JIRA Service Management vs ServiceNow comparison

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8,100 views|5,654 comparisons
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20,011 views|11,932 comparisons
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Oct 31, 2022

We performed a comparison between Jira Service Management and ServiceNow based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

  • Ease of Deployment: Jira Service Management users mostly note that the initial setup is very simple and straightforward. ServiceNow users note the initial setup can be complex because it has a lot of content and out-of-the-box configurations.
  • Features: Users of both solutions are generally happy with their stability and scalability.

    Jira Service Management users are particularly satisfied with its ease of use, integration, and flow of reports. Some note that they would like the solution to simplify its customizations.

    ServiceNow users say they’re impressed with the solution's incident management, chain management, and problem management features. Some users mention that the product’s dashboards and reporting could be improved.
  • Pricing: Jira Service Management users say the price is reasonable and affordable for budget-conscious organizations. Some ServiceNow users note that the solution is expensive but fair.
  • ROI: Users of both solutions mention significant ROI.
  • Service and Support: Users of both solutions report excellent support, though a few Jira Service Management users mention that tech support through Atlassian is sometimes patchy and dependent on who you get.

Comparison Results: Because ServiceNow offers fewer features, is more expensive, and is more difficult to set up, Jira Service Management ultimately wins out in this comparison.

To learn more, read our detailed JIRA Service Management vs. ServiceNow Report (Updated: March 2024).
763,955 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Q&A Highlights
Question: What are the differences in purchase and maintenance costs for ServiceNow and JIRA Service Desk?
Answer: Currently, we work with REMEDY in Totalsec, it is the ticketing tool that manages the Operation processes in Totalsec. We are evaluating SERVICE NOW, as we are looking for new features to control our tickets. It is my first approach with SERVICE NOW, but I have seen it operatively very complete and at a price similar to REMEDY. At the moment I have not worked with JIRA. From my experience, I believe that as long as you have documented processes that work in line with best practices, the platform to use should allow you to have very orderly and beneficial management for your business.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The solution offers lots of information on the website to assist with technical queries. There are also many community sites to help you troubleshoot any problems.""The most valuable features are the management tools.""The automation feature in JIRA Service Management is beneficial, and that's yet to be available in ServiceNow. ServiceNow doesn't have the flexibility to automate processes.""The links between the help desk and Jira issues and between Confluence and Jira issues are most valuable. I can write requirements in Confluence and link them to user stories in Jira and test cases. I can see my test coverage and all that kind of stuff. The integration between these three is very useful. It is pretty customizable, and it integrates well. There are a lot of add-ins and a lot of connectors to third-party products. In my last company, we used Test Royal for managing all the tests, and it integrated perfectly with that. For any issue or bug, we could see what tests have been run and the complete history of the tests.""The flow of the reports is good.""Compared to other solutions, Jira Service Management is really reasonable regarding price and speed.""This is the most complete and versatile enterprise task management product and issue tracker.""The dashboards in Jira have been the most useful feature."

More JIRA Service Management Pros →

"We have found change management and CMDB to be very useful.""Very good incident management, chain management and problem management features.""It offers enhanced and efficient communication between the requester and the four pillar EDR through an online chat platform.""Some of the valuable features I have found the solution to have are it can serve many different types of businesses, it has strong platform capabilities, provides application development, built-in predictive intelligence, and performance analytics reports.""SPM and ITSM features are the most helpful.""I really like what they've done with their common service data model because now I can make a connection between the business process and technology.""ServiceNow is great. You can download the data into Excel and you can basically create reports. It's very flexible.""The solution is easy to use, simple to make queries, flexible to configure, integrates well, and supports all of our companies needs."

