management, standardized service request and fulfillment processes, change management,  fully integrated IT asset management, and more. The platform also integrates with 200 cloud applications. 

Key Differenciators

• Incident Management: Resolve incidents and reduce or eliminate simple tasks. Automated rules are in place for ticket routing and priority.
• Problem Management: Trending helps uncover problems. View the status of a problem impacting users. Agents can search open problems to see if there is a known issue causing their incidents to be opened.
• Change Management: ITIL change management processes include clear communication to the people affected while improving service quality and consistency across operations.
• Service Asset/Configuration Management: The CMDB contains an organization’s users, services, physical assets, hardware, and software to build the upstream and downstream relationship of configuration items.
• Service Desk: The service desk gives employees the ability to submit tickets and requests and gives agents a tool where they can provide services with consistency.
• Analytics: A reports module has commonly used metrics built in. Integration with Google Analytics measures service portal usage.
• Extension Beyond IT: Service Desk offers procurement.
• Market Strength: Solarwinds’ IT Service Desk has market strength in industries such as education, government, retail, and healthcare as well as SMEs.
• Pricing: On a per month basis, small teams can get started for $19, growing teams at $39, mature IT organizations at $69, and full customization for enterprises begins at $89.

InvGate Service Desk

The InvGate suite is designed to provide full IT management covering service, support, discovery, monitoring, and mapping. InvGate Insight allows you to map all of the infrastructure in a single platform, as it brings together asset data and information from across all of the organization’s technology domains. This includes AWS and Azure cloud instances along with IoT devices. Any network monitoring solution can be integrated easily.

A tasks module allows automization of work to be done in a request or in the execution of a workflow, so all the necessary efforts to find a solution are divided. A knowledge management system will help to organize relevant information for it to be available at all times. As end users create a new self-service request, InvGate Natural Language Technology employs heuristics to analyze their text to suggest articles in real time. Integration with other InvGate tools allows discovery and monitoring of IT assets and management of changes. InvGate Service Desk can be integrated with third-party asset managers, such as FileWave and Microsoft SCCM. It is available as SaaS or on-premises.

Key Diferentiators

• Incident Management: InvGate PinkVERIFY-certified incident management capabilities ensure IT support can focus on what’s most important across all the tickets in front of them.
• Problem Management: Reduce the impact of repeat issues, known errors, and known problems with workflows and automation with the aim of speeding up problem identification, logging, investigation, and root cause analysis.
• Change Management: Change models can be created based on the level of risk and impact associated with different change types. Those with minimal risk and impact can be pre-approved as service requests.
• Service Asset/Configuration Management: One application contains all service modules (including service, incident, problem, and change). There is also a fully integrated CMDB (InvGate Insight) to assist with discovery of assets.
• Service Desk: Automate, manage, and measure all types of requests through a ticketing system that includes self-service capabilities.
• Analytics: The integrated OLAP approach delivers data in real time with over 150 built-in metrics.
• Extension Beyond IT: The visual workflow engine allows integration of IT operations with business processes for other business functions or departments beyond IT.
• Market Strength: The InvGate suite is strongest in LATAM (especially Argentina) and U.S. mid-market, primarily.
• Pricing: The platform is offered in three tiers—Insight, Service Desk, and Assets—with pricing proved on request.  

SysAid ITSM

SysAid has built in an all-in-one ITSM solution, driven by automation, analytics, and AI to identify and predict issues and problems and offer up the most likely resolution. This integrated ITSM, service desk, and help desk package includes easy-to-use tools for analyzing and optimizing IT performance and automates manually intensive processes.

The company boasts over 10,000 customers in over 140 countries. SysAid can be used in the cloud or on-premises, and users can move between the two as circumstances change. 

Key Differentiators

• Incident Management: SysAid ITSM’s ITIL-aligned incident management capabilities log, process, manage, and report on issues that adversely affect end users, IT services, and business services.
• Problem Management: SysAid’s problem management capabilities allow you to systemize the problem management workflow processes needed for dealing with simple and complex problems.
• Change Management: Assess the risk of every change in advance, and use an approval process to ensure all changes are in line with policy and business strategies.
• Service Asset/Configuration Management: Components include real asset management, network discovery, monitoring, mobile device management, and patch management.
• Service Desk/Help Desk: SysAid Help Desk offers a ticket management tool, IT asset management, self-service, mobile device management, chat, password reset, mobile apps, and industry benchmarking.
• Analytics: Offers analytics tools such as BI Analytics (by Qlik), reporting tools, and SysAid IT Benchmark.
• Extension Beyond IT: SysAid is primarily focused on IT services.
• Market Strength: SysAid’s market strength is very strong in education with features such as password reset (can be allowed for staff or students or both); a self-service portal to book a room or equipment; Hotkey with SSO to ensure proper logging of the request user who submitted the incident or request along with the correct asset and where it is located; and back-end service desk automation, such as routing by campus, school, or building and prioritizing by staff and administration versus students.
• Pricing: In addition to a free trial, SysAid offers pricing on request.

LogMeIn GoToAssist Service Desk

LogMeIn GoToAssist Service Desk can be custom integrated by API with ITOM systems. It is also closely integrated with the LogMeIn RescueAssist Remote Support product to help agents become more efficient by starting remote support sessions directly from a ticket. It is aligned with ITIL best practices and includes ticketing and incident management, configuration management, problem management, knowledge management, change management, contacts management, release management, a knowledge base, messaging, an online help desk, and email integration.

Service Desk is a SaaS product with popularity among MSPs. It is quick and easy to set up and can be customized to suit a particular environment. 

Key Differentiators

• Incident Management: GoToAssist Service Desk covers the full spectrum of ITIL with dedicated modules. Incident management is one of the primary components and is structured by queues.
• Problem Management: Track all related incidents, root cause, or temporary workaround of problems in one place.
• Change Management: It includes tracking of change plans, builds, and test results well as approval flow and scheduling.
• Service Asset/Configuration Management: GoToAssist Service Desk has a configuration management module where individual CI types can be created: CIs can have their own attributes, categories, and relationship types.
• Service Desk: Service Desk capabilities in the incident module enable admins to create branded customer portals, build escalation flows, and set up templates for frequent request types.
• Analytics: GoToAssist includes built-in reporting to track incoming volume, agent performance, or customer satisfaction.
• Extension Beyond IT: GoToAssist is squarely based on IT services, not other services.
• Market Strength: It is popular amongst SMEs as well as MSPs.
• Pricing: The monthly price per agent is $69 (paid yearly) / $55 (paid monthly) with no limit to the number of customers or tickets created. Service Desk offers named or concurrent license types as well.

Atlassian Jira Service Desk

Jira Service Desk adjusts to existing workflows and agents to provide service. It emphasizes low touch and comes with stock reports, including created versus resolved, time to resolution, SLA met versus breached, and resolution by component. It offers integration with analytics tools from business intelligence (BI) to Google Analytics.

Jira Service Desk can be used as a standalone ITSM tool or part of the Atlassian suite for DevOps, which includes Jira Software, Bitbucket, Confluence, Opsgenie, and Statuspage. Confluence, for example, is a collaborative document management and storage app where you can create a knowledge base of articles that appear in your web portal. It is available as a SaaS, self-managed single server option or by Atlassian’s self-managed enterprise version.

As a relatively new platform, it still lacks some of the features of its more mature competitors. It also requires third-party CMDB and reporting tools.

Key Differentiators

• Incident Management: The Atlassian incident management solution is Opsgenie for operating always-on services, empowering DevOps teams to plan for service disruptions and stay in control during incidents.
• Problem Management: An ITIL problem management workflow investigates, records, and prevents infrastructure problems.
• Change Management: Jira takes a lean approach without compromising compliance or increasing risk to the business. It integrates with several other asset/CMDB management apps.
• Service Asset/Configuration Management: Jira Service Desk provides asset management via integrations from Oomnitza, Device42, and Riada.
• Service Desk: Jira Service Desk is a help desk request tracker. It lets you receive, track, manage, and resolve requests. The app comes with a self-service web portal.
• Analytics: Real-time reporting is available, so users can see performance metrics and workload trends.
• Extension Beyond IT: Jira Service Desk offers capabilities in HR, finance, legal, facilities, and marketing.
• Market Strength: Jira’s market strength is focused primarily on existing Atlassian customers and those heavily committed to DevOps and Agile methodologies.
• Pricing: Jira Service Desk is free for up to three agents followed by three additional tiers that range from $20 per agent up to an annually priced Enterprise tier that offers pricing on request. 

ServiceNow ITSM

ServiceNow’s ITSM product is a part of IT Workflows on the Now Platform. IT Workflows includes modules for ITSM, ITOM, IT business management, IT asset management, DevOps, security operations, GRC (governance, risk, and compliance), and Build Your Own Apps. ServiceNow’s ITOM integrates with other monitoring tools, cloud platforms, serverless infrastructure, and asset management software including AWS, Azure, IBM Cloud, VMWare, AppDynamics, and ForeScout.

