Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS, Microsoft Visual Studio Team System) is an agile development product that is an extension of the Microsoft Visual Studio architecture. Azure DevOps includes software development, collaboration, and reporting capabilities.
$2
per GB (first 2GB free)
BMC Helix ITSM
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
BMC Helix ITSM replaces Remedy. It is a broad suite of ITSM, tools with strong integrations to other BMC tools and in-built ITAM. The product is used mainly by global brands and is offered in on-premise and SaaS configurations.
N/A
TOPdesk
Score 8.3 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
TOPdesk is the flagship highly-modular cloud-based or installed ITSM service desk and asset management solution from the Dutch company of the same name, for enterprise companies.
$76
per month Per agent
Pricing
Azure DevOps
BMC Helix ITSM
TOPdesk
Editions & Modules
Azure Artifacts
$2
per GB (first 2GB free)
Basic Plan
$6
per user per month (first 5 users free)
Azure Pipelines - Self-Hosted
$15
per extra parallel job (1 free parallel job with unlimited minutes)
Azure Pipelines - Microsoft Hosted
$40
per parallel job (1,800 minutes free with 1 free parallel job)
Basic + Test Plan
$52
per user per month
BMC Helix ITSM
Contact Sales
Essential
$76
per month Per agent
Engaged
$109
per month Per agent
Excellent
$155
per month Per agent
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Azure DevOps
BMC Helix ITSM
TOPdesk
Free Trial
No
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
—
—
The TOPdesk license model:
- Modular: Organizations purchase only the modules needed
- Saas or On premise
- Supports unlimited number of assets.
- Service agents based.
- Discount available for annual pricing.
The choice for TOPdesk was made based on the features and integration needs of our business, and also by financial investment. SAP Business One is also used in the company, but only for financial and billing purposes. Atlassian Jira requires a much bigger investment, and makes …
To be fair, we used BMC's Remedy Action Management System (ARS) instead of the full-blown Helix ITSM. We only had access to what would be called Incident Management, Asset Management, and Change Management, although Change Management was not used. We are using the SaaS …
Azure DevOps works well when you’ve got larger delivery efforts with multiple teams and a lot of moving parts, and you need one place to plan work, track it properly, and see how everything links together. It’s especially useful when delivery and development are closely tied and you want backlog items, code and releases connected rather than spread across tools. Where it’s less of a fit is for small teams or simple pieces of work, as it can feel like more setup and process than you really need, and non-technical users often struggle with the interface. It also isn’t great if you want instant, easy programme-level views or a very visual planning experience without putting time into configuration.
BMC Helix ITSM fits our environment particularly well, where standardized, auditable processes are already in place: Incident and Problem Management can be structured cleanly, with clear ownership, escalations, and fully traceable documentation—crucial in a highly regulated banking context. Through the customer platform/portal, users can log incidents and requests consistently, track their status transparently, and use a single central communication channel across service boundaries. This supports a service-oriented setup spanning multiple business services and locations. It becomes less suitable—or at least more effort-intensive—when core foundation data is not yet stable: an immature CMDB, insufficient ITAM data quality, and an unstructured knowledge base limit the value of automation and self-service. In addition, heterogeneous integrations and strict authorization models can increase implementation and ongoing maintenance efforts, especially when SLAs are not harmonized across different customer environments.
We had a smaller team of 6-7 people and for us it was perfect. It was very easy for us to book time per ticket and keep track of what we were spending the most of our time on. Escalating tickets was easy because of the prebuilt emails and message saving features. The typical features are all there of course such as incident, project management, etc. TOPdesk is highly customizable and we felt like we always had a good oversight of the KPI's, time management and customer satisfaction ratings. Our management liked the reporting features, the customizable dashboard and the data visualization. In my personal experience, TOPdesk also had the best search feature, and with the tags we were also very easily able to find the tickets we needed.
AI drive incident correlation leading to identifying problems and major incidents quickly.
Digital Workplace gives end-users a modern and personalized UI to submit requests, monitor service health, and receive self-help.
As an enterprise ITSM, it is critical that Request, Incident, Problem, Asset, and Change Management are integrated and flow together. BMC Helix is built on this principle.
I did mention it has good visibility in terms of linking, but sometimes items do get lost, so if there was a better way to manage that, that would be great.
The wiki is not the prettiest thing to look at, so it could have refinements there.
Service Level management configs can be lengthy, and when changes are needed to specific SLA, it does take a long time to configure. Templates work but only for certain things, lots of manual work is still required.
The Online product documentation can be confusing or in same cases not correct.
BMC products are sometimes expensive. When partners try to resell licenses or increase their own allotment, it becomes very expensive.
I don't think our organization will stray from using VSTS/TFS as we are now looking to upgrade to the 2012 version. Since our business is software development and we want to meet the requirements of CMMI to deliver consistent and high quality software, this SDLC management tool is here to stay. In addition, our company uses a lot of Microsoft products, such as Office 365, Asp.net, etc, and since VSTS/TFS has proved itself invaluable to our own processes and is within the Microsoft family of products, we will continue to use VSTS/TFS for a long, long time.
