ServiceNow vs. Freshservice: 2026 Comparison

Freshservice and ServiceNow both offer users a good level of customization in their ticket management features. In the case of Freshservice, this proves especially useful to help staff tailor views, statuses, and workflows to better manage ongoing incidents and efficiently prioritize tickets. 

This is facilitated by tools that allow support teams to collaborate more easily via shared inboxes and discuss open tickets with discreet threads and private notes. Artificial intelligence (AI) features can also help teams to prioritize incoming tickets and provide important context to support agents about the issue, and whether it’s connected to other ongoing incidents. 

ServiceNow users find the ability to customize and integrate other tools practical to enhance collaboration and escalation of client issues. Additionally, it offers custom dashboards to give better visibility of performance, and users highlight positive aspects such as its ability to integrate with alerting tools and the ability to automate ticketing processes.

Additionally, like Freshservice, ServiceNow provides essential tools to unify the experience of support teams to improve collaboration. However, by comparison, it puts more emphasis on features to automate support responses using AI.

However, users of both platforms highlight issues with this feature, such as a confusing user experience in Freshservice when managing old project codes. Similarly, difficulties managing a steep learning curve with the feature within ServiceNow are also worth considering before adoption.

Freshservice and ServiceNow both possess intuitive alert and notification systems that can keep staff informed of new and priority tickets and tasks. Overall, both receive mostly positive feedback for their ability to keep users up to date with important incidents.

Freshservice users comment positively on the flexibility and ability to integrate tools within the system to enhance notifications, such as Slack and Microsoft Teams. They also mention the ability to generate alerts through a multitude of channels, including webhooks and custom email addresses, positively. These, in turn, help users effectively parse and manage incoming communications.

In the case of ServiceNow, users comment favorably on the platform's ability to use template management to manage alerts for tasks such as ticket creation, updates, and closures. Additionally, they highlight the ability to notify on-call staff with text messages and automate processes as big advantages.

However, there are some areas where users find that alerts and notification features fall short for both platforms. Freshservice users say that, when improperly managed, notifications can overwhelm staff with too many non-essential updates. ServiceNow users don’t experience this issue as much, instead noting concerns with its alerting system’s complexity and extra costs incurred when using mobile app alerts.

Users of both platforms are broadly positive about the inclusion of inventory management features, finding them suitably equipped to oversee assets effectively. 

Freshservice users highlight benefits such as the ability to enable inventory to become a full Configuration Management Database (CMDB) tool. They also value the capacity to assign inventory to users and link it with service desk tickets, which provides faster access to specifications and warranty information.

For ServiceNow users, elements such as dynamic updates and single-click interactions make its inventory management process relatively easy to use. They also note the ability to integrate additional tools as helpful in managing this process.

However, as is the case for other features in ServiceNow’s software, users highlight difficult setup processes. This, in turn, means that users may not utilize the full potential of its in-built inventory management features. For Freshservice users, limitations are mentioned with its lack of certain automations, such as binding statuses to other fields, or the inability to get a full view of all items assigned to a requester.