I’ve used ServiceNow across multiple organisations, in very different environments, with different teams, and different workflows. Honestly, there’s lot’s of pain points.

ServiceNow is incredibly powerful, and there’s a reason it’s everywhere, but it’s design is business-first, and the experience for IT teams comes last.

But does it need to be so bad?

What makes ServiceNow so difficult to use?

Well a lot of it seems to stem from SNOW trying to do too much at once, and not being particular good at anything individually.

Part of the issue is that ServiceNow was designed first and foremost as a highly configurable enterprise workflow “engine”, not an IT user-friendly tool.

SNOW’s bones are focused in governance, structured data, auditability, and complex change management.

This makes it powerful for large organisations with strict compliance requirements, but it also means user experience takes a big step back.

Many features that feel basic in other software often require plugins, configuration changes, administrative approval or “just don’t exist” in ServiceNow.

The usual complaints:

Let’s start with the biggest component, incident and request management, here are some complaints from my colleagues (across multiple different roles).

I agree here, SNOW is bloated with buttons (and often not the ones you would normally want either).

Workspaces are a nightmare, and the lack of a Desktop client is almost inexcusable for a company this size, ridiculous.

The search is probably the worst I’ve ever used on anything before, I’m talking worse than Windows Search..

It really was a shock for me when I first transitioned from using Cherwell, expecting to be blown away by SNOW since I had heard so many good things about it.
But using it day to day, I really wish I could go back. Cherwell genuinely just made my work much more enjoyable, and was far more compatible with my fast paced workflow.

What features would make things better?

Many key features are missing from the platform, these are a lot of the complaints I’m aligned with:

• No ticket “Lock” feature, can’t prevent other IT staff from re-assigning/modifying a ticket while your working on it.

• Pasting of images is not possible in any Notes, which wastes a ton of time adding images, the community had to fix this.
• No “open in new tab/window” option when right-clicking a ticket (middle mouse sometimes works but useless on a trackpad). I am also not a fan of the ServiceNow tab system.

• No Email Formatting in tickets, emails come in unformatted and full of gibberish that needs to be sorted through to find the email body.

• IT Email notifications are too generic, it is incredibly difficult (if not impossible) to setup mail rules to filter out certain customers, updates, etc.
  I also have no way of turning off emails for ticket assignments to other teams, I don’t need these?

• No tooltips for why fields are grayed out and can’t be edited, no indication why I can’t change priority or set a case to pending.
• No “Observe Ticket” feature, I previously used this daily to track all my tickets passed to other teams with Cherwell, one button on any ticket and it’s accessible from the “observed” button on our dashboard, there is no feature-complete equivalent here.
• No way to easily see if a ticket has unsaved changes, making a quick change and hitting save requires that a bunch of fields are pre-filled.

• The platform is very slow to navigate and use, it can take upwards of 30 seconds at busy times to load a dashboard (even with minimal data).

• No easy way to copy ticket number, you have to select the text and Ctrl + C, except you can’t even do that in some SNOW instances because their UI won’t let you.

There’s dozens more of these complaints I could list here, you can read some of our more subjective opinions at the bottom of this post.

The point is, these issues exist, across multiple instances.
It’s pretty clear they bother everyone, and it’s not just related to a bad company configuration.

Let’s talk about knowledge management.

I’ve had the unfortunate experience of having to work with ServiceNow’s knowledge management system.

I want to be reasonable here, but honestly I’m shocked this is even a commercial product at this point.

Things that work adequately in SNOW Knowledge Management:

• Viewing text only articles, via direct links.
• Rating articles.
• Enforcing knowledge expiration and reviews.

Things that do not work well in SNOW Knowledge Management:

• Search and article discoverability (partly due to the poor search engine in SNOW).
• Viewing articles with images (no lightbox view, zooming affects all ServiceNow tabs)
• Exporting/Printing article content (no PDF export, copy and pasting images to word doesn’t work, cannot print).
• Editing articles (extremely basic editor, checkout system takes too long, comments disabled by default).
• Publishing new articles (publishing process is confusing, good articles often end up unpublished).
• Version control (seemingly no way to review previous versions of articles).
• Analytics (very little info on what users/teams are viewing articles).
• Licensing/Centralization (I have been unable to access knowledge for customers that can’t justify SNOW licenses for their separate instance).
• Notifications.(cannot turn off notifications for changes, whole team is constantly notified of changes as the “owner”).
• Permissions management.

If you care about Knowledge, you definitely want to invest in Confluence or something similar.

Alternatively, a simple well-organised Network share would do a better job at getting knowledge to the right audience affordably.

Are all the issues our organisations fault?

This is a common response from ServiceNow enthusiasts, everything works great for them in their role and there’s nothing to complain about, if there is just ask for your org to add it.

In the enterprise world though, it’s not that simple.

Most orgs with 500+ employees rely on 1-3 ServiceNow admins, problem is they are usually at capacity dealing with things like CMDB automations, integrations with other SNOW instances, patching, projects and other business requests.

This limits their ability to spend time developing the SNOW user experience, even though adding some of the features I listed might be possible, it’s hard to get it pushed through.

I’m a strong believer that a good product shouldn’t require so much extra development work to get it into a usable state, look at this WordPress blog you are reading right now, I’m running a stock configuration and it works great for pretty much everyone.

Then there’s the “that doesn’t match ITIL standards” response.

I don’t really know what to say here. ITIL is meant to be a framework for best practice, not a barrier to common-sense improvements.

The platform itself can be better, so why isn’t it?

What does ServiceNow do well?

There are a handful of things that ServiceNow does seem to do well, that I’ve noticed, and these include:

• Change management, this is highly customisable, auditable, and purpose-built to handle CAB processes very well. It’s a good experience not just from the change owners side.
  Though the default UI could be better, I hate that these options are hidden for example:

• End user experience/catalog items, this is a strong point with ServiceNow, raising a request can be extremely straightforward for clueless users, and making sure it goes to the right team is easily configurable too, no complaints here.
• Reporting, I have seen some management reports and been impressed with the data that is able to be collected quickly.
• Manual time logging, SNOW seems to be very good at forcing us to log time (if setup in your environment), and integrates well with timesheeting, very optimal.

Ultimately, the criticism isn’t that ServiceNow lacks power, it’s that its complexity and design does make everyday IT work harder than it needs to be.

For teams that value speed, collaboration, and intuitive tooling, that trade-off can feel less like enterprise robustness and more like unnecessary friction.

What would I use in my own company?

Well it depends on size right, ServiceNow is built for bigger orgs, and you’d have to assess your current and future needs too.

Cherwell Service Management will always be my main point of comparison, even though it had some flaws it was just such a joy to work in, it’s a purpose-built tool that hasn’t left the IT user experience in the shadows.

These days though, I believe Cherwell is end of life, or at least has shifted to some sort of browser version that seems inferior?

One of my ex-colleagues has said some good things about Fresh, which looks really good, so if I get some hands on experience one day I’ll update this post.

Outside of that though, there aren’t many big options other than things like SAP/Salesforce, which seem like they’d have similar problems.

Bonus complaints from the guys:

Here are some more complaints from people I worked with, that transitioned to different roles, and moved to SNOW from Cherwell.

A fair few of these are quite opinionated, so don’t take them too seriously…

That’s it.

Rant over.

Thanks for reading.