The 12 best ServiceNow competitors and alternatives in 2026, by what they replace

TL;DR

• Decide what you’re replacing before you compare prices. Class 1 tools replace the full estate, and class 2 tools replace the queue and the catalog. Class 3 replaces nothing: Computer, by DevRev, and Zendesk work alongside what you keep.
• On nine of the 12, the AI you’re shopping for, the agent that answers the employee, sits above the entry plan. Halo, SysAid, and Zendesk put it in the entry plan.
• Two publish no list price for any paid plan: ServiceNow and Ivanti. Several more price the plan but not the resolving agent, so no complete like-for-like comparison is possible from public pages.
• Some of you should stay on ServiceNow, and the first table says who.

Which part of ServiceNow are you replacing?

Start with what you’re replacing, then check where the resolving agent’s price sits.

Many teams shopping for a ServiceNow alternative are trying to leave a renewal, and the AI that came bundled with it. As one commenter put it in r/servicenow in August 2026, “It’s not a choice now as you will be forced to buy their AI offerings in the new SKUs as they are bundled.” The trap is signing with a vendor that puts the agent you wanted two tiers above the plan you budgeted for. Computer comes first, as our pick for teams keeping ServiceNow, and ServiceNow comes second, as the baseline you price everything else against.

What are ServiceNow competitors?

ServiceNow competitors are IT service management (ITSM) tools that teams move to instead of ServiceNow. Teams switch when ServiceNow’s cost, complexity, or setup work outgrows what they need. Few replace the whole estate. Most cover the ticket queue, the service catalog, and some change and asset management, and leave the rest of ServiceNow’s platform behind.

Why teams leave ServiceNow in 2026

Four reasons come up again and again, and only one of them is about the software.

The renewal arrives with AI attached

ServiceNow now bundles AI into every ITSM package. Its pricing page lists Now Assist and Platform AI, plus Moveworks, the AI assistant platform ServiceNow bought in December 2025, in the Foundation, Advanced, and Prime packages. If finance approved a ticketing tool and the renewal quotes a platform, that’s where most of these searches start.

Nobody can tell you what it costs

ServiceNow publishes no list price. Its pricing page offers a “Get Custom Quote” button and nothing else, so every comparison starts with a sales call.

The platform needs people you didn’t hire

ServiceNow rewards teams that staff it well. Admins, partners, and training are a running cost that never appears on the quote you’re comparing.

You bought a platform and used a queue

Did ServiceNow only ever replace your ticketing tool? Then the problem may be the fit, not the software.

Who should stay on ServiceNow

Stay if an auditor samples your change records. Stay if other systems depend on your populated configuration management database (CMDB), and if you have people whose job is the platform. ServiceNow’s Foundation package includes asset management and a CMDB before you add anything.

Stay, too, if you use it as a platform and not just a queue. A practitioner in a November 2025 thread argued it better than ServiceNow’s own marketing does: “It is a workflow/process management tool. Tickets are one kind of workflow.” The same commenter’s conclusion rules some buyers out, and we agree: “If all you want is a simple ticketing tool, then this is overkill and too expensive.”

How to evaluate a ServiceNow alternative

Six questions. The first three decide the shortlist, and the last three decide the contract.

What does it replace?

Sort every candidate into a class before comparing a price. Class 1 replaces the full estate, “change,” problem, and configuration management included. Class 2 replaces the queue and the catalog. Class 3 replaces nothing and works alongside what you keep.

Does change management come in the plan you’d buy?

Often not. ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, Freshservice, ManageEngine, and TOPdesk sell “change” above the entry plan. SolarWinds includes change requests and approvals in its $39 entry plan. We didn’t find a change module on Zendesk’s or Atera’s public pages, so ask them, and Computer has none.

Is there a CMDB, and is it in the entry plan?

SolarWinds, TOPdesk, SysAid, Halo, Ivanti, and ServiceNow put one in their entry tier. Jira Service Management ships it from Standard, its first paid plan, and Freshservice and ManageEngine put it in a higher plan.