ServiceNow’s full suite of ITSM capabilities include discovery, service mapping, operational intelligence, cloud management, and orchestration. Users leverage the ServiceNow Platform to automate incident, problem, change, configuration, and request management with an out-of-the-box, codeless, pre-configured ITIL-based solution. It is a cloud-based solution with no on-premises configurations. That being said, it boasts a user community of 160,000 online members.

Key Differentiators

• Incident Management: ServiceNow connects users with IT through mobile self-service and virtual agents, leverages ML to automatically route incidents, and uses workflows to resolve issues quickly.
• Problem Management: Its problem management minimizes the business impact of service disruptions and reduces future disruptions using ITIL practices.
• Change Management: With ServiceNow Change and Release Management, companies control IT change processes, from creation, risk‑assessment, conflict detection, and approval to environmental changes.
• Service Asset/Configuration Management: The ServiceNow CMDB provides a single system of record for IT. When paired with ServiceNow Service Mapping, the CMDB enables applications to be service-aware.
• Service Desk: ServiceNow’s agent intelligence offering provides ML solutions for the automated categorization, routing, and other classification of data on the platform.
• Analytics: ServiceNow Performance Analytics is an integrated application designed for reporting and analyzing business performance.
• Extension Beyond IT: Now Platform delivers a digital workplace that brings together IT service management, ITOM, and IT business management to create contextual workflows and digitize business processes.
• Market Strength: ServiceNow focuses on enterprise and commercial accounts with at least 500 employees.
• Pricing: Subscription licensing in a SaaS deployment model hosted in ServiceNow’s private cloud.

Axios Assyst

Axios Assyst offers integration to cloud/SaaS services, auto-population of the CMDB, and comprehensive coverage of ITIL/ITSM processes. It includes multiple business service modules (HR, finance, and facilities), ML, workload allocation, and risk analytics as well as Amazon cloud integration.

Service desk tools help front-line staff route and resolve issues. ITSM, ITOM, and IT business management (ITBM) are provided in one app to give visibility and control over services, support, assets, and financials. 

Key Differentiators

• Incident Management: Axios Assyst includes self-logging of incidents and requests, direct access to services and status information, and the ability to search and crowd-source knowledge via web and mobile.
• Problem Management: Automatically detect and resolve endpoint security and performance issues, reducing the flow of incidents to the service desk and making it easy to find the root cause.
• Change Management: Automated categorization and routing means incidents and requests are pushed to the right team or automated process to fit with rapid changes in business demand.
• Service Asset/Configuration Management: Axios Assyst offers a service-oriented view of the infrastructure, configuration, status, and history as well as a consumer-style service catalog.
• Service Desk: Smart technology combined with easy integration gives service desk analysts the visibility, insight, and control they need to diagnose and resolve issues.
• Analytics: The InfoZone virtual agent assistant is integrated into the logging form to push relevant information and suggested actions to analysts in real time.
• Extension Beyond IT: Axios Assyst is also used for a variety of non-IT use cases, including fleet management, legal services, and marketing.
• Market Strength: Axios Assyst has a strong presence in the U.K. and other parts of Europe.
• Cost: No pricing is provided.

IBM ITSM

IBM considers ITSM as part of its middleware portfolio, where it isn’t given that much attention. A series of home-grown and acquired assets such as Maximo have tasked IBM with combining various ITSM or related applications such as Tivoli Process Automation Engine, Netcool, Maximo, and others. These tools provide end-to-end visibility, control, and automation to help IT operations staff manage business applications and services on-premises and in the cloud.

While IBM has a mighty arsenal of ITSM-related tools, the emphasis is on enterprise asset management and field service. Forrester said IBM Control Desk with Maximo has a configurable low/no-code platform that is scalable and includes a chatbot and reporting. However, the company gives little emphasis to this product line. As a result, it gets lost within a sprawling software catalog. 

Key Differentiators

• Incident Management: IBM ITSM consolidates, reduces, and prioritizes the events and alarms that impact business services before they affect end users.
• Problem Management: It lowers the number of generated events into a small subset of actionable problems.
• Change Management: Automation helps track the status of assets and changes in near-real time.
• Service Asset/Configuration Management: IBM ITSM offers full visibility and control of all CIs and their dependencies.
• Service Desk: Automate service requests through end user catalogs, with each request handled without human interaction.
• Analytics: IBM ITSM integrates with IBM Watson AI for analytics capabilities.
• Extension Beyond IT: IBM ITSM requires personnel skilled in IBM middleware to extend it to other areas.
• Market Strength: IBM ITSM’s market strength lies in existing IBM customers who need ITSM capabilities added.
• Cost: Not available.

Freshworks Freshservice

Freshservice by Freshworks helps to modernize IT and other business functions with an easy-to-use, simple-to-configure IT service desk solution in the cloud. It requires no or minimal training. Freshservice comes with multi-channel support and gamification features and has a mobile service desk app. 

Key Differentiators

• Incident Management: Freshservice tracks, prioritizes, and assigns tickets and automates resolution processes to drive efficiency.
• Problem Management: Automates tasks and provides support for issues raised via email, self-service portal, phone, chat, or in person.
• Change Management: IT is enabled to plan out and assess changes before they are rolled out.
• Service Asset/Configuration Management: Effective asset management can help avoid duplicity of applications, hardware, hosting, and their support.
• Service Desk: Freshservice resolves tickets raised via multiple channels like email, self-service portal, live chat software, phone, and in person. It also provides visibility into all tickets and tracks their progress via a dashboard.
• Analytics: Freshservice auto-assigns and escalates tickets to the right agents or groups, automatically prioritizes tickets based on impact and urgency, maps relationships to dependencies, and schedules recurring tasks as tickets.
• Extension Beyond IT: Freshservice can be used for IT or non-IT processes.
• Market Strength: The primary market strength lies in SMEs.
• Cost: Freshservice costs $19 per month per agent for small teams and up to $109 per month per agent for the enterprise version.

Microsoft Provance

Provance IT Service Management extends the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform into the realm of IT service and IT asset management. Provance ITSM leverages all three of the Microsoft clouds (Dynamics 365, Office 365, and Azure), and it is optimized for use with Microsoft management, productivity, and analytic tools. Thus, Provance users can easily leverage existing investments in technology.

Microsoft Provance comes with reporting, a self-service portal with notifications, ticket templates, end-to-end service visibility, automations and business process flows. It is also a PinkVERIFY-certified solution for 11 ITIL processes, so industry best practices are tied in. It is easy to create and modify forms, templates, automations, and business process workflows as needed. It can also leverage PowerApps, Microsoft Flow, and Logic Apps to connect Provance ITSM to other applications without resorting to building something from nothing.

Key Differentiators

• Incident Management: Automated issue escalation and auto routing of incidents and service requests ensure a faster resolution with minimal end-user effort.
• Problem Management: Provance spots trends, analyzes historical information, and identifies key issues, such as the root cause of errors and failures.
• Change Management: You can make changes and modifications without coding and scripting, and the result of changes can be viewed and rolled back if necessary.
• Service Asset/Configuration Management: Cloud Service Management creates a bridge between Provance ITSM and Azure to auto-populate the CMDB, provide a consolidated view of Azure Subscription Schema, deliver real-time online diagnostics and configuration management, and automatically synchronize services.
• Service Desk: The ITSM Service Desk app is an interactive dashboard focused on tickets, with the ability to filter based on variables (such as ticket type, affected services, or priority) and dive deeper into services workload and ticket status information for more effective ticket resolution.
• Analytics: Power BI is used to instantly collect, correlate and aggregate real-time data, spot trends, and analyze historical information.
• Extension Beyond IT: Provance provides quick visualization of the hierarchy between a business service and its technical services.
• Market Strength: Provance’s market strength lies in existing customers of Microsoft Dynamics and Microsoft/Windows technology.
• Cost: A license for Microsoft Dynamics 365 is also required. The Provance IT Service Management User License is $40 per user per month. 

This article was updated by IT Business Edge’s Managing Editor Llanor Alleyne.

Read next: How IoT is Shaping ITSM Strategies

The post Top ITSM Tools & Software 2022 appeared first on IT Business Edge.

What is IT Asset Management (ITAM)?

IT Asset Management (ITAM) has been around for a long time. Yet its function remains as vital as ever: to keep tabs on all hardware components, software and services operating in the enterprise. This includes tracking any changes and determining what additional changes a company needs to make. In other words, ITAM goes beyond maintaining an inventory of assets to help IT management made decisions about ways to improve capacity, reduce infrastructure costs or upgrade hardware or software. It also provides an accurate account of technology asset lifecycle costs and risks to maximize the business value of technology strategy, architecture, funding, contractual and sourcing decisions.

