We performed a comparison between Device42 and ServiceNow CMDB based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Configuration Management Databases solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The solution's automatic IT asset discovery and inventory functionality are top-notch. The thing I like is that it's open-source. If I need to change them — and they've given me links on GitHub to have them — I can go and change them to pull exactly what I want, as frequently as I want."
"They've also just created some new interactive dashboards. CEOs can see and interact with the data rather than scrolling through endless Excel worksheets to find what they need."
"One of the most valuable features in my experience is the precise tracking of hardware devices and their locations registered in the solution. The solution allows to determine the exact placement of assets based on the building maps and the room details. This feature has allowed us to gain upper hand on the customers and provide them with a great satisfaction because they can visually see the arrangement of their assets within the organisation or building."
"The auto-discovery is brilliant. You can have it scheduled to run on a regular basis, and the infrastructure is always getting updated within the platform. I would rate the asset discovery very highly. It's very comprehensive. It covers quite a lot of different methods for doing discovery and it supports a lot of different types of hardware as well."
"The solution has some very good relational capabilities that show us how certain devices relate to each other and how some of our environment actually works together."
"Device42 has everything in one place and links it altogether. This helps when you need to figure out where things are going wrong, where things are happening, or how everything is linked together."
"The topology layout is the most valuable feature."
"The way the solution’s automatic IT asset discovery and inventory functionality works is you set up a discovery job, then you can schedule it to run. I schedule all of the runs daily at different times so nothing is interfering with anything else. It's nice to know that you can set up the scan, schedule it, and sit back. You can check them every day and make sure everything ran, making sure nothing had errors, then you're good to go. Anything new is going to automatically be discovered, which is nice. It takes some of the stress off because you don't have to know, "If this team opened new servers, we need make sure now it will automatically pick them up." It is one less thing to worry about. It gathers a lot of data points."
"I like ServiceNow CMDB's discovery tools. If you have discovery tools and the discovery tools are built around a philosophy of mapping, then we can implement a top-down architectural mapping of the elements in the upper structure and create your CI."
"It has helped in tracking hardware and software and reducing overall costs."
"It integrates with so many different things. ServiceNow CMDB assisted us in streamlining multiple processes."
"The product's most valuable feature is its ability to extract the details of organizational hardware and provide the latest setup updates."
"Portfolio management is very useful for us."
"The most valuable feature of ServiceNow CMDB is that it provides transparency and tracking of CI usage across multiple process owners or service owners."
"The initial setup isn't too complicated."
"The solution has a single database, architecture, and data model."
"It would be nice for the agent to have an installer versus a single file across multiple systems."
"Configuring rPDUs in the data center for Device42 required us to add multiple discovery jobs. The rPDUs were referred to the ISPDUs and daisy-chained. They would automatically assign a unique SMP port, but Device42 didn't allow SMP ranges, so we had to create a discovery job for each rPDU individually. We submitted a feature request to mitigate that."
"I would like to see API management as an additional feature in the tool's future versions. It will give more API security."
"The breadth and depth of the solution's discovery of IT asset information means the system does most of the work, but they need to work on improving the database discovery part, especially for Oracle Exadata."
"My biggest problem with the product is the upgrades. First, we have to do them manually and second, not this last time but the time before that, we actually had to build a new VM to deploy the solution again. We had to back it up and then restore it to the new version. That was inconvenient."
"If they could make it so their remote connector could do as much as 10,000 devices, that would be better."
"The product must provide AI features."
"Since I was focused on deploying connectors and getting all the servers to be scanned, one of the biggest pains was when a job would fail, then the output (logging) was poor. For example, "Why did it fail?" In these cases, you get a generic error. It doesn't point you in the right direction and tell you why you got the error, which is really annoying. There have been times I asked, "Is there somewhere I can see a better log as to why is this failing?" That would be a really nice improvement."
"When running large queries within the system, it does have a tendency to bog down the system. This is something that should be improved. I would also like to see the HAM Pro module beefed up a little bit and integrated better into the SAM Pro module, which seems to be pretty much on the roadmap. Its pricing is pretty complicated and always fluctuating. Its pricing should be improved."
"There are areas that could be improved, but that's a longer discussion. It all depends on what you are looking to do with it and then it becomes an issue of how do you configure the CMDB accordingly."
"The discovery process and service mapping could be improved."
"It depends on the implementation, but the out-of-the-box product tends to be fixed on the support people. From a linear standpoint, I would like to see a certain number of fields on a table and a related list to describe the support personnel."
"They can improve the mobile application and the TGO tool, which is a built-in tool for development and implementation. As a developer, it is very frustrating to configure or customize the mobile app. In my opinion, this part of the application needs full rework and re-engineering."
"You need to perform additional planning because their recommendation is not to add columns to the core tables."
"While ServiceNow CMDB is flexible and comprehensive, it's also difficult to implement and requires a lot of customization. In order to fully leverage ServiceNow CMDB, you need ServiceNow Discovery and some other ServiceNow solutions. It's expensive to purchase all of these. We're negotiating with ServiceNow, but we're thinking about replacing it with another CMDB solution."
"There could be room for enhancing customization capabilities."
Device42 is ranked 2nd in Configuration Management Databases with 25 reviews while ServiceNow CMDB is ranked 1st in Configuration Management Databases with 31 reviews. Device42 is rated 8.4, while ServiceNow CMDB is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Device42 writes "Good reporting and discovery capabilities, and helpful for understanding device dependencies and asset management". On the other hand, the top reviewer of ServiceNow CMDB writes "It has helped us consolidate information, improving reporting and visibility". Device42 is most compared with ServiceNow, Infoblox IPAM, JIRA Service Management, BMC Helix Discovery and NetBox.dev, whereas ServiceNow CMDB is most compared with BMC Atrium CMDB, OpenText Universal Discovery and Universal CMDB and IBM Tivoli CMDB. See our Device42 vs. ServiceNow CMDB report.
See our list of best Configuration Management Databases vendors.
We monitor all Configuration Management Databases 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.