What makes a good or a bad ITSM tool? Which ones are best for a small company? For an enterprise? Read this article to find out.
Thinking about purchasing our ITSM software?
In 2025, you can hardly find any business model or industry that could avoid using technology without substantial losses. Even if your service or product is purely traditional, your employees will have to use technology.
And you need to support their usage of technologies: provide them with laptops and mobile phones, purchase and renew SaaS subscriptions, and refill the printer’s toner. All of these are IT services.
IT service management is a set of procedures and guidelines that empower organizations to create, deploy, oversee, and enhance the IT services provided to their customers.
ITSM promotes a conscious and consequent approach to IT services, which helps IT teams shift from mere bug-fixing to delivering real value for the customers, and the company in general.
In this article, we’ll explore the key features of modern ITSM solutions, and present the advantages and limitations of 10 software products for ITSM currently available in the market. All to help you choose the right ITSM tool for you.
IT service management tools are software solutions that businesses use to handle IT service management. They aim at automating and improving IT service delivery workflows.
Here are some of the transformations ITSM tools enable:
The main users of IT service management tools are teams that deliver IT services, such as IT support, IT service desk, or IT help desk.
Whether you deliver IT support to your employees or to the clients using your product, the practices and workflows are similar. However, when we speak about ITSM tools, they primarily target employee experience. Customer service software is a standalone industry with its leaders, prominent tech features, and best practices, which we won’t cover in this article.
Recently, the concept of enterprise service management (ESM) has become popular. ESM expands the principles and tools used in ITSM to business functions outside of IT, such as HR, facilities, and finances. These functions benefit from ITSM tools because they also offer services to the employees. We speak about ESM in more detail in the FAQ section below and in our other article, “Enterprise Service Management: the Force of IT across the Enterprise.”
So, when choosing an ITSM solution, what key features should one keep in mind?
As Gartner puts it, “Given the mature nature of the IT service management (ITSM) platform market, much of its core functionality is commoditized.”
Whichever vendor you choose, rest assured you will have these features in the package:
Let’s look at each of them in more detail:
The ticketing portal, also called the technical portal, is the technician’s interface for handling employees’ requests. Ticketing portals store, track, organize, and analyze the tasks the IT team is receiving.
Across the offerings of different vendors, the key components of the portal remain the same:
However, depending on the vendor, the UX of the portal may change significantly, prioritizing different capabilities.
For example, in Alloy Navigator, one of our strengths is the powerful data grids. They’re incredibly efficient, loading instantly even if you have thousands of tickets. Moreover, thanks to conditional formatting, you can define distinct formatting rules for data rows, columns, and cells. This helps technicians keep their focus on high-priority tickets.
(What a tough week before the New Year though!)
Performance analysis dashboards come together with the ticketing portals. These help managers and the C-suite access KPIs and stay on top of the team’s performance. The dashboards typically feature metrics such as mean time to resolution, average ticket response time per technician, the percentage of broken SLAs, etc.
A workflow is a chain of actions to achieve a certain business result. To keep business up and running, organizations constantly perform numerous workflows, such as delivering an order to the client, publishing a piece of content, or onboarding a new employee.
Workflow automation is highly applicable in ITSM because the ticket fulfillment cycle is the same regardless of the ticket type. You don’t need to create an individual workflow for each ticket. Document it once, set up the automation, and it’ll work for most of the tickets.
Workflow management in ITSM solutions enables organizations to replace manual ticket management with automated processes, which saves a lot of time. For example, you can predefine ticket response time, and notifications to stakeholders after these deadlines expire, and much more!
The fewer requests, the less work for technicians. That’s why ticket deflection is a priority for IT services teams. Self-service tools, such as service catalogs and knowledge bases, help to reduce the number of service requests.
A service catalog features services that are fulfilled without technicians’ intervention thanks to workflow automation, such as password reset, vacation request, and reimbursement approval.
A knowledge base collects knowledge of known issues and resolution paths for them.
Vendors aim to distinguish themselves from competitors and integrate AI capabilities into their self-service portals. Noteworthy applications include AI-powered chatbots and knowledge bases infused with artificial intelligence.
ITIL is the best practices framework for ITSM which comprises a set of recommendations and guidelines to organize processes such as incident management, problem management, and change management efficiently. ITSM tools normally offer pre-configured ITIL processes so that the client doesn’t need to set it up on their own.
For example, an ITSM solution would streamline the incident resolution process by automating workflows, sending timely notifications, and maintaining a comprehensive incident log for future analysis. All this comes by default, and the client will only need to input their data to put ITIL to work.
IT asset management tools create a database of IT assets in the enterprise, both tangible, such as devices, and intangible, like software licenses, and documentation.
The ITAM modules of ITSM tools automatically gather information about networked devices and installed software.
For our recommendations on choosing IT asset management software, read this article -> The Best IT Asset Management Software in 2025: How to Choose.
A configuration management database maintains information about configuration items: hardware and software necessary for delivering IT services. A CMDB is a key component of ITSM, which governs IT service delivery. CMDBs are populated automatically via network inventory mechanisms.
CMDBs contain information not only about the status and the health of your CIs, but also about their dependencies on other components of the system. This helps predict how any change will affect related CIs, thus improving service delivery.
Being able to access both the self-service portal and the technician’s portal from different devices is crucial in today’s world. This capability is shared by most vendors.