As such, IT Asset Management helps with compliance initiatives related to security policy and existing regulations. It also guides management in its efforts to enhance productivity by implementing hardware upgrades or business software. Further goals of IT include reducing overhead, containing licensing and support costs, and detecting unutilized hardware, software or services.

Maintaining an accurate inventory of all IT assets is the bedrock of ITAM. Based on that solid foundation, ITAM helps organizations to lower risk. It would highlight situations like outdated hardware that may struggle to support the latest operating systems and applications. Alternatively, a business could use it to make the case that they are underutilizing the current hardware infrastructure due to running older versions of software.

Best IT Asset Management Software Solutions

• ManageEngine (Best Enterprise ITAM)
• Freshservice (Best ITAM for SMBs)
• Kasaya VSA (Best ITAM for MSPs)
• Altassian Jira Service Desk (Best ITAM for DevOps)
• SolarWinds ITAIM
• ServiceNow ITAM
• IBM Tivoli ITAM
• Flexera
• Oracle Peoplesoft
• Asset Panda
• SolarWinds Service Desk (formerly Samanage)

What are Key Features to Consider in ITAM Software?

It is important to know what features are going to make the biggest impact in your ITAM software investment. Hardware and software discovery, license tracking, automatic tracking of changes, management, analysis, and virtual server management are all important factors when choosing an ITAM solution.

Hardware and Software Discovery

ITAM records all servers, PCs, laptops, tablets, routers, switches, networking equipment, storage assets and other devices existing within the organization. This includes remote assets and mobile devices belonging to the organization. Companies can also use metadata and other triggers to track and categorize all operating systems and applications operating within the enterprise or on organizational hardware assets.

License Tracking

In tandem with software discovery, ITAM records the state of licensing within the enterprise and notes any assets that are operating unlicensed.

Automatic Tracking of Changes

Modern ITAM systems automatically track change management. As the business adds or subtracts new hardware or software, the system automatically updates the inventory.

Management

This includes the ability to configure custom rules, to manage permissions, reporting and maintain scanning schedules.

Analysis

The best ITAM software go beyond inventorying to include financial analysis and risk management. These systems highlight areas where it’s possible to improve productivity via upgrades or reduce costs due to unutilized resources.

Virtual Server Management

As well as tracking hardware and software, ITAM software need to be able to stay on top of the ever-changing world of virtual systems. With VMs being deployed, operated and then abandoned in a short time span, ITAM must be able to manage licensing, and detect orphan VMs that drain resources yet are no longer utilized.

Top IT Asset Management Software Vendors

ManageEngine (Best Enterprise ITAM)

ManageEngine AssetExplorer is web-based ITAM software that helps monitor and manage assets from the planning phase to the disposal phase. It offers a number of ways to ensure discovery of all assets in the network. IT can manage software & hardware assets, ensure software license compliance and track purchase orders & contracts. The company has a large number of enterprise and SMB customers in many verticals.

With AssetExplorer, it is possible to track and manage ownership of:

• IT & non-IT assets
• Software asset management
• Purchase orders
• Contracts

Hardware/Software Discovery: AssetExplorer allows asset discovery and collection through an agent-based scan, network scan and windows domain scan. Agents can be deployed through an Active Directory logon script or a bulk deployment through the AssetExplorer application. Also, the agent serves as a channel to perform remote control operations on workstations. ITAM teams can add hardware assets by scanning vendor barcodes.

License Tracking: Licenses can be imported into AssetExplorer via a CSV file or added manually into the application. Using the suite licensing capability, ITAM teams can define software suites with the suite components specified. Rules can be configured to automatically apply suite licenses based on the number of suite component software detected in a workstation.

Automatic Tracking: AssetExplorer allows ITAM teams to schedule scans to track changes in the inventory or detect newly added workstations at regular intervals automatically.

Management: ITAM teams can setup: organization details, custom regions, sites, and departments; configure custom rules and provide view, add, edit, and delete permissions for technicians across modules; and configure permissions across areas like inventory, purchase, scanning and reports.

Analytics: AssetExplorer allows ITAM teams to record various financials including asset purchase costs, maintenance costs, and asset depreciation.

Virtual Server Management: Not done

Additional Features: Purchase and contract management, Built-in CMDB for configuration management

Integration: ManageEngine AssetExplorer is available as an integrated module within its ITSM product ServiceDesk Plus. This enables incident, problem and change management.

Delivery: On premises

Cost: 5,000 assets managed for around $10,000

Freshservice (Best ITAM for SMBs)

Freshservice by Freshworks is cloud-based service desk software with ITIL-aligned features along with multi-channel support, workflow automation and analytics.

Hardware/Software Discovery: Freshservice Discovery Probe and Discovery Agent automatically detect all pingable devices like laptops, desktops, network printers, etc., as well as auto-tracking of all installed software.

License Tracking: You can track software installed across the organization and compare this against licenses purchased.

Automatic Tracking: Freshservice tracks asset inventory through the asset management database. The company is building functionality to tightly couple the service catalog and asset inventory. As the service request is fulfilled and the asset is assigned, the asset inventory will automatically account for that change.

Management: Manages inventory, tracks asset lifecycle changes and draws insights from asset reporting.

Analytics: Freshservice lets you track depreciation of assets over time. The supported methods are declining balance, straight line and sum of years digits.

Virtual Server Management: Freshservice can integrate with AWS to manage all virtual servers, databases and volumes in the centralized CMDB.

Additional Features: Service Catalog, Employee Onboarding, Workflow automator, Sandbox to test a configuration or feature, Gamification

Integration: There are integrations with 200+ apps

Delivery: Cloud

Cost: Starts at $19 per agent/month and ranges up to $99 per agent/month.

Kaseya VSA (Best ITAM for MSPs)

VSA is Kaseya’s remote monitoring, endpoint and network management solution. It is designed primarily for MSPs and SMBs. It integrates with Kasaya Network Monitor for agent-less monitoring and enables IT to view all installed applications (including version and last modified date) per system

Hardware/Software Discovery: VSA performs network discovery as well as AD domain discovery and software discovery. It discovers computers and devices on individual networks, deploys agents to discovered machines and identifies SNMP-enabled devices that can be monitored.

License Tracking: VSA allows you to track and view software license keys stored on the device, and maintain lists of popular software titles and versions that can be installed on agent machines.

Automatic Tracking: Automatically tracks changes to inventory data and identifies when new devices are found in the environment. It generates alerts for first-time discovery of new device names and new IP addresses.

Management: Policy based automation allows you to automate deployment of software, patch management, resolve issues and manage IT infrastructure with dashboards and reports.

Analytics: No

Virtual Server Management: Management of both physical and virtual servers, as well as cloud-based systems

Additional Features: Remote desktop control, Advanced network management

Integration:

• Integrated into VSA are:
• Unified Backup and Disaster Recovery
• Compliance Management (GDPR)
• Antivirus and Anti-malware Management
• Office 365 Backup
• Professional Services Automation (PSA) and IT Documentation
• Kaseya BMS/Vorex helpdesk and business management

Delivery: Cloud and on-prem

Cost: Cost per device per month varies based on tiers starting at $1.25.

Jira Service Desk (Best ITAM for DevOps)

Jira Service Desk is an Atlassian ITSM solution that offers ITAM capabilities via integrations with tools such as Riada, Oomnitza, Device42, and Snipe-IT. These plug-ins provide CMDB capabilities to Jira Service Desk to provide complete ITAM support.

Hardware/Software Discovery: Automatic discovery which also includes dependency mapping and impact analysis.

License Tracking: Yes, licenses for software and OSes are tracked.

Automatic Tracking: Provides a modern CMDB used to manage any type of structured data.

Management: Integrate Insight with Jira Service Desk to enable asset selection in the customer portal. An audit trail of all changes being made to every asset ensures compliance and enables change management reporting.

Analysis: Helps increase governance and reduce operational risk by providing complete reporting on all assets. Limited in terms of analytics.

Virtual Server Management: VMs are discovered, tracked and managed.

Additional Features: Jira Service Desk adjusts to existing workflows and agents to provide service. It offers integration with analytics tool from BI to Google Analytics, and can be used as a standalone ITSM tool or part of the Atlassian suite for DevOps, which includes Jira Software, Bitbucket, Confluence, Opsgenie and Statuspage.

Integration: In addition to integrations into the broader Atlassian suite, Jira Service Desk has over 900 add-ons in the Atlassian marketplace.

Delivery: Cloud or on-premises

Cost: A version for 100 agents costs $1,575 per month. The Insight add-on for 100 agents costs $2.50 per agent per month.

Solarwinds Server & Application Monitor (ITAIM)

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor IT (ITAIM) inventory management software automatically collects IT asset details, including system updates, server warranty information, hosted VM details, removable media, processors, USB ports, memory, network interfaces, operating system and firmware updates, and software information—such as publisher, version, and installation dates. ITAIM is offered through the SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM).

Hardware/Discovery: Tracks details, such as purchase date, usage, warranty expiration date, location, version, installation or purchase date, and latest software updates.

