ServiceNow and Jira Service Management: What’s the difference?

Service desks are the critical operating arms of a modern organisation's IT department. By providing a single point of contact (SPOC) between your IT branch and internal and external customers, they act as a critical driver for end-user satisfaction. An efficient service desk will ensure consistent productivity and help meet customer demands in a timely manner, while a subpar one will slow your business down and could lead to exasperation.

However, choosing a platform for service and support is a difficult task. Zeroing down on a specific solution involves careful evaluation of a range of long term impacts, and often requires more significant input from beyond just the IT team in a large organisation.

Here's a detailed comparison between ServiceNow and Jira Service Management, two industry-leading names among the crowd of IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions out there. This blog aims to help you evaluate and decide which ITSM solution is better suited for your organisation's specific needs.

ServiceNow was built from the ground up as a solution for IT service management based on Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) practices. It offers comprehensive ITIL capabilities with many modules specific to service desks: incident and problem, change, configuration management database, service level, service portfolio, service catalogue and request, social IT: chat and live. However, because it's so ITIL-focused, ServiceNow is a better fit for organisations that are big enough to have formal and structured ITIL procedures in place.

Jira Service Management is also a powerful ITIL-compliant solution. It comes with ITIL-approved configurations, issue types, and workflows and offers essential features out-of-box: excellent service level agreement, queues, request types, reports, workflow, permissions, roles, etc. And while Jira Service Management can be easily structured to support ITIL, it also offers more flexibility for teams that don't need it.

If you're looking for a more structured ITIL-focused solution, you may find that ServiceNow's enterprise service management platform leans more strictly towards the ITIL approach. If not, however, some of the structure and workflows may seem unnecessary or too cumbersome to manage.

ServiceNow primarily offers market-oriented solutions to large, enterprise IT organisations. A quick Google search reveals reviews about ServiceNow's annual packages starting around $10,000, which can be pretty expensive for small and medium organisations.

Furthermore, their licence costs can vary based on your industry, region, size, revenue, and of course, the chosen product & packages. This means a Healthcare company with the same size and revenue as a Food tech company might end up paying different prices even for the same modules.

Also, accessing their pricing tiers can be difficult. In order to get a quote from ServiceNow, you need to provide a full requirement download of your entire organisation and demo their solution.

On the other hand, Atlassian's Jira Service Management offers a much more transparent and upfront pricing model. They provide a per-user price point, and there's a plan for almost every situation – making it appealing for large and small-sized organisations. You have complete flexibility to pick the option that's best suited for your teams and not pay for functionality you don't intend to use.

Besides, estimating costs is relatively straightforward with Jira Service Management — you can make an informed decision without investing time in demoing products you might never purchase.