More ServiceNow Pros →

Cons
"There is room for improvement in support.""From the customer side, it's not friendly used compared to other competitors, like ServiceNow or BMC. It's also not fully ITSM management if you compare it with ServiceNow or BMC. They have a full model of ITSM. In BMC they have TrueSight, they have Discovery, which helps IT to discover IT equipment with a serial number, with the specs, capacity of the server.""Cost has prohibited us from switching entirely to this solution.""Every time there's a problem with JIRA Service Management, you have to have a look at how to solve it, and there's always a feature request or the feature request on the solution is too large and the development cycles are too slow.""The queries are weak and lack advanced functionality. You can do rudimentary queries, but you can't aggregate. You can't filter for a lot of things that would be useful, so you need to use plugins to write writing advanced queries. I run into problems when working with different organizations because they always have restrictions on what kind of plugins they allow.""Its UI is a bit overwhelming for new users. That has been the problem with Jira for a long time. If they could put some fields that we could use to simplify the UI, it would be good.""We have a lot of add-ons, however, instead of the add-ons, for example, cloning could be better.""I'd like to update the dashboard so that more features are available."

More JIRA Service Management Cons →

"I would like the reporting aspect to be better, including the graphs. It could have some way for us to easily to export to a csv or spreadsheet so that if a graph cannot be provided by ServiceNow itself, we would be able to use other applications to create them. Also, if there was a feature that enabled us to interact with end users directly from ServiceNow, like an instant-messaging type of feature, that would be great.""The solution could improve by being more stable.""It's not user-friendly by default, but it can be customized to be customer-friendly.""It's not very secure, it's web-based, and I prefer Remedy. Both the security and the web interface could be improved.""In an upcoming release, there should be more administration tools.""When it comes to changing some of the features, I would like a little more leeway.""Some enhancements to the self-service platform would be helpful. That part is still a little barebone... Also, the mobile app is not bad, but it's limited.""A new user does need training or time to learn the solution before jumping in. It was very hard in the beginning to understand everything. I couldn't find the models I needed at the time."

More ServiceNow Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Costs are about $50 per user per year. JIRA is sold in user tiers of 25, 50, 100, 250, 500, 2000, 10,000, and unlimited users. It is bad when you have 51 users then the price is based on that 100 user tier. Users at 100 will be the most cost effective."
  • "JIRA Service Desk has different pricing as it is based on agents. On average, the price is about $300 per agent."
  • "Do not forget to calculate add-on costs. These cost a percentage of the JIRA purchasing costs and are based on the number of JIRA users."
  • "Buying a software solution is only a half part of the solution (or even less). You need to optimize usage of the software by hiring professionals who will help you to make the most of the software, especially in the beginning."
  • "I would suggest to always buy licenses through an Atlassian partner, so you can also rely on their expertise."
  • "But about the plugins, I found one plug-in — its name is Actionable Metric I think — and it is $3000. That is very expensive for users in Iran."
  • "Actually in Iran we don't have copyright or intellectual property, so we can use JIRA for free."
  • "It's not really expensive, especially when you compare to ServiceNow or other solutions, and it's not expensive to maintain."
  • More JIRA Service Management Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The first impact for the customer is that it is expensive, but do not forget that it is a solution that includes infrastructure; a single cost, easy to justify."
  • "It has a higher cost compared to local/regional solutions."
  • "We know that ServiceNow is not cheap, it's more expensive than other solutions. But we are trying to increase our ability to handle tickets so that the cost per ticket is less."
  • "It's sold as a less expensive solution, but it has to be highly modified. That's where you get into the cost."
  • "ServiceNow pricing is an art, not a science. The deal depends on how commercially savvy you are, which does make it something that is quite difficult to get right. It is most definitely an opportunity area for ServiceNow to improve and have more visibility around pricing of the different products within the platform."
  • "ServiceNow is a leader and its pricing is quite good, quite competitive... Sometimes some plugins are not priced reasonably but, generally, the platform itself, its modules, are priced reasonably."
  • "Isn't pricing always too much? We really do chafe at the ITIL licensing. ITOM is also pretty expensive."
  • "Initially, the licensing model ServiceNow came up with was very good. But now, from a licensing perspective, they are changing their model day by day. It is becoming a bit expensive for customers."
  • More ServiceNow Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Answers from the Community
    FARS ERwan
    Rohit Goyal - PeerSpot reviewerRohit Goyal
    User

    ServiceNow is an expensive ITSM tool and JIRA Service Desk will be good to have to development projects. Now a day organizations look for tailored solutions as per their IT needs.

    reviewer761322 - PeerSpot reviewerreviewer761322 (Technology Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees)
    Real User

    If you need an ITIL aligned helpdesk system, codeless customizations and cost-effective, check out ManageEngine Servicedesk Plus.

