IT service management software compared on price

IT service management software gives a company one place to record what employees ask of IT and what breaks. Each product here handles incident and request tickets, an IT service catalog, and SLA tracking. We checked every price on the vendor's own website on November 4, 2026, and each product page links to the pages we used. Prices below are list prices in US dollars unless a vendor showed another currency, and several vendors set what you see by country.

What the three required features mean

The category rests on a vocabulary that comes from ITIL. PeopleCert has owned the ITIL trademark since it completed its purchase of AXELOS in 2021, and ITIL 4 was released in 2019. Incident management, service request management and service level management are separate ITIL practices, and vendors often list them as separate modules.

An incident is something that is broken, such as a mail server that has stopped answering. A request is something a person wants, such as a laptop, a new account or access to a folder. The IT service catalog is the list of requests that employees can make, each with its own form and approval chain. An SLA is a promised response or resolution time, and SLA tracking is the clock that warns an agent before that time runs out.

We required all three because a help desk that only takes tickets is a smaller product. A product could fail our test in two ways. The vendor might not describe a catalog at all, or the catalog might sit in a higher plan than the one a buyer expects to buy. That second case matters for price, and it is why this page spends time on plan packaging.

Which products made the list and which did not

Eight products qualify: Freshservice, ServiceDesk Plus, SolarWinds Service Desk, InvGate Service Management, HaloITSM, Alloy Navigator, Ivanti Neurons for ITSM and SysAid.

Several well-known names are missing because we could not check them. Jira Service Management's pricing page returned only navigation text to our fetch, so we have no verified price for it. ServiceNow's product pages refused our request with an HTTP 403 error. TOPdesk publishes base prices in pounds (51, 72 and 101 per agent a month). We could not read a page describing its service catalog. monday service published prices ($31 and $45 per seat a month on annual billing), but its page did not mention a service catalog. EasyVista, TeamDynamix and Hornbill showed no prices, and the first two did not name a service catalog either. Leaving a vendor out here means we could not verify it, not that it fails. We will add each as we can read the pages.

Entry prices on annual billing

Most ITSM tools charge per agent, meaning a person who works tickets. ServiceDesk Plus, SolarWinds, HaloITSM, Alloy and InvGate say requesters or end users are not licensed or are unlimited. The published entry prices per agent each month, all on annual billing, are:

• Alloy Navigator: $19 on Explorer, which is capped at 3 technicians, then $49 on Express and $89 on Enterprise.
• Freshservice: $19 on Starter, $49 on Growth and $99 on Pro.
• SolarWinds Service Desk: $39 on Essentials, $99 on Advanced and $124 on Premier.
• SysAid: $59 on ITSM Professional.
• HaloITSM: 66 pounds sterling in the UK view, with no dollar figure displayed.

ServiceDesk Plus lists Standard from $13, Professional from $27 and Enterprise from $67 per technician a month, and also quotes cloud prices per year. Its Standard edition is free for up to five technicians, and only one service desk can use that allowance. InvGate sells by the year, at $1,499 for a 5-agent Starter plan and $500 per agent on Pro, with a $2,500 yearly floor. Its Enterprise plan starts at $12,000 a year. Ivanti publishes no price at all.

The cheapest plan is often not the plan that qualifies. Freshservice's Starter plan lists incident management, and its pricing page places the service catalog and SLA management on Growth. Alloy's pricing page places the service catalog on Enterprise, at $89 against $19 for Explorer. ServiceDesk Plus lists the catalog as a $1,195 a year add-on on Standard and Professional, and as included in Enterprise. SolarWinds is the reverse case, because its Essentials plan at $39 already lists the service catalog and SLA tracking.

A ten-agent example

Take a team of ten agents on annual billing at list price, and use the cheapest plan that lists all three required features. This arithmetic is ours, from the prices above, and it leaves out taxes, add-ons and discounts.

• SolarWinds Essentials: 10 agents at $39 a month comes to $4,680 a year.
• Freshservice Growth: 10 agents at $49 a month comes to $5,880 a year.
• SysAid ITSM Professional: 10 agents at $59 a month comes to $7,080 a year.
• Alloy Navigator Enterprise: 10 technicians at $89 a month comes to $10,680 a year.
• HaloITSM: 10 agents at 66 pounds a month comes to 7,920 pounds a year, with no dollar conversion from us.

Alloy's cheaper path is Express at $49, which lists change management and approvals but not the catalog. The SysAid figure rests on its page example, which prices 70 agents at $4,130 a month, or $49,560 a year. For InvGate, ten agents on Pro is $5,000 a year, but its pricing page does not say which plan first includes the catalog, so we do not call that a like-for-like figure. ServiceDesk Plus is hard to total because of asset counts and add-ons, so build a quote there from the full table.