License Tracking: Manage vendor contracts and gain familiarity with contracts, purchase orders, and expiration details.

Automatic Tracking: Reports on asset inventory with charts and tables. Reports show current asset usage along with model number, last update dates, names of admins who installed the updates, total resources used, unused hardware, etc.

Management: Monitor and manage IT assets in one place and facilitate improved inventory lifecycle management.

Analytics: Cross-stack IT data correlation via the PerfStack dashboard which is included with SAM server monitoring software.

Virtual Server Management: Tracks virtual server warranties that have expired and that are going to expire.

Additional Features: Automatically discover and store IT asset data, Track assets throughout their life cycle, Quickly alert and report on IT assets

Integration: Complements and integrates with the on-premises products SolarWinds provides.

Delivery: SolarWinds SAM is designed to be installed on a Windows Server, and supports on-premises, hosted and public cloud environments.

Cost: ITAIM starts at $2,995

ServiceNow IT Asset Management

ServiceNow IT Asset Management is part of the ServiceNow Workflows suite that runs on the Now Platform. The suite includes ITSM, ITOM, IT Business Management, IT Asset Management, DevOps, Security Operations, Governance, Risk and Compliance and Build Your Own Apps. ServiceNow ITAM integrates with other monitoring tools, cloud platforms, serverless infrastructure and asset management software including AWS, Azure, IBM Cloud, VMWare, App Dynamics and ForeScout.

Hardware/Software Discovery: Discovers hardware and software data across the enterprise. However, mainframe discovery relies on a plug-in from Syncsort.

License Tracking: Tracks software licenses through their lifecycle

Automatic Tracking: The ServiceNow CMDB provides a single system of record for IT. The CMDB provides full automation of change management.

Management: Can automate workflows across the organization, provide reporting and maintain control of assets.

Analytics: Machine learning automates categorization, routing, and other classification of data. Also provides analysis of IT spend, ways to reduce it, and what actions companies should take to improve productivity.

Virtual Server Management: VMs are discovered, monitored and managed.

Additional Features: The Now Platform delivers a digital workplace that brings together IT service management, ITOM, IT business management to create contextual workflows and digitize business processes.

Integration: The Workflows suite is fully integrated. ServiceNow also has a large roster of companies that interoperate with its tools.

Delivery: SaaS

Cost: Subscription licensing in a SaaS deployment model hosted in ServiceNow’s private cloud.

IBM Tivoli ITAM

IBM Tivoli software includes ITAM capabilities. Its start center is a collection of links, notifications, work queues and key indicators appropriate to user role. The start center helps users stay aware of conditions that might require attention. However, IBM Tivoli ITAM is not a product that is high on the radar within IBM, does not receive emphasis or investment and is best suited for existing IBM customers.

Hardware/Software Discovery: Discovery tools are available for both distributed and IBM mainframe environments. They discover hardware, software and virtual systems.

License Tracking: Licenses, especially IBM licenses, are tracked. Reports are useful in obtaining license details and preparing for a license audit.

Automatic Tracking: IBM Tivoli ITAM uses a comprehensive CMDB which keeps track of all changes.

Management: Asset Management for IT offers understanding of the state of a particular aspect of the environment so users can recognize when corrective measures are required.

Analytics: Asset Management for IT key performance indicators give users a look at measurements of efficiency and effectiveness. Role-appropriate KPI graphs appear on most Asset Management for IT start centers. Additional integration with other IBM analytics platforms is available.

Virtual Server Management: Virtual servers are discovered, tracked and managed.

Additional Features: Control which users can use individual applications, and which users can work with groups of configuration items. Configure job plans and more complex workflows to meet exact needs.

Integration: Well integrated with all IBM platforms, Tivoli’s process automation engine provides integration with

• Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database
• Tivoli Service Request Manager
• Maximo Asset Management
• Other industry solutions

Delivery: On premise.

Cost: Not available

Flexera FlexNet Manager

Flexera FlexNet Manager optimize enterprise software regardless of location, from the desktop to the data center to the cloud. It is supported by Flexera’s data intelligence library, a repository of data on enterprise software and hardware which is constantly updated. This provides the foundation for making the enterprise technology decisions by delivering a complete, categorized listing of all hardware and software, eliminating confusion. Rather than being a complete ITAM platform, Flexera provides the data backbone that supports ITAM and improves CMDB quality.

Hardware/Software Discovery: Flexera provides the ability to pull discovery data from a huge number of sources. This also simplifies vendor audit processes. FlexNet Manager tracks each hardware and software asset including identification, purchasing, user allocation, financial, technical, and contractual information.

License Tracking: Tracking and optimization of license consumption

Automatic Tracking: Automatically tracks changes

Management: Tracks key indicators over time for trend analysis, and creates custom reports.

Analytics: What-if analysis capabilities allow organizations to see the impact of hardware and software changes on their license position before they make changes. Provides BI and reporting including multidimensional analysis.

Virtual Server Management: Support for various virtualization technologies (VMware, Hyper-V, Solaris, etc.). FlexNet Manager for VMware provides a product use rights library.

Additional Features: Application Recognition Library, SKU Library, Product Use Rights Library

Integration: Integrates with: Flexera App Portal, an enterprise app store that allows end users to perform self-service requests for products in an approved software catalog and manages the approval and software deployment process; and the FlexNet Manager Platform, which provides integration to many existing IT systems, including configuration management, inventory and usage data tools as well as ITSM.

Delivery: On-premises, cloud and managed service.

Cost: Pricing is per device.

Oracle Peoplesoft ITAM

PeopleSoft IT Asset Management (ITAM) is a system of integrated management processes, strategies and technologies implemented to provide control over IT assets throughout their life cycle. It increases the productivity of the asset base, improve software license compliance, streamline provisioning of equipment, alert personnel about lease end dates, reduce warranty costs and provide IT asset data for business and financial analytics.

Hardware/Software Discovery: PeopleSoft partners with providers of network discovery tools to perpetually inventory IT assets, including hardware devices that connect to the network and software licenses installed on these devices.

License Tracking: The ITAM interactive workspace monitors authorized versus unauthorized license deployment with access to contract and warranty information relative to IT assets.

Automatic Tracking: IT assets are perpetually inventoried using network discovery tools, IT assets are always accurately reflected in business data and financial reporting. When you use PeopleSoft ITAM with PeopleSoft Maintenance Management, the repository also stores organizational asset information, including physical and financial definitions, acquisition history and maintenance history.

Management: Performs a configurable rules-based reconciliation of discovered data to the asset repository after the discovery tool has collected usage data. Provides a central, roles-based portal.

Analytics: Provides reliable IT asset data for business and financial analytics engines available from Peoplesoft and Oracle.

Virtual Server Management: Tracks VMs as well as physical assets and software.

Additional Features: PeopleSoft ITAM embeds network discovery tools into PeopleSoft Asset Management to collect asset inventory for reconciliation to the Asset Repository Manager (ARM).

Integration: IT Asset Management integrates with the following PeopleSoft and third-party applications:

• PeopleSoft Asset Management
• PeopleSoft Maintenance Management
• PeopleSoft Human Resources
• Third-party asset inventory discovery software
• IT Portal
• PeopleSoft Purchasing
• PeopleSoft Payables
• PeopleSoft Customer Relationship Management IT Help Desk

Delivery: On premise.

Cost: Not available

Asset Panda

Asset Panda is a configurable, cloud-based fixed asset tracking platform that helps organizations track, manage, and support fixed assets throughout their life cycle. It leverages the mobile devices most organizations already own. The platform also offers configurations for everything from vendor management to help desk ticketing.

Hardware/Software Discovery: Integration with Microsoft SCCM for hardware and software discovery

License Tracking: Tracks custom groups for software licenses, notifications for the expiration of licenses or need to purchase additional licenses, and license assignment tracking by employee and/or machine

Automatic Tracking: Built-in barcode scanner within mobile app assists with inventory changes; custom inventory groups and actions for tracking and transferring between locations

Management: Custom request ticketing configuration for tracking, notification, and resolution. In addition, offers maintenance management configurations for ensuring warranty compliance and tracking costs, and a help desk system for handling and tracking incidents

Analytics: Reporting tools for depreciation, maintenance costs, and overall budgeting

Virtual Server Management: No

Additional Features:

• iOS and Android apps
• Custom workflows and notifications
• Role-based user management and security
• Automated email reporting
• Purchase orders and request tickets
• Vendor Management

Integration: Asset Panda offers integrations with the following:

• Microsoft SCCM
• Zapier
• Google Device Manager
• Microsoft Active Directory
• ConnectWise
• Zendesk
• Freshservice
• OneLogin
• G Suite
• JAMF Cloud
• Okta

Delivery: Cloud

Cost: Starts at $1,400 per year for an unlimited number of users.

