As organizations become bigger, more complex, and widen their spread across different geographies, it becomes imperative to have a single platform that will streamline operations and give employees, customers, and stakeholders a single source of truth.
In other words, you need a platform that handles IT service management (ITSM) activities including incident reporting, tracking, and resolution.
ServiceNow is a popular platform that gives employees, customers, and the management the right tools needed to streamline work, improve their productivity, and make the right decisions based on valid data.
Also, this is a SaaS platform, so no deployment, installation, or configuration is needed.
That said, ServiceNow comes with its own share of problems too, such as
- It is expensive
- JavaScript is absolutely necessary for configuration
- This is not the ideal choice if you want an on-premise or perpetual licensing, as only a SaaS version is available
- Upgrades can be time-consuming.
Now that you know the downsides, here are some good alternatives that offer similar features.
- Solarwinds Service Desk
- Freshservice
- Jira Service Desk
- Spiceworks Help Desk
- Ivanti Service Manager
- ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus
Let’s take a detailed look at each of these tools and software and see what kind of features that add to the mix.
Best ServiceNow Alternatives for Managed Saas Help Desk:
1. SolarWinds Service Desk – FREE TRIAL
SolarWinds Service Desk is a comprehensive IT service management solution that helps with incident management, change management, knowledge base, and more.
Features
Below are some of the key features of the SolarWinds Service Desk.
- Automates processes to reduce overheads.
- Focuses on important metrics to continuously improve operations
- Provides the highest possible visibility into your asset management
- Comes with a real-time dashboard
- Offers a consolidated database of information for easy reference
- Sends automatic notifications and alerts
- Gives the flexibility to establish and modify rules to meet your SLAs
Pricing: SolarWinds Service desk comes in three editions – Team, Business, and Professional.
Team is ideal for small teams and costs $19 per agent per month while the Business edition is perfect for a growing team and costs $39 per agent per month.
The Professional edition is a customizable service that costs $69 per agent per month. Compare plans and request a quote here.
Download: Get Started for FREE with their Full Trial!
2. NinjaOne – FREE TRIAL
NinjaOne is a SaaS package for managed service providers (MSPs) that includes s Help Desk ticketing system that can be used for technical support management.
Key features:
Features
- A self-service portal for users that enables the raising of tickets for support
- Ticket routing that can be set up to run automatically and enables manual rerouting
- The ability to send monitoring alerts through the ticketing system
- Progress tracking for team management
- Resolution timing for service level agreement (SLA) compliance reporting
- Automatic timesheet generation
- Billing data output
- Knowledge base for user guides
- Scripts for technician troubleshooting
Pricing: You can start a free trial and get a custom quote for your requirements.
Download: Get a 14-day free trial.
3. Freshservice
Freshservice is a cloud-based IT management software that comes with many automated features to bridge the gap between IT and business.
The key features of Freshservice are:
- Allows users to raise tickets through email, portal, phone, or even in person.
- Automatically tracks, prioritizes, assigns, and resolves the tickets.
- Enables users to look up information from the knowledge base without raising tickets.
- Improves collaboration between employees
- Isolates problems, links it with past incidents and performs a root-cause analysis
- Comes with a real-time project dashboard
- Helps to keep track of all your IT and non-IT assets
- Maintains a record of contracts with third-party vendors.
Pricing: There are four editions of Freshservice and they are:
- Blossom – ideal for small teams. Priced at $19 per agent per month
- Garden – ideal for growing teams. Priced at $49 per agent per month
- Estate – ideal for large teams. Priced at $79 per agent per month
- Forest – ideal for enterprises. Priced at $99 per agent per month
Download: Click here to download a 21-day free trial version.
4. Jira Service Desk
Jira Service Desk is an ITIL platform that helps employees to work smarter and harder. It comes with powerful SLA management features and an advanced knowledge base to empower users with the right information.
Here is a look at some of the salient features of this tool.
- Makes it easy for employees to find answers to common questions through a self-service portal.
- Allows you to set up as many SLA policies as possible to stay on top of deadlines
- Creates configurable queues that agents can use to prioritize and assign incoming assignments
- Responds, resolves, and learns from incidents
- Tracks and analyzes all response activities
- Does a thorough root-cause analysis and presents the findings in the form of a report
Pricing: Jira service desk comes in three editions. The free edition supports up to three agents and the file storage is limited to 2GB.
The standard and premium editions support up to 5,000 agents and come with a host of add-on features.
The standard edition costs $20 per agent per month and limits the storage to 250GB while there is no storage limit in the premium edition and it costs $40 per agent per month.
Download: Click here to use the free edition of Jira Service Desk.
5. Spiceworks Help Desk
Spiceworks Help Desk is a free tool from Spiceworks that allows you to stay on top of all your IT incidents and tickets.
It comes loaded with many advanced features as well.
The main features of this tool are:
- Gives complete control over your tickets and tasks.
- Comes with custom fields to track the areas you need
- Offers a customizable user portal to help users track progress.
- Integrates well with Active Directory
- Allows you to set up rules to auto-assign tickets to experts.
Pricing: It is 100% FREE.’
Download: Click here to download this tool.
6. Ivanti Service Manager
Ivanti Service Manager is an affordable and flexible cloud-optimized solution to streamline your IT operations with automated processes.
Here is a look at the key features of the Ivanti Service Manager.
- Manages and automates ITSM processes to improve service delivery.
- Automates manual processes for enterprise service management, infrastructure, and workspace areas
- Improves call handling and increases first-call resolutions
- No programming is needed
- Reduces wait times, transfer rates, and abandoned calls
Pricing: Contact the sales team for a quote.
Download: Click here for a demo version.
7. ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus is a web-based IT help desk software that improves the efficiency of IT help desk technicians.
Features
The features of ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus are:
- Reduces outages and improves agent productivity.
- Helps to meet SLAs.
- Automates ticket workflows to save technicians’ time and effort.
- Analyzes root-cause to reduce repeat incidences
- Streamlines the planning, approval, and implementation processes.
- Manages releases with precision
- Integrates with Office365.
Pricing: Contact the sales team for a custom quote.
Download: Click here to try a demo version.
Conclusion
To conclude, IT service management tools are essential to bridge the gap between IT and business and to streamline the process of creating and managing incidents within an organization.
Though ServiceNow is a popular tool, it comes with its own share of disadvantages and this is why it makes sense to look at some of its alternatives.
The above-mentioned tools help with service management and they also come with advanced features to give you complete control over your IT processes, assets, change management, and more.
We hope this detailed review will help you to make an informed decision when it comes to choosing your next ITSM tool.