Because the ITSM market is so mature and all the vendors focus on similar features, it can be really hard to distinguish between various ITSM solutions and choose one for you.
Below we’re bringing a list of the best ITSM tools. We assume each of the tools we’re mentioning already includes the must-have capabilities we’ve outlined in the previous section. So, we’ll only discuss those features and use cases that go beyond the default setup and make this product stand out from the competitors.
Hopefully, by looking at these detailed descriptions, you will get an idea of which tool is the best one for you!
Alloy Navigator® is an ITIL-based IT Service Management and IT Asset Management solution designed and built with industry best practices and real-world customers in mind. Centered on a powerful business process automation engine, Alloy Navigator equips you with the tools to streamline and improve the efficiency of IT operations, including Incident and Problem Management, Asset Management, Change Management, Knowledge Management, Organization and Contact Management, and more.
Why Alloy Navigator stands out from the competitors:
Cloud or on-premises: can be deployed on-premises on your servers, delivered as SaaS by Alloy Software, or installed on your Azure or AWS cloud.
Size of the business: The solution suits any business size, from small to large enterprises. For small businesses, we have a standalone solution Alloy Navigator Express.
Pricing: You pay based on Technician accounts and audited computers. The cost starts from $19 per technician per month on the basic plan.
Contact our sales team to learn more about our solutions.
Image source: ServiceNow website
ServiceNow is perhaps the most popular ITSM vendor in the marketplace. It runs the Now Platform, a unified extensible platform that collects enterprise data from backend sources and delivers insights and action points to the C-suite to bust enterprise silos.
ServiceNow ITSM is a group of key applications and capabilities that deliver resilient IT services.
How ServiceNow ITSM stands out from the competitors:
Cloud or on-premises: throughout the website, the company primarily speaks about cloud solutions. However, we assume that ServiceNow provides its solutions on the customers’ premises as well, by request.
Size of the business: the core of ServiceNow’s focus is global enterprise companies. It seems that the solution may be less beneficial for small and medium companies.
Pricing: custom quotes.
Image source: SysAid website
Compared to its peers, SysAid is a relatively small company focusing on IT service management software.
Here’s why SysAid might be a helpful ITSM tool for you:
Cloud or on-premises: no clear mention on the website.
Pricing: custom pricing.
Image source: Ivanti YouTube channel
Ivanti stands out in the ITSM space with a broad product offering that includes not only traditional ITSM capabilities but also asset, endpoint security, mobile device, and supply chain management solutions.
In its ITSM profile, Ivanti offers 2 products: Ivanti Neurons for ITSM, and Cherwell for Service Management. Let’s speak about the first one.
Here’s what we think makes this product stand out from the rest:
Cloud or on-premises: available in both versions.
Pricing: custom pricing.
Image source: Ivanti website
Along with Ivanti Neurons for ITSM, Cherwell by Ivanti is an ITSM solution by Ivanti.
Key Features:
Considerations:
Cloud or on-premises: no clear mention on the website.
Pricing: custom pricing.
Images source: InvGate website, and the trial instance
Invgate is a company from Argentina focusing on ITSM software. The team seems to be evolving rapidly and even raised money from external investors in the summer of 2023.
As far as their ITSM product InvGate Service Desk goes, here’s what we noticed.
InvGate is the only vendor that offers some gamification features. “Gamification is a framework to reward staff, with virtual or tangible incentives for completing tasks.”
Also, on InvGate, approvers are free and don’t require a license. And sharing dashboards with users without a license is free!
Disadvantages: No separate ITIL process like release management, change management, etc.
Cloud or on-premises: only the cloud solution is available.
Pricing: starts from $17/agent/month.
Image source: Atlassian website
Many of you know Jira for its project management tools, and you could wonder, is Jira an ITSM tool, as well?
Jira has a special module called Jira Service Management for managing IT service delivery.
And it has a lot of advantages:
Cloud or on-premises: it’s a cloud-only solution, there’s no on-premises option.
Pricing: forever free for teams of less than 3 agents. For bigger teams, the pricing starts at $22.05/agent/month.
Image source: Freshworks website
Freshworks is a company that owns a portfolio of software solutions for use cases such as customer service, IT service management, marketing, and sales.
The product called Freshservice primarily focuses on ITSM, and includes several modules: IT Service Management, Freshservice for Business Teams, IT Operations Management, IT Asset Management, and Project Portfolio Management.
What makes Freshservice stand out from the competitors:
Cloud or on-premises: cloud only.
Pricing: starts from $19/agent/month.
Image source: BMC website
BMC Helix ITSM is a leading cloud service for IT help desks, known for using AI to make work easier and more efficient. It’s a top choice for big companies, offering a lot of smart features to handle IT services.
Why BMC Helix ITSM can be a good choice:
Considerations:
Cloud or on-premises: no clear mention on the website.
Pricing: custom pricing.
Image source: ManageEngine website
ManageEngine as a company has a diverse portfolio of software solutions: identity and access management, endpoint management and security, security information and event management, and much more. Their ServiceDesk Plus solution is focused on enterprise and IT service management, as they put it.
Why we think ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus stands out:
Disadvantages:
Cloud or on-premises: both of them are available.
Pricing: custom pricing.
Based on our overview of the solutions available in the market, here are some suggestions on how to choose an ITSM solution for you:
(We hope, this will be Alloy Navigator. Contact our sales team to learn more about our solutions.)