SolarWinds Service Desk – ITAM (formerly Samanage)

SolarWinds Service Desk – IT Asset Management is based on technology the company acquired from Samanage. It includes ITAM software that allow organizations to keep track of assets within their organization. It works in tandem with SolarWinds Discovery to collect asset data. Discovery options include agentless, agent-based and integration methods.

Hardware/Software Discovery: Provides organizations with a way to discover, map and manage IT assets. It enables organizations to consolidate asset information from multiple repositories, provide real-time intelligence on assets and manage data.

License Tracking: Allows businesses to make informed decisions around licensing strategy by gaining visibility into over and under usage of software.

Automatic Tracking: Includes a discovery scanner, agent and integrations that periodically collect information on new assets and update existing asset records. The platform tracks changes in IT hardware inventory to plan migrations and projects accordingly.

Management:

• Lifecycle Management
• CMDB
• Risk Detection
• Ticket Resolution

Analysis: IT asset management helps organizations maximize their current inventory of assets.

Virtual Server Management: Tracks the various components of their virtual environments, keeping the details of their virtual machines continually up to date in their system.

Additional Features: Service Desk, Incident Management, Problem Management

Integration: It integrates with SolarWinds Dameware Remote Everywhere, helping to resolve employee issues faster directly within the service desk. Service Desk and Asset Management are fully integrated. Also integrates with SCCM, VMWare vCenter and ChromeOS.

Delivery: Cloud-based multi-tenant SaaS platform.

Cost: Starting at $19 per month per agent for small teams. The professional version costs $69 per month per agent, $0.50 per month per device.

Featured IT Asset Management Products

The post Best IT Asset Management (ITAM) Software for 2022 appeared first on IT Business Edge.

Gartner, too, notes an evolving ITSM landscape. The analyst firm believes that the true value of ITSM lies in aiding IT in the delivery of integrated processes to correlate the broader activities of the IT organization. Tighter integration with knowledge management features and IT Operations Management (ITOM) are additional trends highlighted by Gartner.

Based on the trends outlined in these reports and interviews with vendors, we have compiled a list of the leading ITSM platforms, with additional guidance for verticals like MSPs and small businesses.

Here are our picks for top ITSM software:

• Top ITSM Software Comparison Chart
• Best ITSM Solutions by Industry, Company & Purpose
• BMC Helix
• Ivanti Service Manager
• EasyVista Service Manager
• CA Clarity Service Manager
• Micro Focus SMAX
• SolarWinds Samanage Service Platform
• InvGate Service Desk
• SysAid ITSM
• LogMeIn GoToAssist ServiceDesk
• Atlassian Jira Service Desk
• ServiceNow ITSM
• Axios Assyst
• IBM ITSM
• Freshworks Freshservice
• Microsoft Provance
• Cherwell Service Management

Key Features to Consider in ITSM Software

• Incident Management: Many types of incidents can occur in IT. Some are vitally important, many are not. Incident management should be able to help IT identify priorities with automation features that simplify the process.
• Problem Management: Problem management assists IT via processes and activities that manage the lifecycle of problems that could happen in an IT service. The purpose is to prevent problems from happening and resolve incidents rapidly.
• Change Management: The number of changes taking place within the IT infrastructure boggles the mind. If they are not tracked, a great many challenges are likely to result. For example, if a server virtualization project is initiated without detailing all the processes, services, storage connections and dependencies involved, chaos could erupt. The latest change management modules sometimes provide risk analysis to highlight potential issues in advance.
• Service Asset/Configuration Management: Service asset and configuration management is all about maintaining an accurate record of all information about the many configuration items (CIs) required to deliver an IT service, as well as their dependencies and relationships.
• Service Desk: A service desk provides a point of contact to ensure users receive help for requests that can vary from the routine to full-blown emergencies.
• Analytics: These days, data is no longer allowed to be locked inside an ITSM system. It is shared with external systems, and ITSM gains data from a great many sources across the enterprise to aid in achieving its core functions more rapidly and with a greater level of automation. Sharing of information enables advanced analytics related either to ITSM or for broader business management purposes.
• Extension Beyond IT: There are so many ITSM solutions out there that it takes additional functionality to stand out. Some offer intelligent search, chatbots, improved routing, automation recommendations, various types of analysis, support for complex processes, AI/machine learning, support for containers and serverless computing. But more than that, ITSM capabilities are being extended beyond the traditional technology services (request, incident, problem and change management) to areas of the enterprise such as facilities, fleet management and HR.

Top ITSM Tools and Vendors

BMC Helix

BMC Software has arranged its ITSM suite in alignment with ITIL best practices. The BMC Helix Suite includes modules for chatbot, digital workplace, discovery, ITSM, business workflows and cloud-native microservices. It comes with built-in AI and machine learning capabilities. Users can choose to deploy it on-premise, SaaS, multi-cloud and hybrid. Its ITSM module can run on a choice of public clouds (AWS, Azure, IBM, BMC).

The company has traditionally been one of the leaders of the market via its Remedy offering. But a change of ownership and the introduction of the broader Helix platform has introduced some uncertainty. As a result, Forrester ranks BMC only as a Strong Performer behind companies like Micro Focus, Cherwell and ServiceNow. Despite that, Forrester noted that BMC’s coverage of the ITSM core (request, incident, problem, change, and configuration management) is among the strongest in the market. Gartner has a higher regard for BMC than Forrester, considering it a Leader in its Magic Quadrant, and only behind ServiceNow overall. Gartner noted that BMC has the largest installed base among the large enterprise market. But the company has lost ground to ServiceNow and is scrambling to catch up.

• Incident Management: Create and resolve incidents faster with intelligent, context-aware, and proactive incident matching.
• Problem Management: ITIL 4-compliant best practices for service management processes that embed mature practices into the user experience and the back-end workflow.
• Change Management: Simplified change request processes with a guided process on mobile and web, drag-and-drop change calendar, and automated and contextual collision detection and impact analysis.
• Service Asset/Configuration Management: Scalable, service view configuration management for ITOM. Offers class structure, data and service models, federation, reconciliation and normalization, and agentless application and dependency mapping.
• Service Desk: Support a variety of service request workloads at scale, such as customer service in large banks.
• Analytics: BMC Helix ITSM has cognitive capabilities that automate classification, assignment, and routing of incidents, as well as provides cognitive email analysis and response.
• Extension Beyond IT: Ability to track operating level agreements and contracts from external providers. It also extends to HR, facilities and procurement.
• Market Strength: BMC has the largest enterprise installed base for core ITSM services. Not aimed at the SME market.
• Cost: Choice of pricing (named and concurrent).

Ivanti Service Manager

Ivanti Service Manager evolved from the merger of HEAT and Landesk to offer ITSM, chatbots, telephony support, third-party service integration and contract management functionality. Forrester said users commented on a complex setup requiring skilled administrators but ranked it as a Strong Contender.

Ivanti service management solutions are user configurable, including a workflow designer and engine that adapts to changes in the market and shifts in the business. Users can either run it as a single product or as one element of a suite.  Ivanti offers both SaaS and on-premises options. Gartner considers Ivanti to be a Challenger and it was very close to being considered a Leader in the latest Gartner MQ. One negative, though, was more focus on and revenue from other products in the Ivanti portfolio such as asset management, endpoint management and security.

• Incident Management: Ivanti provides fast, flexible incident management including analytics to deal with inbound ticket requests from any channel.
• Problem Management: Problem management utilizes information from other elements within the enterprise for automated problem resolution processes.
• Change Management: User configurable support of change workflow and business process, and enough flexibility to modify or create new change workflows.
• Service Asset/Configuration Management: Service asset and configuration management enable the handling of IT changes quickly and efficiently.
• Service Desk: Ivanti was the original service desk solution in the 1980s. It includes dashboards, reporting, knowledge management, mobility, self service and more.
• Analytics: Review events over selected time periods, track mean time between failure (MTBF) for assets and services, and report service availability against service level agreements.
• Extension Beyond IT: Ivanti tracks external providers’ operating level agreements and the underpinning contracts.
• Market Strength: Ideal for organizations looking for a single solution to synchronize IP telephony/PBX and ITSM. Strong in health care, higher education, manufacturing, retail and legal. Gartner user surveys showed Ivanti playing well in small, midmarket and large enterprise environments.
• Cost: Pricing not provided.

EasyVista Service Manager

The EasyVista Enterprise Service Management Platform includes ITSM, Enterprise Process Automation (service manager), Advanced Intelligent Knowledge Management (self help), and Micro Apps technology (for building apps, portals, and dashboards). It is available as SaaS and on-premise.

Forrester scored EasyVista as a Strong Performer and gives it good marks for integrating project management with ITSM, as well as low/no-code and analytics capabilities that include sentiment analysis and intelligent routing. It emphasizes quick setup but Forrester noted that it lacks the breadth of third-party integration of some competitors. Gartner gave it high marks for organization with lower ITSM maturity, though it didn’t score so well in organizations with a high level of ITSM maturity. The company acquired knowledge management capabilities from Knowesia, which are being integrated into the product along with virtual agent functions.

