I think the comparison mostly stems from the legacy enterprise where badly configured tools are pushed top-down and workers are told to 'deal with it'. Either you'll be a developer mostly using JIRA or a non-developer mostly using ServiceNow, and if you're really unlucky in such an organisation you'll be using both.

Having a Service Desk that actually provides usable and composable tooling is a benefit for all. Having a random contractor "implement" ServiceNow because Gartner said so is a pain for all. This is of course a bit of opposing extremes, but the same applies to JIRA and AD and pretty much anything else. Hard-pushed bad implementation will ruin your workday.

Teams that are capable and allowed to self-steer and deviate from company policy if they come up with a good enough reason seems to be the sweet spot of attainable & realistic.

I have only ever seen servicenow used for… well, service requests. Reset my password, grant access, create this resource. Always administration, never product development.

I've seen it used for way more than that. Their sales (and customer support) people will gladly tell you it can, or soon will, do everything you may want it to do.

Well said. I have to deal with both of them in my current role, and while Jira is... not great, ServiceNow is next-level-clunky.

ServiceNow is just about the most user hostile software I know. I know that any request I make that ends up in SN will take 2-4 times as long and i will never be sure that anything is happening or that they person on the other actually knows what I want.

And try to get a straight answer on pricing from the ServiceNow rep…

The answer is "way more than is sensible, even factoring in how absurd pricing on crap like this has gotten."

We dropped SN a couple years back over this. They were charging us about 6-7x what we pay for Jira, and we still use the on-site enterprise version of Jira.

“Let’s have a kickoff, invite everyone in the company who may be interested, and white board out all the possible use cases. We have an exciting new pricing model that will greatly simplify pricing on your existing business. But I can’t tell you that price until after the kickoff.”

We have a few of those around as well. While they work fine, I don't really get why anyone would want to self-host JIRA or any COTS product like that anymore. Most instances now seem to be just a case of "our hosting company is fully responsible for it and it's pretty cheap and reliable" and until it starts failing or falling behind the cloud offering it'll probably stay like that.

Usually, if it isn't better from a staff-perspective or better for the customer, self-hosting or self-building is less likely to be the answer these days.

Self hosting is sometimes easier to do than to argue with data governance about putting the information out a system that is offprem. The additional precautions for HIPAA or PII data that may show up in the comments or attachments can problematic. There are far too many users of all stripes that copy and paste data that they have access to without doing a check on it to see if it really does belong there (and if it does belong in the issue, then applying appropriate permissions to the object).