I started working at a mid-size company (around 500 people) and got stuck with a messy ServiceNow setup. The previous team made it way too complicated and it’s really hard to fix. SNOW could work great if done right, but ours is a total mess and would need to be built from scratch. We don’t have time or resources for that.
What we use ServiceNow for right now:
- IT Service Management
- IT Operations Management
- Managing our application portfolio
- Identity and access workflows (new employee setup, departing employees, permission requests, role updates)
The identity stuff is really important because we use ServiceNow to track everything for compliance and audits.
We hired a ServiceNow consultant to map out what we actually use and how everything connects. But we’re pretty sure we want to replace it with simpler tools that are easier to manage.
Tools we’re looking at:
- Jira Service Management for IT help desk
- LeanIX for application management
- Workato for connecting systems and automation
My biggest worry is whether Jira Service Management can handle our identity workflows like ServiceNow does. We need to keep the same level of control and audit trails without starting a huge identity management project.
Looking for people who have:
- Moved from ServiceNow to JSM - what worked and what was difficult?
- Set up employee onboarding and access approval processes in JSM or other Atlassian products?
- Worked with consultants in the US who know both platforms well?
Any advice would be really helpful. Thanks!
Made this exact switch about two years ago and the identity management piece was definitely our biggest headache. JSM handles basic onboarding workflows fine but you’ll miss ServiceNow’s built-in compliance features. We ended up having to supplement with additional tools - used Okta for identity governance and kept detailed logs in Confluence. The audit trail requirement forced us to get creative with JSM’s history tracking and we built some custom automation to capture the right data points. Your consultant idea is smart because mapping those ServiceNow identity workflows to JSM equivalents isn’t straightforward. We underestimated the time needed to rebuild our compliance reporting and had to scramble before our next audit. The good news is that once everything was configured properly, our help desk team found JSM much easier to work with daily. Just budget extra time for the identity stuff - it’s not impossible but requires more planning than the standard ITSM migration.
We did a partial migration from ServiceNow to JSM about 18 months ago for a similar sized company. The IT service desk transition was smooth and our team actually prefers JSM’s interface now. However, the identity workflows were definitely the biggest challenge we faced during the switch. JSM can handle employee lifecycle processes but you’ll need to architect it carefully. We ended up using Jira Service Management combined with Confluence for documentation and Assets for tracking equipment assignments. The key is setting up proper request types with conditional fields and making sure your approval chains are bulletproof. For compliance tracking, we had to build custom reports using JSM’s native reporting plus some Power BI dashboards. It’s not as comprehensive as ServiceNow’s audit trails out of the box, but with proper configuration you can get what auditors need. The Workato integration you mentioned should help bridge gaps between systems. One thing to consider is training time. Even though JSM is simpler, your team will need time to learn the new workflows and your end users will need guidance on the new request processes.
honestly jsm is way more straightforward than servicenow but the identity stuff might be tricky. we moved last year and had to get creative with automation rules and scriptrunner for the compliance tracking. workato integration helped alot tho. jsm’s approval workflows are decent but not as robust as SNOW’s ootb identity modules. you’ll probably need some custom fields and reporting dashboards to match your audit requirements.