Kovira compared with the tools you already know
Honest, substantive side-by-sides with the CMDB, documentation, and help desk platforms that internal IT teams, small businesses, and MSPs most often evaluate alongside Kovira.
Where Kovira sits in the IT tooling landscape
IT teams typically end up running two, three, or four products to cover the ground a CMDB and ITSM platform should cover end to end. Documentation in one place (IT Glue, Hudu, Confluence pages), tickets and changes in another (ServiceNow, Freshservice, ManageEngine, a Microsoft Teams help desk), network discovery and audit somewhere else (Liongard, Network Glue, the spreadsheet a technician maintained for two months), endpoint inventory in an RMM, and a password vault that nobody can remember the master password for. Each tool is separately good at what it does. Stitching them together is the work.
Kovira is one product across that whole surface. The CMDB models your infrastructure as typed configuration items with real relationships between them. ITILv4 incident management runs against that CMDB, with full SLA tracking driven by per-customer policies and coverage windows. Change enablement enforces an independent reviewer on every approval. The workflow engine fires on CI changes, ticket lifecycle events, SLA events, schedules, and incoming email. VECTOR scans your network and brings back physical topology with port-level connectivity. ATLAS keeps endpoint records current. Microsoft 365 sync covers Entra ID, Intune, and connected mailboxes. Documents live next to the CIs they describe. Every action is in the audit trail.
The comparisons below put each of those tools next to Kovira on the dimensions IT teams actually evaluate against. None of them are bad products. Some of them are the right call when the requirement matches their shape. Where they differ from Kovira is in scope, deployment time, pricing model, and how much of the surface ships in one platform versus across several.
Six dimensions worth comparing
Use these as a checklist whatever shortlist you build. They are the dimensions on which CMDB and ITSM platforms most often differ in ways that show up in day-to-day operations after the rollout.
Configuration database depth
Does the platform model your environment as typed configuration items with dependency relationships, or as flat documents and tags? Typed CIs make impact analysis and change reviews trustworthy because the schema enforces what each record is. Look for typed fields per category (devices, networks, services, racks, contracts, SLAs), real foreign keys between related records, and a dependency map that runs against current data rather than diagrams someone redrew last quarter.
ITILv4 practice surface
ITSM tools differ wildly on how seriously they take ITIL. Look for the full incident lifecycle (response and resolution SLAs driven by per-customer coverage windows, classification at close, watchers, links between major events, postmortem references), change enablement that enforces an independent reviewer, and a CMDB that tickets and changes link back to. The presence or absence of these capabilities tells you whether the product was designed around ITIL or had ITIL labels added later.
Built-in discovery vs paid add-on
Network discovery and endpoint inventory either ship with the platform or come as separately-licensed products. Kovira ships VECTOR (agentless network discovery with physical topology mapping and port-level connectivity) and ATLAS (Windows and Linux endpoint agents with central pause, resume, and remote uninstall) in every plan, including the free tier. ServiceNow Discovery, IT Glue Network Glue, and equivalent add-ons elsewhere are licensed separately and often need a partner to deploy.
Email to ticket and workflow triggers
Where do tickets actually come from in your team? If most arrive by email, look for a real mailbox-to-ticket pipeline (scoped per-mailbox access, native reply threading, attachment preservation, loop prevention) and an incoming-mail trigger inside the workflow engine. The combination is what lets you route, acknowledge, and escalate inbound tickets without bolting on a third-party connector.
Pricing transparency and free tier
Per-seat pricing published on the website is dramatically less expensive than enterprise licensing quoted per customer once you factor in implementation partner fees. A genuinely usable free tier (not a 14-day trial) lets you evaluate the platform on real data before any spend. Kovira publishes plans and prices on the pricing page and ships a permanent free tier that includes the full CMDB, network scanning, and endpoint agents with starter limits.
Migration path and lock-in
Switching tools is only realistic when the new platform can ingest the data you already have, keep it current going forward, and not trap you in a proprietary export format down the line. Look for an importable schema that maps to your existing records, ongoing discovery that ends the migration rather than turning it into a permanent CSV pipeline, and an exportable audit trail and CI history if you ever need to leave.
Side-by-side comparisons
Each comparison covers the same dimensions: CMDB depth, ITILv4 practice surface, discovery and integrations, automation, pricing, and where each product is the right call.
vs ServiceNow
Kovira vs ServiceNow
Enterprise ITSM giant
ServiceNow is the enterprise ITSM platform that covers IT, HR, finance, and customer service if you have the platform team and the implementation budget to run it. Kovira delivers the CMDB and ITSM half of that surface (configuration management, incident and change with response and resolution SLAs, workflow automation, audit) running in minutes for IT teams of 1 to 500 technicians, with a permanent free tier and published per-technician pricing.
Read comparisonvs IT Glue
Kovira vs IT Glue
IT documentation platform
IT Glue is the legacy MSP documentation incumbent: passwords, runbooks, and asset records, with limited CMDB depth and no ITSM. Kovira covers IT Glue's documentation and password-vault use cases and adds a typed CMDB with dependency mapping, ITILv4 incident and change management, workflow automation, VECTOR network scanning with physical topology mapping, and ATLAS endpoint agents in one product.
Read comparisonvs Hudu
Kovira vs Hudu
Modern IT documentation platform
Hudu is the modern documentation alternative to IT Glue, with a clean editor and a solid password vault. Kovira matches Hudu's documentation surface and goes further: a real CMDB with dependency mapping, ITSM (incidents, changes, SLAs, workflows), network discovery with physical topology mapping, and endpoint agents, so you replace one tool with one tool, not one tool with three.
Read comparisonvs Desk365
Kovira vs Desk365
Help desk ticketing in Microsoft Teams
Desk365 is a Microsoft Teams-native help desk for organisations standardised on M365. Kovira covers a similar surface from a different angle: ITILv4 incident management with response and resolution SLAs, mailbox-to-ticket from connected Microsoft 365 inboxes, and the configuration database underneath the tickets. Teams using Desk365 for chat-first ticketing and Kovira for the CMDB and ITIL practice surface get the best of both layers.
Read comparison
Switching to Kovira: how it actually goes
Migrations from documentation tools (IT Glue, Hudu, Confluence pages) and ITSM platforms (ServiceNow, Freshservice, ManageEngine ServiceDesk) take one of two shapes in practice. Either the team has a small, well-curated data set they want to bring across cleanly, or a large, partly-stale archive where the migration is a chance to leave behind what should not be carried forward. Kovira supports both. The public API and CSV import paths cover the standard CI types; for the records that should not survive the move, leaving them behind is the right call.
Discovery is what makes the migration end rather than turn into a permanent CSV pipeline. Once VECTOR scans the network and ATLAS rolls out to the endpoints you manage, the inventory rebuilds itself from the environment going forward. Microsoft 365 sync brings users, groups, and managed devices in. The result is that the migration cleans up a snapshot once, and the living CMDB takes the day-to-day upkeep off the team.
Tickets and changes from a previous ITSM platform usually do not come across in full history. What is worth migrating are open tickets, recent changes, and any incident or change records explicitly referenced by postmortem documents. Closed history is more useful as reporting evidence than as live records, and most teams export it once and keep it as a flat archive rather than re-import it.
Kovira is launching soon
The free tier will include the full CMDB, VECTOR scanning, and ATLAS agents. Leave your email and be first in line on launch day.