At which tier does the resolving agent switch on, and what does that tier cost?

This is the question that decides whether the move saves anything. Get the tier, its price, and the metered rate above any allowance in writing.

What can the AI write to?

An agent that drafts a reply saves your agent some typing. An agent that resets the password, provisions the access, and closes the record saves the ticket. Different products share one word, and few pricing pages tell them apart. Amar Gautam, Head of DevRev Labs, named the problem underneath in a post on employee self-service:

The ticket “was meant to coordinate humans: capture a request, put it in a queue, assign it to someone, track it until it’s closed.” – Amar Gautam, Head of DevRev Labs

Most of your queue doesn’t need coordinating.

Can you see a price without a sales call?

Two of these 12 publish no list price at all, and more publish a plan price without pricing the resolving agent. That isn’t a dealbreaker, but it tells you how long procurement takes.

How we priced the AI, and what we couldn’t price

This is desk research: we read each vendor’s own pricing pages and documentation on Monday, September 21, and Tuesday, September 22, 2026, re-read the pricing pages on Tuesday, September 29, and re-read Atlassian’s on Friday, October 9. We didn’t run trials. Prices are as of those reads. TOPdesk and Halo show pounds by default, so we lead with the US-dollar price each shows with US dollars selected and keep the pound figure beside it. We don’t add up the AI cost, because that would need a usage volume nobody publishes.

Where a cell reads “not published,” we didn’t find it on the vendor’s public pages, which doesn’t mean the product lacks it: ask the vendor. The Reddit quotes in some entries are single practitioners’ accounts, linked and dated. Where no Reddit conversations exist about a product, we left those blank. No vendor publishes a realistic time to a first live agent, so the last column carries what they do publish, which is trial length and whether you can self-serve.

ServiceNow competitors at a glance

The 12 ServiceNow competitors and alternatives, one by one

1. Computer, by DevRev – for teams keeping ServiceNow and adding an agent

Computer isn’t a ServiceNow replacement or an ITSM suite: we don’t publish a CMDB, asset discovery, change management, problem management, or ITIL (formerly the IT Infrastructure Library) coverage. It works alongside the estate you keep, and our service desk automation page describes the job as creating tickets in ServiceNow.

Three parts do that work, and they’re worth separating. ServiceNow AirSync syncs tasks, incidents, comments, and attachments between ServiceNow and DevRev, in one direction or both, on a periodic schedule that defaults to hourly. Employees ask in Slack, in Computer, or in another surface of their choice, according to the same page.

Agent Studio skills, which are tools, natural-language skills, and workflows, are what take action. They run with the permissions of the person the agent acts for. Each skill’s “Needs Approval” setting is off by default, and when you switch it on, the agent asks for confirmation before it runs that skill.

This DevRev video has our Co-Founder and CEO, Dheeraj Pandey, on why employees shouldn’t wait on people for routine requests, and where people still bring judgment to the complex ones.

Best for – IT teams keeping ServiceNow that want an agent acting in the systems around it.

Pricing

A free Mini tier, then Pro and Max. Pro is listed at $30 a month on computer.io, with a discount for annual billing. It includes 2,000 credits a month per user, pooled across your team. Pro and Max both read “Contact us” on our devrev.ai pricing page. We price in consumption credits, so the bill follows the work Computer does.

Where the AI turns on

Above the free tier. Agent Studio, where you build and deploy agents, comes with Pro on devrev.ai, and Pro and Max both read “Contact us” there, so ask us for a quote sized to the requests you want it to handle.

Limitations

• No CMDB, asset discovery, IT asset management (ITAM), change management, or problem management module.
• Our help center lists internal, employee-facing Agent Studio agents as “coming soon” as of October 2026, so confirm which IT requests your plan covers today.
• ServiceNow AirSync’s setup requires ServiceNow’s Customer Service Management plugin, so check that first.
• We don’t yet publish a named IT service desk reference customer.

