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ServiceNow App Engine

Score7.9 out of 10

45 Reviews and Ratings

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What is ServiceNow App Engine?

ServiceNow App Engine aims to bring creator workflow apps to production quickly for mission-critical tasks. Design with best-practice guidance and templates within a holistic low-code dev experience.

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features ServiceNow App Engine has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 45 ratings of ServiceNow App Engine's features
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Top Performing Features

  • Drag-and-drop Interfaces

    Drag-and-drop interface for building applications

    Category average: 8.4

  • Reusability

    An internal repository where assets, modules, and even entire applications can be reused

    Category average: 8.6

  • Platform Security

    Security guardrails in place to help prevent malware, data breaches etc.

    Category average: 8.6

Areas for Improvement

  • Platform Scalability

    Apps developed by low-code platform must be scalable and capable of supporting large numbers of users

    Category average: 8.7

  • Platform User Management

    Tools enabling admins to control user access and on-board and off-board users

    Category average: 8.4

  • Visual Modeling

    Visual modeling tooling allows business users to design processes visually.

    Category average: 7.7

Reviews

What users are saying about ServiceNow App Engine.
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Game changer for Low Code Development on ServiceNow App Engine.

Incentivized
Ehab Pilloor
ServiceNow Consultant in Information Technology at RAQMEA (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Business problem: Client used an Excel-based 5-case model across multiple spreadsheets for project investment. Approval was manually routed via email. Budget and financial data were fragmented. The system was based on ad hoc scoring and prioritization. There were no automated calculations (NPV, IRR, capacity gaps). A manual search was in place for past initiatives. Impact: There was no single source of truth, causing version control issues. There was no audit trail in the existing process. Limited visibility into spending efficiency. Inconsistent investment decisions and analysis. There was a risk of duplicate or overlapping projects.

Pros

  • App Engine can be used by non-developers to create Applications on the go, without coding.
  • App Engine has all the important aspects of the application available for adding or editing within a single record. Hence, it is easier to modify.
  • App Engine has a delegated development option which can be granted to specific developers or groups to manage a specific area for Scoped App Development without giving admin rights.

Cons

  • The scoped app prefix should be shorter to allow appropriate application naming if it exceeds the character limit. Either the scoped app name limit shall be increased, or the limit on scoped app prefixes shall be increased to allow better naming for scoped apps.
  • It's challenging to make citizen development work at scale. Businesses want experienced pro code developers rather than citizen developers to work on this feature.

Return on Investment

  • Based on the business case provided earlier, Approval cycle time became 40% faster.
  • 95% increase in submitted cases with 5-case data.
  • Budget visibility improved from monthly manual reports to real time data.
  • User satisfaction was more than 80%.

Usability

Other Software Used

ServiceNow IT Service Management, ServiceNow IT Operations Management

A Solid Low Code Platform for IT teams already on ServiceNow

Incentivized
Arymann SinhaView profile
ServiceNow Developer in Information Technology at Sgital (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

At our Company, we use ServiceNow App Engine as our primary platform for building low code applications that streamline our operations. With Ap Engine, we have been able to empower our non-developers to also build and deploy functional apps without needing deep coding expertise.
Our Use cases range from IT request management and employee onboarding workflows to custom approval processes and asset tracking.
It has been a game changer for small team like ours and where we cant always dedicate a full team to internal tooling.

Pros

  • Non Developers on our team can build functional apps Quickly using App Engine Studio.
  • Multi Step workflow automation with approvals, notifications and conditional logic work reliable out of the box without heavy scripting
  • Flow Designer within app Engine makes it easy to automate complex IT workflows

Cons

  • App engine studio is great for basic apps but once u need advanced UI customization or complex client side logic , you're forced into ServiceNow Scripting which creates a steep learning curve
  • Integrating App Engine apps with third party tools outside the ServiceNow ecosystem like Jira requires IntegrationHub spokes
  • ServiceNow App Engine's licensing model can be difficult to navigate for smaller organizations. As you scale the number of custom apps or add more users, costs can rise very quickly

Return on Investment

  • Since adopting App Engine, we have reduced internal app development time by roughly 60%. Workflows that previously required custom coded solutions taking 3-4 weeks are now built and deployed within a week using App Engine Studio
  • We eliminated at least 2-3standalone Saas tools we were paying for separately , replacing them with custom built apps on Now Platform which saves us good amount of tooling costs annually.
  • On the negative side, the initial licensing and onboarding cost was higher than expected for a small team. It took us nearly 3 months before we saw meaningful ROI and we had to invest in ServiceNow training for two team members before we could fully utilize App Engines Capabilities.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Mendix, Appian and OutSystems

Other Software Used

Microsoft Teams, Atlassian Jira, Atlassian Confluence

ServiceNow Powerful and Easy Workflow Automation

Incentivized
Waleed Aladwan
Technology Support Eng in Information Technology at Takeda Pharma (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our organiziaiton users ServiceNow App Engine to build and manage internal workflows and service reqeusts across our organization. it helps us automate manual processes, track INC and tasks, and improve between teams.

Pros

  • Workflow Automation
  • Custom app development
  • Reporting and visibility

Cons

  • performance with large data set can be very slow
  • User interface Complexity
  • Cost Transparency

Return on Investment

  • Improved Efficiency
  • Better visibility
  • cost

Usability

Minimal codes with maximum impact in a very short span of development time - ServiceNow App Engine

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Currently in my organisation we have an integration of our tool with servicenow app engine. Our custom applications are built on the servicenow application. It helps us create scoped applications basis our custom requirements. Currently we support integration of our tool with servicenow and using CMDB we are able to find out our assets in the current infrastructure

Pros

  • Creating custom applications
  • Minimal coding platform
  • Seamless integration across tools
  • End to end delivery of IT process to customer

Cons

  • Initial learning of the tool requires some training
  • Possibilities of conflicting scripts- ui policies, actions, business rules, client scripts . Changes made to any one might not actually work. So need to be fully aware of what code is written where
  • To build custom applications, knowledge in IT domain is required. Also it is a huge platform. Learning requires time

Return on Investment

  • Increase customer satisfaction
  • Improved speed of app development
  • Easy to learn with some knowledge in IT
  • Overall stakeholders can get a working model in a short span of time
  • Customers requirements are easy to adapt
  • Helps integration with other tools and hence very much impactful as all data is managed at a centralised location

Usability

Alternatives Considered

ServiceNow Automated Test Framework (ATF)

Other Software Used

ADP Enterprise HR, Okta Workflows, Jira Align

A great option to create your business processes.

Incentivized
Verified User
Manager in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use the ServiceNow App Engine to create and automate many business processes that were implemented in different ways. In this way, all these processes are encompassed in a single web tool, allowing the people in charge of each process to manage them and receive all requests and information in the same tool.

Pros

  • Workflows
  • Notifications
  • Management

Cons

  • Manage of the workflows.
  • Integrations with other systems.
  • Reports

Return on Investment

  • Speed of resolution.
  • Dependency of the processes.
  • Management in the same app.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

BMC Helix Remedyforce

Other Software Used

CoPilot, SAP SuccessFactors HCM, Microsoft Teams