In short:
- Six criteria genuinely separate ITSM platforms, and functional richness is not among them.
- On core processes, incident, request and change, every serious platform performs alike.
- The billing unit, technician or end user, weighs more on five-year cost than any single feature.
- The service catalogue is written before the consultation, not after: it is what makes demos comparable.
What to settle before looking at any tool
Most tenders start with a feature grid sent to vendors. That is the reverse of the order that produces a good decision. Until scope is written down, every vendor answers on its own ground and the answers are not comparable.
The real scope
Three questions frame it: how many departments will eventually be served, is asset management in scope, and who will operate the platform three years from now. The answers determine half the criteria below. Scoping is covered in our article on the fundamentals of Enterprise Service Management.
The six criteria that decide
| Criterion | What to check | Why it decides |
|---|---|---|
| Asset management | Built in or a separate module | A separate component forces permanent data reconciliation |
| Multiple catalogues | Autonomous publishing per department | Precondition for any extension beyond IT |
| Billing unit | Per technician or per end user | Major gap in five-year cost |
| Rights model | Partitioning of ticket content | Without it, HR and legal use cases are ruled out |
| Data migration | Import format, history, attachments | Lost history resets every indicator to zero |
| Hosting | SaaS, managed or on premises | Determines who carries upgrades and backup |
The fourth is the one most often discovered too late. A platform unable to hide ticket content from unrelated teams will never serve human resources, whatever its other qualities. The topic is developed in our comparison of ESM and ITSM.
The criteria that decide nothing
- Feature count. Every serious platform handles an incident, a request and a change
- Advertised ITIL compliance. The framework does not certify software, only people and management systems
- The demo. It is built around cases that work well, which is fair enough, but it says nothing about yours
How to run the comparison
- Write the catalogue of the ten most frequent requests, with their real approval paths
- Have each vendor replay those ten cases in their own tool, unrehearsed
- Cost it over five years, licences, hosting, integration and operations included
The third step holds surprises in both directions. A platform billed per technician can stay cheaper than an apparently free solution that is poorly tooled, and the reverse is just as true. The same full-cost reasoning applies to IT inventory, whose collection is often billed separately.
Frequently asked questions
How do you choose an ITSM platform?
The decision rests on six criteria: native asset management, support for several partitioned service catalogues, the licence billing unit, the granularity of the rights model, migration of existing data, and hosting mode. On core processes, incident, request and change, functional gaps between serious platforms are too small to decide anything. The length of a feature list is therefore not a selection criterion.
Should you choose the tool before or after writing your service catalogue?
After. A written catalogue lets you test platforms against real cases rather than rehearsed demos, and it immediately exposes the limits of the rights model.
How many platforms should be shortlisted?
Three is enough when they have been pre-screened on the eliminating criteria. Beyond that, evaluation time grows without improving the decision.