Verdict: Our overall pick for teams keeping ServiceNow. Buy it if the queue in front of ServiceNow is the problem and you want an agent that acts in the systems around it. Skip it if you need change management or a CMDB, where Halo gives you both in one license.

Keeping ServiceNow? Book a demo of Computer and bring the request your team works by hand most often.

2. ServiceNow – the estate you measure everything else against

ServiceNow is here as the ruler, not a target. Its three ITSM packages stack. Foundation carries incident management, the service catalog, asset management, and the CMDB. Advanced adds change and problem management, and Prime adds the AI that works on its own.

Moveworks now ships inside those packages, which is why this list doesn’t treat it as a way around ServiceNow and leans toward independent vendors instead.

Best for – Regulated estates running full ITIL with a populated CMDB, big enough to justify dedicated platform staff. That tends to mean hundreds of fulfillers and thousands of employees.

Pricing

Not published. The pricing page offers a “Get Custom Quote” button and no list price anywhere. Per-seat ServiceNow figures you see online are reconstructions, so you won’t find one here.

Where the AI turns on

Everywhere and nowhere. Now Assist and Moveworks run across all three packages at different levels, but the L1 Service Desk AI Specialist, the agent that “is assigned incidents and resolves them without human intervention,” is Prime only. ServiceNow holds a FedRAMP High Baseline Provisional Authority to Operate (P-ATO) for its Government Community Cloud, yet its docs list some AI features as unavailable in FedRAMP, Defense Department Impact Level 5 (IL5), Australia’s Information Security Registered Assessors Program (IRAP), and self-hosted instances. If you answer to a regulator, check which AI you’d get.

Limitations

• No published price for any package, at any size.
• Change and problem management aren’t in the entry package.
• The AI that resolves tickets on its own requires the top package.

What Reddit says

Even in the r/servicenow thread “Just an expensive ticketing tool,” practitioners defending ServiceNow grant the cheaper end of the market its place:

“There are lower cost tools that do specific things like ticketing and requests for cheaper and they are perfectly fine.”

u/Furyio. r/servicenow, November 2025 ↗

Verdict: Stay if you run the platform and an auditor checks your change records. Leave if you bought a platform and use a queue, and start with ManageEngine, which prints a price.

3. Freshservice – ITIL coverage without a professional-services program

Freshservice does the same jobs as ServiceNow without the implementation program. Change management comes with a Change Advisory Board, change calendars, and business-impact assessment, and you configure all of it yourself. Then you reach the AI, and the bill changes shape.

Best for – IT teams of about 10 to 100 agents that want ITIL processes without hiring a platform specialist.

Pricing

$19 Starter, $49 Growth, and $99 Pro per agent a month, billed once a year. Enterprise is custom.

Where the AI turns on

The entry price and the resolving agent sit far apart. Freddy AI Copilot is an add-on at $29 per agent a month, on Pro and Enterprise only, so the assistant costs $128 a seat on Pro. The Freddy AI Agent (Classic) resolves queries end to end in 40-plus languages, and it’s Enterprise only, with no published price.

Limitations

• The resolving AI agent requires Enterprise, which is quote-only.
• Change and problem management start at Pro, at $99 a seat.
• Plans include 1,200 to 12,000 Model Context Protocol (MCP) actions a year, then charge $15 per 1,000.

What Reddit says

The switching stories here are warm, which is rarer than it sounds. This one came from a thread about leaving ServiceNow:

“Left ServiceNow for Freshservice last year – best decision ever. Way cheaper, easier to use, and our team likes it.”

u/Dependent_Radio_43. r/sysadmin, July 2025 ↗

Verdict: Buy it for ITIL processes you configure yourself, and price Pro plus the $29 Copilot as your real starting number. Skip it if the autonomous agent is why you’re moving. That’s an Enterprise conversation, and SysAid includes its agents at $89.

