Unily: The best ServiceNow Employee Center alternative

What is ServiceNow Employee Center?

ServiceNow is one of the biggest technology vendors globally, used by an estimated 85% of the Fortune 500. In 2021 it entered the intranet market with Employee Center, a solution it says is “a unified portal to access services, communications, apps and tasks.” ServiceNow is an IT Service Management solution, designed for ticketing and cross-enterprise workflows. Therefore, Employee Center’s functionality, setup and UI reflects this background.

Why might organizations consider ServiceNow for their intranet or EXP?

Large enterprises that already use ServiceNow as their ticketing solution may believe that Employee Center would be a cost-effective or simple way to extend an intranet to their organization, without bringing another vendor into their already-complex IT estate. However, for enterprises looking for a best-of-breed solution, with top tier comms, consumer-grade UI and market-leading ROI, ServiceNow is likely not the best option. This was summed up quite well by Gartner in the 2024 IPS Magic Quadrant, where ServiceNow made its first appearance:

“Innovation specific to traditional IPS expectations is more strongly handled by longtime players in the market”

Unily named a leader in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™

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At-a-glance pros and cons

Here are some high-level pros and cons potential buyers might want to consider:

ServiceNow Employee Center Pros

• Familiar to IT teams who are already expert users of the Now Platform.
• Trusted vendor, with a track record of serving large enterprises.
• Strong partner ecosystem, with lots of third party integration and service providers to choose from.
• Extremely tight (centralized only) level of governance for content creation and publishing, with multi-step approval workflows.

ServiceNow Employee Center Cons

• Poor visual appeal with limited branding options; always looks like an IT portal.
• Always requires heavy IT involvement for setup of platform taxonomies and management and maintenance thereafter.
• Lacking consumer-grade UI/ UX for end users and admins alike.
• Poor for user-generated, or ‘bottom up’ content, with no social capabilities.

ServiceNow vs Unily: Features Comparison

The crucial difference between the two vendors is that Unily is a purpose-built, best-of-breed EXP or intranet solution, whereas ServiceNow Employee Center is not.

This is reflected when comparing the features and functionality of the two.

Unily as a ServiceNow alternative

As always, finding a solution which is the ‘best fit’ for your individual business circumstances and goals is key. The following are some key considerations that may help to evaluate strong ServiceNow alternatives, depending on your needs.

ROI and time-to-value

Both ServiceNow and Unily are longstanding solutions, with many years’ experience delivering value for clients in their respective specialist areas of ITSM and employee experience.

Both have been independently verified as delivering a strong positive return on investment (ROI) for their customers. Unily’s ROI, assessed by Forrester in a Total Economic Impact Report, is 385%, with a time-to-value (TTV) of less than 6 months. ServiceNow’s HR Service Delivery (the module that needs to be purchased to get Employee Center), is 259%.

Another consideration here is how it’s possible to accurately determine ROI in the first place. Unily has a useful ROI calculator publicly available, as well as Customer Success Managers that work with organizations to help determine the value that’s being delivered by an investment in Unily.

As a megavendor, ServiceNow lacks this level of post-sale service. Additionally, ServiceNow’s licensing model is highly complex and requires custom renegotiation every year; this makes it extremely difficult to isolate the Employee Center part of a SNOW estate to determine if it is truly driving value.

Free up IT for business-critical tasks

The set up and ongoing maintenance of a ServiceNow intranet requires heavy IT involvement right from day one, including the setup of complex taxonomies for content and page creation and approvals.

With Unily, you don’t need IT involvement unless you want it. Unily is ready to go, out-the-box, with all the functionality you need to realize value right from launch – with the option to customize and extend it if you have the expertise and resources available. Day-to-day, Unily can be managed by non-technical stakeholders such as Internal Comms Managers.

Because Employee Center always requires heavy involvement from IT and ServiceNow administrators, it can quickly become a resource sink. Consider this: IT needs to pivot to focus on a business-critical activity that involves weeks of input, leaving little time for work and approvals within the company intranet which quickly falls behind.

For CIOs and technical decision makers looking to maximize the impact of their already stretched teams, it’s often better to free up IT to do the tasks that can only be done by them.

Do more, with less

Thinking further about resourcing, company intranets created with ServiceNow typically require significant involvement in terms of headcount. And, as everyone knows, employees’ time equals company money.

In contrast, Unily intranets are often managed by the smallest internal comms and admin teams of any solutions on the market. This was evidenced in Neilsen Norman’s 10 Best Intranets report, where one Unily customer managed an intranet for over 50,000 employees with a lean team of just 4 admins. 