    Jose Velez - PeerSpot reviewerJose Velez
    User

    JIRA Service Desk gives you a better monetary deal.

    David Shimberg - PeerSpot reviewerDavid Shimberg
    User

    I don’t know the answer, but I assume JIRA will be significantly less money.

    David Sandoval - PeerSpot reviewerDavid Sandoval
    Real User

    Jira Service desk supports ITIL and gives you many templates for different helpdesk scenarios, allows to creates issues using the email. The implementation of Service Desk is easy and intuitive

    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:We use JIRA Service Management for tracking purposes, planning, and execution.
    Top Answer:It is one of the premium products on the market, but it is very costly, especially in the Indian market. Smaller organizations cannot afford it. We pay monthly licensing costs. We only have to pay for… more »
    Top Answer:The short answer is that OutSystems is far better for 2 main reasons. Firstly, with Service Now you are locked into that platform for good. The business model is to lock in and then keep pumping the… more »
    Top Answer:Hi Netanya I will choose ServiceNow because ServiceNow is a very good tool compared to Microsoft PowerApp.  Because ServiceNow has a very strong module (Performance Analysis) reporting which will… more »
    Top Answer:The most impactful feature in our day-to-day operations is the ticket status, which provides crucial visibility into the progress of each resource or incident.
    Ranking
    2nd
    out of 59 in Help Desk Software
    Views
    8,100
    Comparisons
    5,654
    Reviews
    36
    Average Words per Review
    550
    Rating
    8.2
    1st
    out of 59 in Help Desk Software
    Views
    20,011
    Comparisons
    11,932
    Reviews
    23
    Average Words per Review
    458
    Rating
    8.4
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    JIRA Service Desk
    Learn More
    Overview

    JIRA Service Management is Atlassian’s IT service management (ITSM) solution. It unlocks all teams at high velocity by:

    1. Accelerating the flow of work between IT teams, development teams, and business teams

    2. Empowering teams to deliver their service more quickly

    3. Bringing visibility to their work

    Built on JIRA, JIRA Service Management enables best practices across request, incident, problem, change, knowledge, asset, and configuration management so that teams can streamline collaboration between themselves. More than 30,000 customers of all sizes rely on JIRA Service Management to deliver service.

    JIRA Service Management Features

    JIRA Service Management has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Request management: Allows businesses to manage work across teams with one platform so employees and customers get the help they need quickly.
    • Problem management: To minimize the impact of incidents, this feature groups incidents, fast-tracks root cause analysis, and records workarounds.
    • Change management: IT teams are empowered by richer contextual information around changes from software development tools. This helps them minimize risk and make better decisions.
    • Asset management: Manage inventory efficiently, track lifecycles and ownership, and reduce costs.
    • Configuration management: Attain visibility into the infrastructure that supports critical services and applications. Understand service dependencies to minimize risk.
    • Incident management: The solution brings development and IT teams together to rapidly respond to, resolve, and learn from incidents.
    • Knowledge management: While fostering team collaboration, the solution enables self-service, deflection of more requests, and management of knowledge articles.

    JIRA Service Management Benefits

    There are many benefits to implementing JIRA Service Management. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • The solution empowers all teams across IT, development, and business with intuitive, flexible workflows.
    • Work is made visible through the open and collaborative JIRA platform.
    • Connect IT and development on a single platform to accelerate workflow.
    • Gain significant ROI with competitive pricing on useful features.
    • Benefit from faster time to value by implementing a full ITSM solution in just a few months.
    • Lower total cost of ownership without expensive ongoing maintenance and upgrades.
    • Enjoy a broad ecosystem of more than 4,000 best-in-class apps and integrations.

    Reviews from Real Users

    JIRA Service Management stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Some of these include its stability, its easy customization, and its seamless integration with other solutions. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

    Abhishek S., a Program Lead at PureSoftware, writes of the solution, “You can scale the solution whether it is deployed to the cloud or the data center. While we might have up to 5,200 people using the solution, we do not require that many licenses, as only those dealing with the tickets are required to be licensed.”