4. Ivanti Neurons for ITSM – a vendor that prints its own AI restrictions on the product page

Ivanti carries incident, problem, change, and configuration management in its base ITSM tier, according to its plans datasheet. It also prints its own AI restrictions on its product page, as ServiceNow does in its docs.

Best for – Organizations that want service and endpoint management from one supplier. You need ITIL know-how in-house already.

Pricing

Not published. Ivanti quotes, and its plans datasheet describes packages without prices.

Where the AI turns on

Analyst AI Assist is in every tier, and the Self-Service AI Agent comes with enterprise service management (ESM) or as an add-on. The restriction is Ivanti’s own, from its product page: “AI capabilities require Ivanti ITSM 2024.2 or later on SaaS deployments. AI capabilities are currently not available for FedRamp.”

Limitations

• No published price at any tier, so you can’t check a figure before a sales call.
• No AI on FedRAMP deployments, and a version floor on SaaS.

What Reddit says

Practitioners describe it as capable and cheaper than ServiceNow:

“We use Ivanti Neurons for ITSM/ITAM and it does what we need without the price tag of ServiceNow.”

u/Few-Celebration-5463. r/sysadmin, March 2025 ↗

Verdict: Buy it for one vendor across service and endpoint management. Skip it if published pricing is what you’re running toward.

5. ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus – the lowest published paid entry price here

ManageEngine prints numbers, which on this page counts as a personality trait. Standard is free for up to five technicians, and the paid editions are priced on the page. Here the win is unqualified: if a published price at real team sizes decides your shortlist, ManageEngine wins.

Best for – Cost-led IT teams of 10 to 200 technicians that will read an edition table with care.

Pricing

$13, $27, and $67 per technician a month on Cloud, billed once a year. Below Enterprise, problem management is a $1,595-a-year add-on, and change and release management costs $3,195.

Where the AI turns on

ManageEngine’s AI FAQ says its AI features are “available at no additional cost to all SDP Cloud users, subject to the capabilities offered in their subscription plan.” The agents are a separate article and a separate answer. Its Zia Agents FAQ says they’re Enterprise only, and it describes the large language model (LLM) billing this way: “free to use. You only pay for the LLM usage, which is measured in credits.” ManageEngine doesn’t print the credit price on either page, so the agent is free and the tokens aren’t.

Limitations

• Pricing the editions and add-ons right takes real work.
• On-premises misses several Cloud predictions, including change risk.
• Zia Agents are Enterprise only, and their LLM usage meters in credits ManageEngine doesn’t price.

What Reddit says

This commenter’s quote landed far below ServiceNow’s:

“For us, the quote from ManageEngine came in at 1/10th of ServiceNow.”

u/Steve----O. r/ITManagers, December 2025 ↗

Verdict: Buy it when a defensible published price is the brief, and go straight to Cloud Enterprise for the agents. Skip it if you want one price with everything in it. That’s Halo.

6. SolarWinds Service Desk – every tier priced, and no AI in the first

SolarWinds, which the private equity firm Turn/River Capital has owned since April 2025, earns its place because its pricing is easy to read. Essentials includes incident, problem, and release management, change requests, and a CMDB, which is a lot of ITSM for $39. It includes no AI. Category recommendations, smart suggestions, the virtual agent, and AI resolution summaries start at Advanced, and Premier adds the rest of the generative set.

Best for – IT teams of 10 to 150 technicians that want ITSM structure at a low price. They can live without AI, or will pay for it by choice.

Pricing

$39 Essentials, $99 Advanced, and $124 Premier per technician a month, billed once a year. Asset pricing is on request, and there’s a 30-day free trial.

Where the AI turns on

At Advanced, $99, which is more than 2.5 times the entry price. That multiple is our math on SolarWinds’ own two published figures, and it shows plainly what “AI included” costs.

Limitations

• No AI of any kind in the entry plan.
• SaaS only; the on-premises product is the separate Web Help Desk.
• Change templates and workflows, and audit history, need Advanced.