It just works, has some continuous development and an easy-to-use interface, which is important especially because not all our colleagues are technical experts (or in other words, "capable of more than switching on and off the computer"). We use a large range of functions and therefore it would be really hard to replace TOPdesk in our company.
It's a great help to get more information about new feature release and stay updated on what the dev team is working on. I like how easy it is to just login and read through the work items. Each work item has basic details: Title, Description, Assigned to, State, Area (what it belongs to), and iteration (when it’s worked on). See image above.They move through different states (New → Discovery → Ready for Prod → etc.).
Overall the product enhances the capability of incident management, problem management and change management. The AI based framework helps generated better visibility and reports. The effectiveness of enhanced service desk suuport improves end user experience as the incidents are handled well in time and aged incidents are highlighted at the right time.
In short, we've been able to remove many pain points, automate multiple things, and empowered the end-user by being able to manage more items via the Self Service Portal. We've been able to do more than we were able to do with our previous ITSM platform. The TOPdesk development team added some things recently that will allow us to make some other things more efficient.
Like I said somewhere else in this review: the helpdesk of TOPdesk is top of the bill! In the Netherlands, that is. I can not plea for the helpdesks in other countries, but I guess the TOPdesk organization will make sure the quality of the helpdesk is the same in every country.
Although being a SAAS solution, TOPdesk performs pretty fast. One can imagine that any SAAS solution is slow or has hiccups, but we have not experienced such with TOPdesk. Pages load quickly, logging in goes smoothly. We have made reports on premise in the past - that always took some time, as you might expect with such complex tasks. It seems that in the SAAS solution TOPdesk somehow has managed to make it even faster!
When we've had issues, both Microsoft support and the user community have been very responsive. DevOps has an active developer community and frankly, you can find most of your questions already asked and answered there. Microsoft also does a better job than most software vendors I've worked with creating detailed and frequently updated documentation.
Their tech support is top notch. They respond and get back to us, even on lower level incidents and issues, very quickly. It is rare that we deal with a support technician who does not know what they are doing.
Most if not nearly all questions are answered within the same or a few days. The helpdesk is very knowledgable about their product and are always willing to help. The only downside is that for more difficult questions it can take a while due to the experts being further removed from the helpdesk. But they are always willing to answer questions, even if they are not directly related to a problem with the service.
We had Topdesk in-house here training staff for almost a month (2-3 hour meetings 3x a week.) It was invaluable and we were able to take that training and share with the rest of our IT staff. Once implemented we were able to fly from there. The challenges we found were in how to get started. Once started the knowledge base offered from Topdesk has been invaluable.
the trainers dont have so much practical experiences. its mostly follow up and reading existing documentation withou own input. of course experiences people are on shore or have no free time. sad truth
Online training documentation is easy to access and consume. There is no real challenges with finding information on how to use the product and some really helpful knowledge base items that show us how valuable these options are in our own implementation of it. The online training we've used has been self driven
It was a challenge to port over years of the same thing and we ended up keeping old ideas in Topdesk that we will eventually weed out as time passes and we learn how users view categories and flows of tickets. Planning is key but bear in mind that just because you used to do it this way doesn't mean you still have to
Microsoft Planner is used by project managers and IT service managers across our organization for task tracking and running their team meetings. Azure DevOps works better than Planner for software development teams but might possibly be too complex for non-software teams or more business-focused projects. We also use ServiceNow for IT service management and this tool provides better analysis and tracking of IT incidents, as Azure DevOps is more suited to development and project work for dev teams.
I believe Remedy's performance and market share exceeds its competitors. But it is worth mentioning that Microsoft's SCCM has excellent integration with Microsoft enterprise solutions and has is less expensive and not efficient. The IBM solution has better analytics but lacks the wide features and capabilities of Remedy. HP & CA are the real competitors for Remedy but lacks the stability, maturity, and effectiveness in Remedy
Spiceworks is an easier-to-use Help Desk solution but it lacks all other features that Topdesk has. Freshdesk was just too much for our environment. It was cost-prohibitive for our intended use. TOPdesk fit our org size and budget better than the others.
TOPdesk is very flexible and scalable. Every department in you organization can you the software. Perhaps some persons need some training, but that can be provided by TOPdesk ot some keyusers.
We have saved a ton of time not calculating metrics by hand.
We no longer spend time writing out cards during planning, it goes straight to the board.
We no longer track separate documents to track overall department goals. We were able to create customized icons at the department level that lets us track each team's progress against our dept goals.
Positive: an introduction to ITIL and viewing Asset, User Management from the perspective of ITIL, and how BMC has implemented those processes
Negative: The development team needs to communicate better with the sales and support side, and they need offer an open API
Negative: Currently the Asset Management side has little security and validation of Asset input: anyone can make API (mostly), at any item, which is a problem that I am apart of solving.
The UX needs updating, badly. Its quality is poor: it functions, but it is cumbersome, click-heavy and requires several hours to understand how to function with it. Also, it needs to ditch IE11 support, altogether.
