ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus vs Ralph

ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus is an IT help desk product with a free plan and a 30-day trial. Its feature set includes SLA management, a knowledge base, approval workflows, an employee portal, single sign-on, and IT asset management. The paid plans separate core help desk use from broader management needs: Standard is $13 a month, billed monthly, for IT help desk work; Professional is $27 a month, billed monthly, and adds asset management; Enterprise is $67 a month, billed monthly, and includes change management and projects alongside the help desk and asset management. The product is available on Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, web, and Windows, with mobile apps listed. That combination gives teams a way to compare the included service and asset capabilities against their plan requirements while accounting for access across desktop and mobile platforms.

Ralph is free, open-source software for asset management, data center infrastructure management, and configuration management databases in data centers and back offices. It records hardware purchases, ownership, and asset lifecycles through flexible workflow flows, and includes data center visualization, service mapping, and discovery imports. Ralph can be self-hosted on premises and exposes a REST-style web API for querying and populating its database. API resources support GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE, using an automatically generated personal token in the Authorization header. Cloud synchronization supports OpenStack Ocata, with documentation for providers such as AWS. LDAP or Active Directory authentication can be enabled. Ralph is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license and costs nothing. Production Debian packages target Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic on AMD64; Docker Compose installation is experimental. The maintainers provide source without guarantees for issue responses or pull-request support and direct commercial-support seekers to the community forum.