• Incident Management: Automatic knowledge search locates any related known errors, knowledge articles, news or major incidents. Resolutions from knowledge can be copied to current incidents.
• Problem Management: Alerts can be received from third-party monitoring tools, analyzed and can trigger events such as a simple recording of the events, a notification or the creation of an incident.
• Change Management: Changes are categorized based on change catalog records that also define the related workflow. Impact analysis lets you understand the impact of a change based on the CMDB relationship.
• Service Asset/Configuration Management: Assets/configuration items (CIs) are linked to define the dependency map. Business services are tracked and linked to CIs.
• Service Desk: Request management starts with the service catalog. Workflows are configured and associated to every service.
• Analytics: Microsoft Cognitive Services are used to interpret user needs.
• Extension Beyond IT: EasyVista Service Manager is used to support the offering and delivery of various enterprise services such as IT, HR and facilities.
• Market Strength: Focused on the small and medium-size enterprise market; many customers in public sector, education, health care and insurance. Strongest in the European market.
• Cost: Estimated $1,000 per concurrent user (annual SaaS subscription of platform).

CA Clarity Service Manager

(Best ITSM for MSPs)

CA Technologies (now owned by Broadcom) is a veteran of the ITSM market. Its ITSM solution known as Clarity Service Manager offers intelligent search, chatbots, improved routing, automation, sentiment analysis and image analysis. It includes a variety of service workflows. It is particularly strong on analytics, work prioritization, knowledge management, portal development, mobile capabilities and camera support. In addition, machine learning aids in queue awareness, and automatic categorization of incidents and requests.

This ITSM tool is on-premise only and part of a larger suite, which includes additional products. Its multi-tenancy approach makes it popular among MSPs. The acquisition of CA technologies by Broadcom, though, has introduced some uncertainty. Currently, the ITSM product is buried on the Broadcom site below many other Broadcom products. That’s one of the reasons why Forrester rates it as a Strong Performer rather than a leader.  Gartner characterized CA as only a Niche Player in ITSM, saying it is only really aimed at very mature service management organizations, lack of SaaS features and declining market share for several years. On the plus side, the company has strong global reach, and a broader ITOM and integrated ITOM portfolio.

• Incident Management: Incident generation can be automated through integrations with email systems, command line interfaces, web services, event monitoring, and CTI tools.
• Problem Management: You can create a standalone problem, a problem from an incident and attach an incident to a problem. You can also select the impacted CI.
• Change Management: Includes a robust CMDB and integrations between the service desk and Clarity Configuration Automation, Clarity Service Operations Insight and Clarity Client Automation.
• Service Asset/Configuration Management: Integration between Clarity APM and Clarity SM enables sharing of business-critical information to form a view of assets and CIs.
• Service Desk: Mobility and collaborative self-service bring users together to share information and resolve issues on their favorite devices, often without opening a ticket.
• Analytics: xFlow gives analysts the ability to understand the complete state of the IT environment, a way to prioritize work and the context to make decisions.
• Extension Beyond IT: Users have begun to leverage it for a variety of use cases, such as HR, procurement and facilities.
• Market Strength: CA Technologies has traction with managed service providers (MSPs) that use the product to service many hundreds of clients. Overall, it is primarily a large enterprise solution.
• Cost: Clarity SM is included in the CA Portfolio Licensing Agreement (PLA), which is under is under a non-disclosure agreement.

Micro Focus Service Management Automation X

Micro Focus SMAX is the single suite for ITSM, enterprise service management and IT asset management. It incorporates containers and Kubernetes to decrease ticket volumes, as well as automated service support for IT and non-IT processes, workflows and tasks based on machine learning and analytics. It can be run in the cloud (AWS, Azure, Google) or on-premise or consumed as a service. It drives change management by using prescriptive analytics to decrease change failures and reduce service outages.

SMAX has codeless configuration and can help develop new applications without developer skills. A self-service portal comes with social collaboration as the single point of contact for business and IT users for support and requests. Intelligent search, chatbots and a strong CMDB are included.

Micro Focus has a complex portfolio due to the merging of product lines with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). According to Forrester, it entails a higher skills requirement than those of other vendors and is graded as a Strong Performer.  Gartner, though, considered it to be only a Niche Player as ITSM is not a product line that is prioritized by the company in terms of revenue generation.

• Incident Management: Restore normal service operation, access incidents from the landing page, automate reporting and track incidents, and issue alerts or escalate an incident.
• Problem Management: Identify the underlying reasons for one or more related incidents, enabling IT teams to create workarounds, identify known errors and define solutions.
• Change Management: Create and manage requests for change to the service assets and configured items registered in the CMDB by providing templates and change models to implement changes.
• Service Asset/Configuration Management: SMAX helps you organize and track the individual assets that support business services.
• Service Desk: One centralized location for all employee issues related to IT. Its interface enables users to independently request support, search a self-help knowledge base and browse a service catalog.
• Analytics: SMAX comes with embedded Micro Focus IDOL Intelligent Data Operating Layer, which allows for the search and processing of text taken from both structured data and unstructured human information.
• Extension Beyond IT: Micro Focus SMAX includes enterprise service management features to extend ITSM to other business services.
• Market Strength: Micro Focus SMAX is primarily aimed at large-scale environments with higher process maturity, and strong regulatory compliance reporting and audit requirements.
• Cost: SMAX flexible licensing includes concurrent and named users, pay-per-use (for MSPs).

SolarWinds Samanage Service Platform

Samanage has been acquired by SolarWinds. Its ITSM solution includes release management, service catalog, service portal, knowledge base, IT asset management, CMDB, service level management and risk detection. It is a standalone ITSM that can scale across departments within an organization and offers a selection of native integrations. A REST API enables integration with other systems.

Samanage is a cloud-based multi-tenant SaaS platform. It doesn’t require third-party configuration or a dedicated administrator to be functional. Users can be up and running rapidly. It utilizes artificial intelligence and machine learning. SolarWinds plans to add the Samanage products to its IT Operations Management portfolio during the course of 2019. Samanage is too new to be graded by Forrester or Gartner. But its new ownership could see it appearing in analyst reports in the near future.

• Incident Management: Resolve incidents and reduce or eliminate simple tasks. Automated rules are in place for ticket routing and priority.
• Problem Management: Trending helps uncover problems. View the status of a problem impacting users. Agents can search open problems to see if there is a known issue causing their incidents to be opened.
• Change Management: ITIL change management processes include clear communication to the people affected while improving service quality and consistency across operations.
• Service Asset/Configuration Management: The CMDB contains an organization’s users, services, physical assets, hardware and software to build the upstream and downstream relationship of configuration items.
• Service Desk: The SolarWinds-Samanage service desk gives employees the ability to submit tickets and requests, and gives agents a tool where they can provide services with consistency.
• Analytics: A reports module has commonly used metrics built in. Integration with Google Analytics measures service portal usage.
• Extension Beyond IT: Samanage extends to services beyond IT such as procurement.
• Market Strength: Education, government, retail and health care. Primarily SMEs.
• Cost: Starting at $29 per month per agent for small teams. The professional version costs $79 per month per agent, $0.60 per month per device.

InvGate Service Desk

The InvGate suite is designed to provide full IT management covering service, support, discovery, monitoring and mapping. InvGate Insight allows you to map all of the infrastructure in a single platform, as it brings together asset data and information from across all of the organization’s technology domains. This includes AWS and Azure cloud instances along with IoT devices. Any network monitoring solution can be integrated easily.

A tasks module allows automization of work to be done in a request or in the execution of a workflow, so that all the necessary efforts to find a solution are divided. A knowledge management system helps you organize relevant information for it to be available at all times. As end users create a new self-service request, InvGate Natural Language Technology employs heuristics to analyze their text to suggest articles in real time. Integration with other InvGate tools allows discovery and monitoring of IT assets and management of changes. InvGate Service Desk can be integrated with third-party asset managers such as FileWave and Microsoft SCCM. It is available as SaaS or on-premise.

InvGate has not yet gained enough market traction to be included in Forrester or Gartner market evaluations. But it is an up-and-coming product.

