ServiceDesk Plus vs. TOPdesk: Which ITSM Tool Truly Fits Your Organization?

1. AI, AI, AI

ServiceDesk Plus comes standard with Zia built in. ZIA is the intelligent AI assistant developed by Zoho, the parent company of ManageEngine. Zia is also available across dozens of other Zoho and ManageEngine products, creating a consistent AI experience throughout the platform. At the time of writing, TOPdesk offers five AI features. As a result, it does not meet Gartner's extensive admission criteria for inclusion in their AI in ITSM Magic Quadrant. ServiceDesk Plus does. Zia combines conversational, generative, predictive, and autonomous AI capabilities. It can create tickets, resolve requests, generate reports, automate repetitive tasks, and much more. Even if your organization is only beginning its AI journey, you want a service management platform that will continue to support your growth for years to come. With Zia, ServiceDesk Plus supports you and your organisation's journey towards more automation, higher efficiency, and increased IT maturity.

2. A Visual Workflow Designer

The major convenience of a Visual Workflow Designer (with drag-and-drop) is still missing in TOPdesk. ManageEngine has offered this already for years, and nowadays also has it supported by AI. Simply describe the workflow you need, and Zia generates the first version for you. From there, you can easily easily fine-tune the process template without complex configuration. This enables delegation to every team in your organisation saving both time and effort.

3. Workflow Automation Across Every ITIL Process

ServiceDesk Plus provides workflow capabilities across all ITIL processes, not just Change Management as in TOPdesk. So for example in Problem Management, Asset Management and Asset Management, you can easily define and automate processes, saving your team work, while improving quality and resolution times.  This also offers the possibility to have technicians follow your own Incident Management process, and if desired, even enforce it. For example, you can require incidents to be classified and prioritized before technicians can begin working on them.

4. Dynamic and Advanced Forms

ServiceDesk Plus makes it easy to build intelligent and complex forms that simplify the user experience while collecting all required information. You can display fields based on previous answers, include pricing information, show images, and create highly dynamic request forms. These capabilities allow you to reduce the total number of forms, simplify your self-service portal, and ensure requests contain all necessary information from the start. TOPdesk has not reached this level. The result is faster request handling, fewer incomplete tickets, improved service quality, and less work for your support teams.

5. Enterprise-Grade Service Level Management (SLM)

ServiceDesk Plus offers comprehensive Service Level Management (SLM) capabilities, including close integration with Operational Level Agreements (OLAs). This makes it much easier to collaborate with internal departments and external suppliers while ensuring customer SLAs continue to be met. This is not well supported in TOPdesk.

6. Full OTAP Support

ServiceDesk Plus includes complete OTAP (Development, Test, Acceptance, Production) functionality. Administrators can safely promote configurations from a sandbox environment to production without manually recreating changes. This saves time, reduces errors, and minimizes the risks associated with making changes directly in production environments. This is missing in TOPdesk, causing many organisations to adjust and test their instances directly in production, which is not safe and very risky.

7. More Integrations Out of the Box

Standard ServiceDesk Plus iis delivered with over 150 ready-to-use integrations, with many more available through the Marketplace. All in all a much longer list of valuable integrations that are ready to use. These integrations are often richer in functionality as well. For example, the Microsoft Teams integration supports true two-way communication, allowing technicians to create, update, and resolve tickets without leaving Teams. TOPdesk's Teams integration is considerably more limited and only works in a single direction.

8. Automation Without Coding

TOPdesk relies on Action Sequences for automation. Actually this means custom scripts that you download and adjust, or write yourself. In many organisations, this is making the work of application managers too complex, especially with personnel changes. ServiceDesk Plus takes a different approach. Automation—both within the platform and across integrated systems—is built using an intuitive visual drag-and-drop designer. This makes automation accessible to far more administrators while reducing long-term maintenance.

9. Built-in iPaaS

TOPdesk can integrate directly with systems that expose APIs, allowing data to be exchanged without middleware. While convenient, direct integrations are not always resilient. If synchronization fails, updates can be lost and systems may become inconsistent.

ServiceDesk Plus includes a fully featured Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) by default, with capabilities such as store-and-forward processing, retries, monitoring, and robust error handling. This enables reliable, secure, enterprise-grade integrations.

10. Complete Mobile Experience

Whether you're working remotely, traveling, or on-site, the ServiceDesk Plus mobile apps allow end users and technicians to create and update tickets, scan assets, and perform other day-to-day service management tasks. With Zia, many actions can even be performed using voice commands.

TOPdesk also offers a mobile app, but with considerably fewer capabilities.

Bonus: More Features at a Lower Cost

Beyond these functional advantages, ServiceDesk Plus is also significantly more cost-effective than the latest TOPdesk pricing. Depending on the edition and the number of technicians, TOPdesk costs anywhere from 52% to 243% more.

At the same time, ServiceDesk Plus includes substantially more functionality as standard.

For example, Zia AI is available in every edition of ServiceDesk Plus at no additional cost. TOPdesk charges extra for an external chatbot, while the chatbot in ServiceDesk Plus is native and always included by default. Furthermore, none of TOPdesk's AI capabilities are available in the Essential edition, only three become available from the Engaged edition onward, and two are reserved exclusively for the premium and seldomly bought Excellent edition.

The same applies to integrations. Many key Marketplace integrations in TOPdesk require additional licensing, whereas hundreds of integrations are included with ServiceDesk Plus. This not only reduces costs but also lowers the barrier to integrate, and to automating more business processes.

Professional services are more affordable as well. TOPdesk charges separately for health checks unless you purchase the highest-tier Excellent edition. With ServiceDesk Plus, annual health checks performed by experienced consultants are included, helping organizations keep their environment optimized, adopt new features, and maximize the value of their investment.

Where Both Solutions Perform Well

There are also several areas where TOPdesk and ManageEngine perform at a comparable level:

• Thousands of customers across the Netherlands in all sectors: MSP, private and public sectors.
• Local consulting, support, account management, and a fully localized Dutch user interface.
• 24/5 support via phone and email.
• Solid and fast onboarding, if required with optional data migration.
• Available both on-premises and as SaaS.
• Compliant with AVG/GDPR, SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, NEN7510, BIO, ARBIT, GIBIT, etc.
• Built-in AI only uses your own knowledge and data and does not send information externally.
• Support for both IT Service Management (ITSM) and Enterprise Service Management (ESM), including facilities management processes such as space management and reservation management (e.g. room booking).