What Reddit says

Practitioners rate the setup and talk about cost per technician per year:

“Licensed per tech, very easy to set up your workflow. The cost for us is about 1k/tech/year.”

u/armonde. r/sysadmin, June 2026 ↗

Verdict: Buy Essentials for ITSM structure at a low published price, treating AI as optional. Skip it if the AI is why you’re moving, because you land at $99 and SysAid includes its agents at $89.

7. TOPdesk – one desk for every department, with the AI split in two

TOPdesk sells one service desk that HR and facilities use alongside IT. It also prices assets flat, whether you track 50 or 50,000.

Best for – Shared services across IT, HR, and facilities, at about 20 to 50 agents.

Pricing

$64, $91, and $128 per agent a month at 30 agents with US dollars selected, or £51, £72, and £101 in pounds. Per-agent prices fall as the count rises, and above 50 agents, TOPdesk suggests you get in touch.

Where the AI turns on

TOPdesk’s AI splits across its two upgrades. Engaged adds categorization, knowledge generation, and AI Search. Excellent adds summarization, the writing and answer assistants, and translation. TOPdesk Robin, announced on Thursday, September 17, 2026, is listed on the Excellent card at $128 (£101).

Robin works for both sides. It “sits inside your incident card” for operators, and employees can “ask TOPdesk Robin a question in plain language.” TOPdesk tells Excellent customers Robin “has just started work,” while the launch post frames it as “what’s coming to you this October,” so check whether it’s live on your tenant.

Limitations

• The older Ebbot virtual agent is an add-on for Engaged and Excellent, with no published price.
• Change and problem management aren’t in the entry plan.
• Above 50 agents there’s no published price.

Verdict: Buy it for shared services with a predictable asset bill. Skip it under 20 agents with only IT to serve, where SysAid puts change, problem management, and AI agents in one published plan.

8. Halo (formerly HaloITSM) – one license, with the AI and no meter

Halo sells one tier: “No tiers, no bolt-ons, no locked-away features.” Incident, problem, change, the CMDB, asset management, and AI come in every license. On a page about AI gates, that makes Halo the control group.

Best for – Teams of about 10 to 50 agents that want every feature on and will put in the setup time.

Pricing

$99 per agent a month at 10 agents with the United States region selected. In the UK region the page shows by default, it’s £69, which the calculator totals at £690 a month and £8,280 a year. Onboarding packages “are required with purchase at a bespoke cost depending on scope,” so your first-year number is higher than the calculator suggests.

Where the AI turns on

At the entry price, because there’s no other price: “Halo AI is included as part of the base licence, with no additional Halo consumption-based pricing.” It’s the one row here with no gate and no meter to describe.

Limitations

• The pricing calculator shows GBP by default, and the $99 US figure appears only once you switch the region.
• Configuration burden is real, and it lands on you.
• You must buy an onboarding package, at a cost Halo quotes case by case.

What Reddit says

A sysadmin shortlisting Halo, InvGate, and Freshservice in November 2025 says Halo’s one quote covered the AI that Freshservice sells as an add-on:

“Halo quoted us a bit more than the FreshService Pro plan, but they include everything in that cost and don’t split into multiple pricing tiers, including all the AI, chat bot, etc., that would be an add-on with FreshService.”

u/El_Demente. r/sysadmin, November 2025 ↗

Verdict: Buy it for every feature in one license, if you have someone to set it up. Skip it if you want to start without a paid onboarding package, where Freshservice is self-serve.

9. SysAid – change, a CMDB, and AI agents in one $89 plan

SysAid’s Professional plan bundles request, incident, change, and problem management with asset management and a CMDB. It costs $89 per agent a month, with 250 managed assets and AI in the box.

Best for – Lean IT teams under about 20 agents wanting the full process set without an edition matrix.

Pricing

$89 per agent a month for Professional. Enterprise is custom and starts at 20 agents. SysAid doesn’t state the billing term, so ask.

Where the AI turns on

At the entry paid plan. SysAid advertises “No usage caps, no continuous approvals, no surprise invoices,” then qualifies it with a fair-usage policy “to prevent excessive or unreasonable use.” That’s more honest than most metering, and still a limit whose number you can’t see.