• Incident Management: InvGate PinkVERIFY-certified incident management capabilities ensure IT support can focus on what’s most important across all the tickets in front of them.
• Problem Management: Reduce the impact of repeat issues, known errors and known problems with workflows and automation, with the aim of speeding up problem identification, logging, investigation and root cause analysis.
• Change Management: Change models can be created based on the level of risk and impact associated with different change types. Those with minimal risk and impact can be pre-approved as service requests.
• Service Asset/Configuration Management: One application contains all service modules (including service, incident, problem, and change). There is also a fully integrated CMDB (InvGate Insight) to assist with discovery of assets.
• Service Desk: Automate, manage and measure all types of requests through a ticketing system that includes self-service capabilities.
• Analytics: The integrated OLAP approach delivers data in real time with over 150 built-in metrics.
• Extension Beyond IT: The visual workflow engine allows integration of IT operations with business processes for other business functions or departments beyond IT.
• Market Strength: Strongest in LATAM (especially Argentina) and U.S. Midmarket, primarily.
• Cost: For a target mid-size company with 50 service desk agents, with named licenses (one for each), who can solve requests for an unlimited amount of end users (who don’t require any license), pricing would be:
  Annual Licensing: US$ 19,100 (same value for yearly renewal of the same licenses)
  Perpetual Licensing: US$ 48,250 (renewal at 20%)

SysAid ITSM

(Best Education ITSM Solution)

SysAid has built in an all-in-one ITSM solution, driven by automation, analytics and AI to identify and predict issues and problems, and offer up the most likely resolution. It automates manually intensive processes. This integrated ITSM, service desk and help desk package includes easy-to-use tools for analyzing and optimizing IT performance.

The company boasts over 10,000 customers in over 140 countries. SysAid can be used in the cloud or on-premise, and users can move between the two as circumstances change. As a relatively new entrant into ITSM, SysAid is one of the market upstarts that are yet to be evaluated in the Forrester Wave or Gartner Magic Quadrant.

• Incident Management: SysAid ITSM’s ITIL-aligned incident management capabilities log, process, manage and report on issues that adversely affect end users, IT services and business services.
• Problem Management: SysAid’s problem management capabilities allow you to systemize the problem management workflow processes needed for dealing with simple and complex problems.
• Change Management: Assess the risk of every change in advance, and use an approval process to ensure all changes are in line with policy and business strategies.
• Service Asset/Configuration Management: Components include: real asset management, network discovery, monitoring, mobile device management and patch management.
• Service Desk/Help Desk: SysAid Help Desk offers a ticket management tool, IT asset management, self-service, mobile device management, chat, password reset, mobile apps and industry benchmarking.
• Analytics: Offers analytics tools such as BI Analytics (by Qlik), reporting tools and SysAid IT Benchmark.
• Extension Beyond IT: Focused on IT services.
• Market Strength: Very strong in education with features such as: password reset (can be allowed for staff or students or both): a self-service portal to book a room or equipment; Hotkey with SSO to ensure proper logging of the request user who submitted the incident/request along with the correct asset and where it is located; and back-end service desk automation such as routing by campus/school/building; prioritizing by staff/administration vs students.
• Cost: SysAid starts at $3,000.

LogMeIn GoToAssist Service Desk

LogMeIn GoToAssist Service Desk can be custom integrated by API with ITOM systems. It is also closely integrated with the LogMeIn RescueAssist Remote Support product to help agents become more efficient by starting remote support sessions directly from a ticket. It is aligned with ITIL best practices and includes ticketing and incident management, configuration management, problem management, knowledge management, change management, contacts management, release management, a knowledge base, messaging, an online help desk and email integration.

Service Desk is a SaaS product. It is quick and easy to set up and can be customized to suit a particular environment. It has popularity among MSPs. Yet another of the new breed of primarily cloud-based ITSM products that are not yet covered in Forrester or Gartner reports.

• Incident Management: GoToAssist Service Desk covers the full spectrum of ITIL with dedicated modules. Incident management is one of the primary components and is structured by queues.
• Problem Management: Track all related incidents, root cause or temporary workaround of problems in one place.
• Change Management: Tracking of change plans, builds and test results. It also includes approval flow and scheduling.
• Service Asset/Configuration Management: GoToAssist Service Desk has a configuration management module where individual CI types can be created: CIs can have their own attributes, categories and relationship types.
• Service Desk: Service Desk capabilities in the incident module enable admins to create branded customer portals, build escalation flows and set up templates for frequent request types.
• Analytics: Built-in reporting to track incoming volume, agent performance or customer satisfaction.
• Extension Beyond IT: Squarely based on IT services, not other services.
• Market Strength: Popular amongst SMEs, as well as Managed Service Providers.
• Cost: Monthly price per Agent is $39 (paid yearly) / $49 (paid monthly) with no limit to the number of customers or tickets created. Service Desk offers named or concurrent license types as well.

Atlassian Jira Service Desk

(Best ITSM for DevOps)

Jira Service Desk adjusts to existing workflows and agents to provide service. It emphasizes low touch and comes with stock reports, including created vs resolved, time to resolution, SLA met vs breached, and resolution by component. It offers integration with analytics tool from BI to Google Analytics.

Jira Service Desk can be used as a standalone ITSM tool or part of the Atlassian suite for DevOps, which includes Jira Software, Bitbucket, Confluence, Opsgenie and Statuspage. Confluence, for example, is a collaborative document management and storage app where you can create a knowledge base of articles that appear in your web portal. It is available as a SaaS, self-managed single server option or by Atlassian’s self-managed enterprise version.

Forrester graded Atlassian as a Strong Performer, noting strengths in Agile project management. As a relatively new platform, it still lacks some of the features of its more mature competitors. It also requires third-party CMDB and reporting tools. It is not yet on the Gartner ITSM MQ radar.

• Incident Management: The Atlassian incident management solution is Opsgenie for operating always-on services, empowering DevOps teams to plan for service disruptions and stay in control during incidents.
• Problem Management: An ITIL problem management workflow investigates, records and prevents infrastructure problems.
• Change Management: Jira takes a lean approach without compromising compliance or increasing risk to the business. It integrates with several other asset/CMDB management apps.
• Service Asset/Configuration Management: Jira Service Desk provides asset management via integrations from Oomnitza, Device42 and Riada.
• Service Desk: Jira Service Desk is a helpdesk request tracker. It lets you receive, track, manage and resolve requests. The app comes with a self-service web portal.
• Analytics: Real-time reporting so users can see performance metrics and workload trends.
• Extension Beyond IT: HR, finance, legal, facilities, marketing.
• Market Strength: Existing Atlassian customers and those heavily committed to DevOps and Agile methodologies.
• Cost: A basic version for three agents costs $10 per month; a more robust version for 100 agents costs $1,575 per month.

ServiceNow ITSM

(Best Overall ITSM)

ServiceNow’s ITSM product is a part of IT Workflows on the Now Platform. IT Workflows includes modules for ITSM, ITOM, IT Business Management, IT Asset Management, DevOps, Security Operations, Governance, Risk and Compliance, and Build Your Own Apps. ServiceNow’s ITOM integrates with other monitoring tools, cloud platforms, serverless infrastructure and asset management software including AWS, Azure, IBM Cloud, VMWare, App Dynamics and ForeScout.

ServiceNow’s full suite of ITSM capabilities include discovery, service mapping, operational intelligence, cloud management, orchestration. Users leverage the ServiceNow Platform to automate incident, problem, change, configuration and request management with an out-of-the-box, codeless, pre-configured ITIL-based solution. It is cloud, not on-premise. It boasts a user community of 160,000 online members.

Forrester graded ServiceNow as a Leader due to deep ITSM capabilities in asset and configuration management, a variety of business service modules, such as HR and facilities; and powerful PaaS. Minuses are the need for skilled developers to achieve success, and concerns over complex licensing and high cost. ServiceNow is also a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for ITSM.

• Incident Management: Connects users with IT through mobile self-service and virtual agents, leverages machine learning to automatically route incidents, and uses workflows to resolve issues quickly.
• Problem Management: Minimizes the business impact of service disruptions and reduces future disruptions using ITIL practices.
• Change Management: With ServiceNow Change and Release Management, companies control IT change processes, from creation, risk‑assessment, conflict detection and approval, to environmental changes.
• Service Asset/Configuration Management: The ServiceNow CMDB provides a single system of record for IT. When paired with ServiceNow Service Mapping, the CMDB enables applications to be service-aware.
• Service Desk: ServiceNow’s agent intelligence offering provides machine learning solutions for the automated categorization, routing, and other classification of data on the platform.
• Analytics: ServiceNow Performance Analytics is an integrated application designed for reporting and analyzing business performance.
• Extension Beyond IT: Now Platform delivers a digital workplace that brings together IT service management, ITOM, IT business management to create contextual workflows and digitize business processes.
• Market Strength: ServiceNow focuses on enterprise and commercial accounts with at least 500 employees.
• Cost: Subscription licensing in a SaaS deployment model hosted in ServiceNow’s private cloud.

Axios Assyst

Axios Assyst offers integration to cloud/SaaS services, auto-population of the CMDB and comprehensive coverage of ITIL/ITSM processes. It includes multiple business service modules (HR, finance, and facilities), machine learning, workload allocation, and risk analytics, as well as Amazon cloud integration.

Service desk tools help front-line staff route and resolve issues. ITSM, ITOM and IT Business Management (ITBM) are provided in one app to give visibility and control over services, support, assets and financials. Forrester graded it only as a Contender behind many other companies. The analyst firm said it needed to expand its knowledge management features and develop a more robust ecosystem of services and third-party integrations. Gartner considers Axios to only be a Niche Player in this market due to small market share and its narrow European/UK focus.