Location changes what you see

HaloITSM shows prices in pounds, dollars, euros and several other currencies depending on region, and its page said regions not listed need a quote. In our fetch it showed the UK price of 66 pounds a month and no dollar amount. The monday service page says its price depends on the billing country. ManageEngine's pricing page does not say prices vary by location, but it notes that cloud subscriptions can be bought through local partners. Treat every figure here as a starting point, then confirm the amount shown for your country.

SolarWinds Service Desk also lets a customer pick where data is stored. Its security page lists AWS data centers in the United States, the European Union and Australia. InvGate's security page does not say where it hosts, and points to a separate trust center.

Trials, free plans and add-ons

Freshservice has no free plan and gives 14 days with all features. SolarWinds, HaloITSM and ServiceDesk Plus each state 30 days. SolarWinds opens Premier features during its trial and disables the account if you do not subscribe, while keeping trial data in the account if you do. Halo says no credit card is needed. InvGate and SysAid mention a free trial on their pricing pages without a length for the ITSM product. Alloy says its trial includes all features and technical support.

AI is now sold as a separate line item at some vendors. Freshservice charges $29 per agent a month for its Freddy AI Copilot, only for Pro and Enterprise. SysAid sells an AI product called Dex at $89 or $189 per technician a month, priced apart from the ITSM plan. SolarWinds puts AI incident summaries on Premier. If a vendor demo features AI, ask which plan and which add-on it needs.

Smaller costs also appear. Freshservice sells Day Passes for occasional agents, with three free at sign-up and more from $3. Alloy says cloud hosting carries extra fees, and that training costs extra. InvGate says its listed prices exclude taxes and additional fees, and may change without notice.

Certifications and what they prove

Five vendors state some security attestation. SolarWinds says Service Desk is ISO 27001 certified. InvGate says it holds ISO 27001:2022 and refers to SOC 2 Type II audits. HaloITSM lists ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA. Ivanti says it holds SOC 2 and ISO/IEC 27001 compliance, with no scope or dates on the page. Alloy says it finished a SOC 2 Type II audit in early November 2025, after a Type I report in April 2025.

We could not confirm Freshworks, ManageEngine or SysAid certifications on the pages we could read. Freshworks says its trust center holds its certifications but does not list them on the security page we fetched. The SysAid trust center page returned only a heading to us. Absence from our reading is not absence of the certification, so ask each vendor for its current report and read the scope. A SOC 2 report covers the systems and period the auditor chose, and a Type I report describes controls at one date rather than over time.

ITIL certification is a different thing. ServiceDesk Plus, SysAid and Ivanti each cite PinkVERIFY, an assessment of tool support for ITIL processes. Ivanti's FAQ says it is certified for 14 ITIL 4 processes, and lists incident management, service catalog management and service level management among them. It is a check of process support, not of security.

Analyst placement is only as good as its source. ManageEngine's product page says ServiceDesk Plus is a Challenger in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for IT Service Management Platforms and a Strong Performer in the Forrester Wave for ESM platforms in the fourth quarter of 2025. We read those claims on the vendor's page and did not check them against the analyst reports.

Contract terms are hard to find

The most useful contract page we found was Freshworks' terms. Plans renew automatically unless a party gives written notice at least 30 days before the term ends. Payments are non-cancelable and non-refundable except in listed cases, and users cannot be reduced or the plan downgraded during a term. After an account closes, customer data is available for export for 14 days if payments are current, and Freshworks may keep it for up to three months before deletion.

For the other vendors we could not read a terms page, so renewal and cancellation fields on their product pages are blank rather than guessed. ManageEngine's pricing FAQ says users can upgrade, downgrade or cancel at any time, and offers monthly or yearly billing. SolarWinds, InvGate and Alloy show only annual billing for the plans we checked. Ask for the order form before a trial ends, and read the renewal clause and the data export clause together.

Incident records outlast the ticket

An ITSM tool holds the record of how an outage was handled, and security teams reuse that record. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology published SP 800-61 Revision 3 in April 2025, replacing the 2012 Revision 2. It places incident response inside cybersecurity risk management under the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0. A service desk that logs timestamps, owners and categories makes that later review easier, so check that the export and reporting you need are in the plan you buy.

What to test during a trial

• Build one real catalog item with a form, a manager approval and a task for another team, then submit it as an ordinary employee.
• Create an SLA policy with a 4-hour target, backdate a ticket, and see whether the warning and escalation fire on time.
• Open an incident from an emailed message and from a chat message, and see whether both reach the same queue.
• Count the agents you need, including part-time ones, and ask which plan covers the catalog and SLA tools you tested.
• Request a full export of tickets, assets and attachments, and open the files before the trial ends.