Limitations

• Fair usage qualifies the no-caps claim, and SysAid doesn’t publish the threshold.
• Tailor-made AI agents require Enterprise, which is quote-only.
• Two years of data retention on Professional, against longer terms elsewhere.

Verdict: Buy it for the full process set at one published price under 20 agents. Skip it if you want agents you build yourself. That’s an Enterprise conversation.

10. Atera – per-technician pricing for small IT teams, and a queue, not an estate

Atera bundles remote monitoring, patch management, and a help desk into one pay-per-technician price with unlimited endpoints. For a small team running a lot of devices, that’s a different deal. Be clear about what it is not: its plan cards and feature comparison list no change management, problem management, or CMDB.

Best for – IT departments and managed service providers (MSPs) under about 20 technicians with a high device-to-technician ratio.

Pricing

$149 Professional, $189 Expert, and $219 Master per technician a month, billed once a year, or $169, $229, and $269 month to month. Network Discovery is a $29-per-technician add-on, and there’s a 30-day trial.

Where the AI turns on

The Copilot is in every plan, which looks like a clean answer until you go looking for the agent. Atera publishes no price for Robin, its autonomous agent, and the only route on the pricing page is “Request a demo.” The same page claims Robin will “Resolve 92% of technical issues autonomously.” That’s Atera’s number, and we can’t check it.

Limitations

• We didn’t find change management, problem management, or a CMDB on its pricing page, so ask.
• Robin, the autonomous agent, has no published price.
• Network Discovery costs $29 a technician on every plan below Enterprise.

What Reddit says

The most useful Atera thread is a customer working out why the bill went up, and the answer is the AI:

“We have been using them since the beginning of 2023. They just hit us with a 60% price increase.” and, on what drove it, “It is all around their Copilot offering, which is OK at best.”

r/msp, February 2025 ↗

Verdict: Buy it as a small team managing many devices on one per-technician bill. Skip it if you need change management or a CMDB, which SysAid includes at $89.

11. Jira Service Management – the full-estate move for teams whose changes start in a repo

If your engineers already live in Jira, a change request can start in a pull request and end in a change record, all on one platform. Atlassian sells Jira Service Management only inside its Service Collection bundle, free for three agents.

Best for – IT teams of about 10 fulfillers or more, inside engineering-led companies that already run Jira.

Pricing

$25 per agent a month on Standard and $57.30 on Premium for one to 15 agents, billed monthly, and the rate falls as the count rises, so 75 agents average $20 and $51.42. Enterprise is annual and quoted.

Where the AI turns on

Rovo starts on Standard, with 250 credits a month for each Atlassian user on Standard and 700 on Premium. Overage billing at $0.01 a credit starts on Thursday, December 3, 2026. The virtual service agent, the part that answers employees, is Premium and Enterprise. So is change management, which moved up a tier in October 2024, so two of the three things you came for sit on the same higher plan.

Limitations

• Change, problem, and major incident management are Premium and above.
• Rovo’s credits meter, and the overage rate starts billing in December 2026.
• Cloud only; Data Center closed to new customers in March 2026.

What Reddit says

Practitioners like this product and distrust its pricing, often in the same comment:

“If, and only if, you’re already invested in the Atlassian ecosystem then Jira Service Management is fantastic.” and “Atlassian’s licensing model almost feels predatory at times.”

r/sysadmin, June 2025 ↗

Verdict: Buy it if Jira is already your system of record. Budget for Premium from day one, because that’s where the product you’re picturing lives.

12. Zendesk – employee service beside the customer service you already run

If Zendesk already runs your customer support, its Employee Service Suite puts internal IT on the same platform. It’s a good ticketing product, not an ITSM suite, and Zendesk doesn’t pretend otherwise.

Best for – Organizations already on Zendesk that want employee service without a second vendor.