• Incident Management: Includes self-logging of incidents and requests, direct access to services and status information, and the ability to search and crowd-source knowledge via web and mobile.
• Problem Management: Automatically detect and resolve endpoint security and performance issues, reducing the flow of incidents to the service desk, making it easy to find the root cause.
• Change Management: Automated categorization and routing means incidents and requests are pushed to the right team or automated process to fit with rapid changes in business demand.
• Service Asset/Configuration Management: Offers a service-oriented view of the infrastructure, configuration, status and history as well as a consumer-style service catalog.
• Service Desk: Smart technology combined with easy integration gives service desk analysts the visibility, insight and control they need to diagnose and resolve issues.
• Analytics: The InfoZone virtual agent assistant is integrated into the logging form to push relevant information and suggested actions to analysts in real time.
• Extension Beyond IT: Also used for a variety of non-IT use cases, including fleet management, legal services and marketing.
• Market Strength: Strong presence in the UK and parts of Europe.
• Cost: No pricing provided.

IBM ITSM

IBM considers ITSM as part of its middleware portfolio, where it isn’t given that much attention. As such, Forrester only graded it as a Contender. A series of home-grown and acquired assets such as Maximo have tasked IBM with combining various ITSM or related applications such as Tivoli Process Automation Engine, Netcool, Maximo and others. These tools provide end-to-end visibility, control, and automation to help IT operations staff manage business applications and services on-premises and in the cloud.

While IBM has a mighty arsenal of ITSM-related tools, the emphasis is on enterprise asset management and field service. Forrester said IBM Control Desk with Maximo has a configurable low/no-code platform that is scalable, and includes a chatbot and reporting. However, the company gives little emphasis to this product line. As a result, it gets lost within a sprawling software catalog. Gartner graded it the worst out of nine ITSM products evaluated in its last ITSM MQ. It scored poorly on usability among and is primarily sold to existing IBM customers.

• Incident Management: Consolidates, reduces and prioritizes the events and alarms that impact business services before they affect end users.
• Problem Management: Lowers the number of generated events into a small subset of actionable problems.
• Change Management: Automation helps track the status of assets and changes in near real time.
• Service Asset/Configuration Management: Full visibility and control of all CIs and their dependencies.
• Service Desk: Automate service requests through end user catalogs, with each request handled without human interaction.
• Analytics: Integrates with IBM Watson AI for analytics capabilities.
• Extension Beyond IT: Requires personnel skilled in IBM middleware to extend it to other areas.
• Market Strength: Existing IBM customers who need ITSM capabilities added.
• Cost: Not available.

Freshworks Freshservice

(Best ITSM for SMEs)

Freshservice by Freshworks helps to modernize IT and other business functions with an easy-to-use, simple-to-configure IT service desk solution in the cloud. It requires no or minimal training. Freshservice comes with multi-channel support, gamification features and has a mobile service desk app. The company boasts 20,000 customers.

Gartner Peer Reviews graded Freshservice highly in SME and less mature ITSM environments. However, it scored less well in intermediate and high maturity ITSM settings.

• Incident Management: Tracks, prioritizes, and assigns tickets, and automates resolution processes to drive efficiency.
• Problem Management: Automates tasks and provides support for issues raised via email, self-service portal, phone, chat or in person.
• Change Management: Enables IT to plan out and assess changes before they are rolled out.
• Service Asset/Configuration Management: Effective asset management can help avoid duplicity of applications, hardware, hosting, and their support.
• Service Desk: Resolves tickets raised via multiple channels like email, self-service portal, live chat software, phone and in person. Provides visibility into all tickets and tracks their progress via a dashboard.
• Analytics: Auto-assigns and escalates tickets to the right agents or groups, automatically prioritizes tickets based on impact and urgency, maps relationships to dependencies, and schedules recurring tasks as tickets.
• Extension Beyond IT: Can be used for IT or non-IT processes.
• Market Strength: SMEs
• Cost: $20 per month per agent for small teams and up to $100 per month per agent for the enterprise version.

Microsoft Provance

Provance IT Service Management extends the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform into the realm of IT service and IT asset management. Provance ITSM leverages all three of the Microsoft clouds (Dynamics 365, Office 365 and Azure). It is optimized for use with Microsoft management, productivity and analytic tools. Thus, Provance users can easily leverage existing investments in technology.

Microsoft Provance comes with reporting, a self-service portal with notifications, ticket templates, end-to-end service visibility, automations and business process flows. It is also a Pink Verify-certified solution for 11 ITIL processes so industry best practices are tied in. It is easy to create and modify forms, templates, automations and business process workflows as needed. It can also Leverage PowerApps, Microsoft Flow and Logic Apps to connect Provance ITSM to other applications without resorting to building something from nothing.

• Incident Management: Automated issue escalation and auto routing of incidents and service requests ensure a faster resolution with minimal end-user effort.
• Problem Management: Spots trends, analyzes historical information and identifies key issues, such as the root cause of errors and failures.
• Change Management: You can make changes and modifications without coding and scripting. The result of changes can be viewed and rolled back if necessary.
• Service Asset/Configuration Management: Cloud Service Management creates a bridge between Provance ITSM and Azure to auto-populate the CMDB, provide a consolidated view of Azure Subscription Schema, deliver real-time online diagnostics and configuration management, and automatically synchronize services.
• Service Desk: The ITSM Service Desk app is an interactive dashboard focused on tickets, with the ability to filter based on variables (such as ticket type, affected services or priority) and dive deeper into services workload and ticket status information for more effective ticket resolution.
• Analytics: Power BI is used to instantly collect, correlate and aggregate real-time data, spot trends and analyze historical information.
• Extension Beyond IT: Quick visualization of the hierarchy between a business service and its technical services.
• Market Strength: Existing customers of Microsoft Dynamics and Microsoft/Windows technology.
• Cost: A license for Microsoft Dynamics 365 is also required. The Provance IT Service Management User License is $30 per user per month for SaaS and $652 for the perpetual on-premise license.

Cherwell Service Management

(Best Enterprise Service Management Solution)

Cherwell Software has developed ITSM and Service Management software that can support complex processes and extend beyond IT to other business and enterprise services such as security, facilities and HR. It takes a low/no-code approach to its platform for service and workflow design.

This standalone ITSM tool can be either on-premise or SaaS. It is a codeless platform that reads in metadata configuration files, which governs what applications then run on the platform. Cherwell Service Management is the combination of ITSM content and the platform. It offers easy customization of new IT services and the extension of digital services beyond IT. Forrester named it as a Leader due to its enterprise service management capabilities. However, Forrester gave it some minus points for a lack of comprehensive analytics and machine learning features, as well as its CMDB, with some preferring to use the third-party Firescope tool to the native Cherwell CMDB for discovery. Gartner placed Cherwell in its Challengers category and considers it is best for intermediate levels of ITSM maturity. It received good marks for third-party integrations.

• Incident Management: Cherwell Service Management meets PinkVerify 2011 general, core, and integration suitability requirements for 11 processes including Incident Management.
• Problem Management: Can dig into symptoms, looking for the underlying cause and identifying long-term solutions.
• Change Management: Cherwell’s ease of configuration and automation advances both the deployment of Change Management process and the execution of the changes.
• Service Asset/Configuration Management: Cherwell’s CMDB software enables IT teams to visualize how their applications, servers, databases, and networking, and storage devices interact, helping them more effectively manage their infrastructures.
• Service Desk: Automates repetitive and complex tasks, reducing labor intensity and optimizing costs.
• Analytics: Analytics are not emphasized on the Cherwell platform.
• Extension Beyond IT: Cherwell is a leader in extending ITSM to other functions such as HR, fleets and other business workflows.
• Market Strength: Strong in health care, higher education, financial services and government.
• Cost: Not provided.

Best IT Service Management Comparison Chart 

Best ITSM Tools by Industry, Company and Purpose

Best Overall ITSM Solutions

ServiceNow offers the best overall solution of the list due its fair pricing, robust offering, and excellent customer service.

Best Education ITSM Solution

SysAid ITSM is our recommended vendor for the education market due to it scalability and ease of integration with major BI platforms including Qlik and Tableau.

Best ITSM for SMEs

We recommend Freshworks Freshservice for small to medium sized businesses due to the low starting cost structure as well as abundance of available integrations with other Freshworks SMB solutions.

Best ITSM for DevOps

Atlassian Jira Service Desk is our pick for devops professionals as it includes functionality for tracking of long and complex projects as well as a simple to understand cost structure.

Best ITSM for MSPs

CA Clarity is our pick for managed service providers as it includes an easy to use interface that allows for multiple clients to be managed simultaneously in a remote manner.

Best Enterprise Service Management Solution

Cherwell Service Management is the best ITSM option for large enterprises currently.  It’s not the lowest cost option on the list, but it is very scalable and can accommodate organizations of any size.

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