In the same report, a ServiceNow intranet required four times as many admins, plus a PR agency, to manage an intranet with less than half that number of end users. According to Forrester, a ServiceNow platform will also require the dedication of more internal resources – definitely IT and likely also HR – as “the platform grows and deploys more use cases.”

What Unily delivers, therefore, is the ability to effectively serve large organizations but without resource or technical sprawl.

Productivity PLUS engagement

ServiceNow’s Employee Center leans in heavily to productivity as a key value driver. It claims to bring all employees’ apps, services, tasks and information together in one place to “reduce swivel chair moments.” Unily does this too, providing a single pane of glass experience for employees to find everything they need in one central location.

Productivity is often a key success metric for employee experience platforms, and ServiceNow does appear to deliver on this. However, Unily offers both productivity and employee engagement enhancements – truly the best of both worlds! The two are interlinked; happy employees are more productive, as well as more likely to stay in their current roles for longer. Plus, more engaged employees are more likely to quickly align around and execute on company imperatives – something we’ve referred to as organizational velocity.

Prioritize speed, avoid bottlenecks

On the subject of speed, customers may wish to think about the impact of ServiceNow’s highly centralized governance model, versus Unily’s more flexible approach. This is something that reflects its ITSM background, but which is highly unusual for purpose-built intranets which tend to favor decentralized models, with strong governance ‘guardrails’ in place.

Ask yourself this question:

What if IT is caught up in another urgent matter, and not able to create and approve content?

For some types of content, such as news articles or urgent announcements, this time delay may mean that items are out of date as soon as they’re published. Over time, this erodes trust in the intranet as an authoritative source of current and accurate information.

With Unily, governance and content creation strikes an effective balance between granularity and configurability.

Partnership from day one

There’s no avoiding it: ServiceNow’s Employee Centre is 100% self-service. This is very common for megavendors, but it does mean that customers requiring more help will have to rely on the patchy guidance of ServiceNow’s user forums, or pay extra for a third party partner to help with whatever they need.

If you’re happy with this, then ServiceNow may be a reasonable solution. If not, you’d be better off with Unily, who provides bespoke implementation and setup with satisfaction guarantees built in. Thereafter, you’ll receive dedicated, ongoing support from an expert in-house Customer Success Manager.

A beautiful, attention-grabbing intranet that reflects your brand values

Needing to align a global workforce under a company’s brand values is a common reason that customers go searching for a new EXP. This is an area where Unily excels vs ServiceNow.

It’s well known that Unily has an almost infinite amount of branding and design capabilities when it comes to the look and feel of your intranet. In fact, Unily’s customers have won multiple awards and been praised for the leading-edge design of their intranets by the top voices in the industry.

However, a beautiful intranet is not just about looks; visual appeal can be crucial for getting employees to sign up in the first place, and to keep using the intranet.

Consider this example: a large organization with short-term personnel out in the field – perhaps engineering contractors, or agency nurses – has a very short window of opportunity to catch these employees’ attention and get them to log in to the company app. If the company app looks like an unengaging IT portal, rather than something consumer-grade and easy to use, that opportunity may be lost.

Collaboration and cross-pollination of employee knowledge

Buyers looking for a new employee experience or intranet solution often state ‘collaboration’ between employees as high on their list of priorities. In this respect, it should be noted that ServiceNow does not offer any social capabilities, nor any features around employee recognition (such as the ability to award kudos or give ‘shout-outs.’). Organizations looking for such features, as well as any gamification capabilities, will have to purchase another separate solution.

While fun, what these features actually do is bring employees together, promoting the cross-pollination of internal knowledge and best practices. In the case of searchable kudos, for example, it becomes easy to identify internal experts. It’s this kind of collaboration and shareability that breaks down silos across the organization.

Conclusion

In summary, ServiceNow Employee Center may be a good choice for an enterprise organization with a large IT department – including in-house ServiceNow Administrators and developers – that has the capacity to set up, update, and manage an intranet day-to-day. It may also be a solid option if an organization’s employees are happy working in ITSM-like ‘workflows.’

However, for organizations looking for a beautiful and highly useable EXP that is proven to drive both engagement and productivity, is adopted by employees, frees up technical resources, and has predictable overheads year-to-year, Unily will be the wiser choice.

The best of both worlds

ServiceNow and Unily are both market-leading solutions – one in ITSM, the other dedicated to employee engagement. In this respect, it’s beneficial to let both options do what they were built to do, leveraging their combined strengths together. Unily has long had robust integrations with ServiceNow; many customers use Unily as their digital front door, providing state of the art comms features and consumer-grade UI, while surfacing tickets and other content from ServiceNow. This way, customers can realize the best of both worlds, using two best-of-breed platforms to drive maximum ROI and productivity. 

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