Pricing

$29 Team, $59 Growth, and $99 Professional per agent a month, paid once a year. Enterprise goes through sales.

Where the AI turns on

Every plan, metered by outcome instead of by tier. Zendesk charges $1.50 committed or $2.00 pay-as-you-go per resolution above a small allowance, and Copilot is a separate $50-per-agent add-on.

Limitations

• We didn’t find a CMDB or a native change management module on its pricing page; its help center offers a do-it-yourself recipe for change.
• AI resolutions bill per resolution above a small included allowance.
• Audit logs are Enterprise only.

What Reddit says

Answering a July 2025 r/Zendesk thread on automated-resolution pricing, one Zendesk customer says the billing definition is why they never deployed the AI agents:

“The biggest sticking point for me was the ‘resolution’ definition.”

u/Brosenjew. r/Zendesk, July 2025 ↗

Verdict: Buy it if Zendesk is already your support platform and employee service is the gap. Skip it if you need change management, where SolarWinds gives you change requests at $39.

What the resolving agent costs, vendor by vendor

We couldn’t complete a like-for-like price comparison of this list from public pages, and neither can anyone else.

One number here is hard, so start with it: two publish no list price for any paid plan at all: ServiceNow and Ivanti.

The others need a test. Ours is the price of the agent that answers the employee, not the assistant that helps the operator, because only one of those empties a queue.

On that test, four publish a plan price and not the agent’s. Atera prints $149, $189, and $219, then routes Robin to a demo. Freshservice puts its conversational agent in a custom-priced Enterprise tier, and ManageEngine gives you Zia Agents on a $67 plan and meters the tokens in credits it doesn’t price. We list Pro at $30 a month on computer.io, and our devrev.ai page puts Agent Studio in Pro and Max, which read “Contact us.”

Six publish the agent’s price: SysAid at $89, Halo in one license, Zendesk at $1.50 to $2.00 per automated resolution, Jira Service Management with its virtual service agent in Premium, SolarWinds with its virtual agent at $99, and TOPdesk, whose Robin answers employees from the $128 (£101) tier. Only SysAid, Halo, and Zendesk put the agent in the entry plan. If a comparison shows you a complete price column, ask where each cell came from: a conversation, an estimate, or an old quote.

Michael Machado, our CVP of Product and Brand, put the distinction this way in our Agent Studio post:

“Building an agent that impresses in a demo is relatively easy. Building one that can be trusted with customer interactions, business processes, and enterprise data is a very different problem.” – Michael Machado, our CVP of Product and Brand

A pricing page can’t show you the second problem, so ask each vendor on your shortlist what its agent is allowed to change, and who approves it.

What it costs to leave, and what leaving doesn’t buy you

The software is the cheap part. Migration is where ServiceNow exits go wrong, and someone who did one describes it best:

“It wasn’t easy. Everything had to be redone. We could not bring forward any historical data.”

u/tmanXX. r/sysadmin, February 2025 ↗

Three things almost never come across:

• Your history, because ticket schemas don’t line up.
• Your CMDB relationships, because rebuilding them is a re-implementation, not an export.
• Your customizations. This is often the largest cost, and it never reaches the business case.

Sequence the move to protect the audit evidence. Run both for a quarter, move incident and request first, and move change management last, because change is what an auditor samples.

Watch the meter as well as the tier

Tier gates are visible: you can see $39 next to $99 and decide. Meters price what you can’t forecast. Atlassian starts billing $0.01 per Rovo credit above the allowance in December 2026, Zendesk already bills $1.50 to $2.00 per automated resolution, and Freshservice meters MCP actions. In our read, the tier gate is still the bigger number on most of these contracts as of October 2026, and the meter is the line to watch at the next renewal.

Ask every vendor on your shortlist one question, and get the answer in the contract: what happens to the bill when the AI works better than we expected?

If the estate is fine and only the queue hurts, you don’t need a migration plan. Bring your ten most common IT requests to a demo, and we’ll show you which ones Computer can act on in the systems you keep.

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