    Andrew B., a Technical Engineer at a consultancy firm, notes, “One of the valuable features is that an automatic response or action can be taken on tickets. We can have certain responses for tickets that contain keywords or are logged and tagged with certain labels.”

    ServiceNow is a cloud-based task-management platform that specializes in IT operations management (ITOM), IT services management (ITSM), and IT business management (ITBM). ServiceNow allows users to manage their teams, projects, and customer interactions using a variety of different plugins and apps with which it easily integrates.

    ServiceNow offers prebuilt applications to support any process, as well as a framework and tools that allow you to build your own.

    ServiceNow’s service management solutions include change, request, incident, problem, and cost management, as well as HR, IT, field service, and facilities management solutions. They also cover business management solutions such as vendor performance management, financial management, performance analytics and project portfolio suite, as well as governance, risk, and compliance.

    “The Smarter Way to Workflow”

    ServiceNow’s activities, processes, and tasks are overseen as part of a comprehensive managed workflow that supports such features as real-time collaboration, communication, and resource sharing. ServiceNow’s suite of products allow for operation using serverless computing, and include the categories of Business Apps, Customer Service, HR, IT, and Security.

    ServiceNow can be used to support most workflows because of the wide range of tools it offers. These include on-suite ticketing tools, predictive modeling to manage workflows, and benchmarking for the tracking of progress. ServiceNow can assist with artificial intelligence and machine learning processes and can be used to organize the cases of a help/service desk as well as for instance management and problem management. It also smoothly integrates with many legacy systems.

    ServiceNow offers service management software for industries including:

    Cloud services
    Education
    Financial services
    Government
    Healthcare
    Manufacturing
    Telecommunications

    Reviews from Real Users

    PeerSpot users prefer ServiceNow to its competitors because of its scalability, stability, and ease of use. It helps everyone in the company to be on the same page by creating a single source of record across all departments. One user stated that “I’ve definitely used over 20 project management solutions, but they can't be compared with ServiceNow.” Another said that “ServiceNow is an industry leader in multiple areas and provides an excellent ROI.

    Sample Customers
    mgm technology partners, Telestream, Build.com, Zend Technologies, OfficeDrop, PGS Software, American Diabetes Association, NEPTUNE Canada
    AAA, AstraZeneca, Becton, Dickinson and Company, Broadcom, Christus Health, Epicor, Equinix, GE Capital, Intuit, KPMG, Loyola Marymount University, OshKosh, Quantas, RedHat, Royal Bank of Scotland, Swiss Re, U.S. Department of Energy, Safeway, Yale University, and Zillow    
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company35%
    Comms Service Provider12%
    Retailer9%
    Transportation Company6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company18%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    Government7%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Healthcare Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization22%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Government7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business38%
    Midsize Enterprise28%
    Large Enterprise35%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise60%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business21%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise64%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business15%
    Midsize Enterprise29%
    Large Enterprise56%
    Buyer's Guide
    JIRA Service Management vs. ServiceNow
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about JIRA Service Management vs. ServiceNow and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    763,955 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    JIRA Service Management is ranked 2nd in Help Desk Software with 36 reviews while ServiceNow is ranked 1st in Help Desk Software with 24 reviews. JIRA Service Management is rated 8.2, while ServiceNow is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of JIRA Service Management writes "It lets you configure workflows and manage requests; it has a dashboard for monitoring". On the other hand, the top reviewer of ServiceNow writes "Comprehensive IT service management with predefined processes, and seamless integration, empowering organizations to streamline workflows and enhance productivity". JIRA Service Management is most compared with ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, BMC Helix ITSM, Freshdesk, PagerDuty Operations Cloud and Zendesk, whereas ServiceNow is most compared with BMC Helix ITSM, Microsoft Power Apps, Pega BPM, IBM Maximo and PagerDuty Operations Cloud. See our JIRA Service Management vs. ServiceNow report.

    See our list of best Help Desk Software vendors and best IT Service Management (ITSM) vendors.

    We monitor all Help Desk Software reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.