ServiceNow vs Jira Service Management: Compare DevOps Tools

Management systems for DevOps have grown in popularity over the years as many organizations have brought together software developers, IT, and DevOps under one roof. Platforms such as Jira Service Management and ServiceNow allow companies to gain a competitive advantage and manage customer support requests (internal and external), among others, for a better outcome. We’ll compare two of the leading players in this space: ServiceNow and Jira Service Management, pitting the two tools against each other and determining which is better for your organization.

Jump to:
What is ServiceNow?
What is Jira Service Management?
ServiceNow and Jira Service Management feature comparison
Common Features of Jira vs ServiceNow
Choosing between ServiceNow and Jira Service Management

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What is ServiceNow?

ServiceNow is an enterprise-focused toolkit that provides a one-stop shop for organizations to manage their IT infrastructures, development operations, hardware and software procurement, internal and external customer management, and more. It is extensible through APIs and third-party integrations with other tools your organization may integrate or use for other operational tasks.

What is Jira Service Management?

Jira Service Management is a tool that adds functionality to an existing Jira installation. This includes tracking customer requests and issues, configuration management, change management, and knowledge management for public or internal customers. Since Jira Service Management is built on top of Jira, it integrates well for organizations already using other Atlassian products and services, but can also integrate with third-party tools to optimize DevOps workflows.

ServiceNow and Jira Service Management feature comparison

Common Features of Jira vs ServiceNow

Collaboration

If you already use Atlassian products, the Jira Service Management solution will feel right at home and integrate seamlessly into existing pipelines for developer management and ticketing. Incidents can easily be assigned to developers for further investigation without leaving the Atlassian ecosystem. However, if you use a ticketing system other than Jira, you rely on third-party integrations to enable the collaboration flow.

Although ServiceNow takes care of IT ticketing, it is less involved in ticketing at the developer level, so collaboration between IT/DevOps and development teams will be done with third-party integrations with GitHub Issues, Jira or d other ticketing systems your organization may use.

Where Atlassian beats ServiceNow is by providing multiple tools that allow an organization to easily collaborate, from code-level ticketing to customer-level ticketing, and everything in between.

Audit, governance and compliance

Both Jira and ServiceNow allow the use of audit logs for changes made and the ability to block specific deployments until a specified number of approvers have been reached. The only difference is that while these features are included for ServiceNow, Jira only offers some of these features on certain plans.

ServiceNow comes ahead of Jira as it includes automated data collection and connections between multiple systems to ensure all governance information is completed before deployments can take place, and all of these features are included out of the box.

Purchasing management and monitoring

Asset provisioning and tracking is a critical IT management task. Jira Service Management only enables IT asset tracking and does not offer in-app purchase management systems or self-service purchases. Jira allows general service requests that can be used for provisioning, asset management, and tracking, complete with serial number and warranty expiration information.

ServiceNow has a much more comprehensive procurement system allowing organizations to create service catalogs, create procurement workflows, create and manage procurement orders and purchase orders, as well as a stream of received assets that can integrate with storage rooms when receiving assets from shipments.

In procurement, ServiceNow beats Jira, enabling comprehensive procurement management, order tracking, and customizable workflows.

HR integration and onboarding

Jira has features that can enable staff onboarding, leaving, and change requests, as well as facilities management, legal, and customer service templates that can be used to initiate tickets for IT and DevOps employees to to fill. Integrations can be added to extend the functionality of these tickets or even automate certain tasks.

ServiceNow can integrate with supported HR systems to enable service onboarding, offboarding, background check, e-signature, and tax form functionality; however, this requires that you are using one of the supported platforms or have third-party system integration.

Jira is ahead of the game in this regard as it has built-in support for these task templates and can integrate with other platforms, while ServiceNow relies on integrations with HR partners to HR-related tasks.

Community and customer orientation

Both Jira and ServiceNow offer the ability to create knowledge bases that can facilitate self-service for internal and external customers, troubleshooting steps, and general Q&As.

ServiceNow has processes for creating, categorizing, reviewing, and approving items. It integrates with Microsoft Word for authoring and provides knowledge base analytics so you can find out which issues your users are having the most difficulty with.

Jira’s knowledge base is powered by Confluence, another documentation tool offered by Atlassian, which offers its own integrations that can enable extensibility through third-party platforms and services.

Integrations and Automation

Both Jira and ServiceNow have API integrations that allow custom enterprise applications to integrate with both systems and perform tasks or deep integration with other services used by the organization, including , but not limited to, CI/CD, HR systems, legal systems, electronic signature systems and more.

Choosing between ServiceNow and Jira Service Management

ServiceNow has solutions for more business-oriented organizations, and the user interface shows that too. Many users may find the ServiceNow system confusing or difficult to navigate and may require training for setup and use. However, ServiceNow provides in-depth solutions not found on other platforms and detailed documentation to help your organization integrate it into various workflows.

Jira Service Management is more user-friendly than ServiceNow and integrates with Jira, the leading developer ticketing solution, which many organizations already use in their day-to-day software development. Business users may already be familiar with how this system works, so it may require less training compared to ServiceNow.

If your organization is smaller and already uses Atlassian products for daily operations, Jira Service Manager is the best solution as it already integrates with existing solutions and can provide additional built-in collaboration.

Larger organizations, especially enterprises and those that need more auditing, legal, and HR functionality, will want to check out ServiceNow’s offering. It has a complete solution that, although training may be required, will provide your organization with more comprehensive DevOps tools.