InvGate Service Desk VS iTop

InvGate Service Desk is an IT service management platform that offers help desk request fulfillment, customer service and support and self-service knowledge management. InvGate lets users create trouble tickets, run advanced reports and view analytics and automate workflows. Its drag-and-drop and drill-down functionality allow data to be accessible to all members of the team. The solution offers features such as ticket management, knowledge base, problem management, change management, reporting and analytics. The built-in analytics tool uses OLAP approach to deliver data and information in real-time. The system can be purchased outright as an on-premise option, or cloud-based, with an annual recurring fee. It is customizable depending on the needs of the company. InvGate also offers web self-service capabilities, so staff can track the progress of trouble tickets, search the knowledge base, and promote self-resolution to IT service requests.

iTop is an Open Source web application for the day to day operations of an IT environment. iTop was designed with the ITIL best practices in mind but does not dictate any specific process, the application is flexible enough to adapt to your processes whether you want rather informal and pragmatic processes or a strict ITIL aligned behaviour.

The belief behind iTop is that a CMDB must be an operational tool. The only way for a CMDB to be accurate and up to date is to be used day-to-day by the IT teams (support agents, IT engineers, etc.). Moreover, the more the CMDB is integrated with other IT tools (monitoring systems, reporting tools, automated inventory, etc.), the better.

iTop features, what you can do with it:

• Document your IT infrastructure and all the relationships between the various pieces and stakeholders of the infrastructure (servers, applications, network devices, virtual machines, contacts, locations…)
• Manage incidents, user requests, planned outages…
• Document IT services and contracts with external providers including service level agreements
• Export all the information in a manual or scripted manner
• Mass import (manually and using scripts) or synchronize/federate any data from external systems

iTop can be used by different types of persons:

• Help Desk agents
• Support engineers (1st level, 2nd level…)
• Service managers
• IT managers
• End-users: a simplified “portal” interface is available to let them submit their requests directly.