Service desks with a CMDB built in: what the pricing pages say

All prices below are list prices as shown on the vendors' pages read on 27 September 2026, with Freshservice's IT asset management pricing page read on 11 October 2026. They can change; confirm before you budget.

Why look at service desks at all?

For a smaller IT team, the cheapest alternative to a hand-kept CMDB can be a service desk that includes one. The record and the tickets live together, and the price is often published per agent. The question is how much of the record such a CMDB fills by itself.

Freshservice

Freshworks publishes Starter at $19, Growth at $49 and Pro at $99 per agent per month, billed annually, with Enterprise on request. Problem, change and release management sit on Pro and Enterprise; the service catalog and SLAs start at Growth. Its IT asset management page describes "agentless discovery" and a CMDB built "with data from devices, software, storage, cloud resources, and their interdependencies", plus SaaS license management. A separate IT asset management pricing page, read on 11 October 2026, shows that the CMDB and asset discovery come with the ITAM Growth plan, with SaaS discovery on Pro and service discovery and application dependency mapping on Enterprise. ITAM is licensed in Asset Units bought in packs of 500: a desktop or mobile device counts as 1 unit, a server, VM or network device as 4, a SaaS user as 1. The Asset Unit price is not shown, so the CMDB's own cost cannot be modelled from the page. Freshservice is the only service desk we score; it ranks 8 of 9 at 60.8.

Jira Service Management

Atlassian lists a free plan for 3 agents, Standard at $20 per agent per month, Premium at $51.42 and Enterprise on request. Standard includes "Asset and configuration management"; Premium adds "Advanced Asset Management and Configuration". We read the pricing page only, so we do not score it.

ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus

ManageEngine lists Standard from $13, Professional from $27 and Enterprise from $67 per technician per month. The CMDB is a $1,195 annual add-on on Professional and included in Enterprise. A free edition covers 2 technicians and 250 IT assets. Cloud and on-premises editions are offered.

Halo

Halo publishes one price, £66 per agent per month billed annually on its UK list, with "No tiers, no bolt-ons, no locked-away features". Asset and CMDB modules are included, and there is a 30-day trial with all modules. A US dollar figure was not shown on the page we read.

What do the pricing pages not tell you?

Three things matter more to record accuracy than the per-agent price.

• How the CMDB is filled. Freshservice describes agentless discovery. The other three pricing pages list asset and configuration features but say little about discovery on the pages we read.
• Whether records from other tools are matched. None of these pages describes reconciling the CMDB against EDR, MDM or directory data.
• Who owns each record. Ownership mapping is not described on any of them.

How does that compare with the rest of the set?

ServiceNow does not publish prices for ITSM, Discovery or the CMDB. Device42 publishes its pricing model, an annual subscription by number of devices, but not amounts. Among the dedicated options, JupiterOne, runZero and Lansweeper publish price lists by data points or assets. Axonius publishes device-based pricing with a starting figure of $8.55 per asset for 15,000 to 24,999 assets and a 500-asset AWS Marketplace package at $90,625 for 12 months. Armis shows only an AWS Marketplace minimum of $3,250 a month. Oomnitza does not publish prices.

How should you budget?

Per-agent pricing scales with the size of the IT team, not the size of the estate. That suits a small team with many devices. If the CMDB still needs filling from other tools, add the cost of a discovery or reconciliation option, and the time to run it. The drift cost calculator gives the other side of the comparison: what manual upkeep costs at your own counts and rates.

Which questions should go to each vendor?

Ask every service desk vendor the same four questions in writing: which plan includes the CMDB and discovery, whether discovery is agentless or needs an agent or probe, how often it runs and what controls the schedule, and whether records from other tools are matched or simply added. The answers decide how much of the drift problem the service desk solves on its own.

The short version

A service desk CMDB with published pricing is a sensible start for a small team. Read past the price: the pages say much less about how the record is kept accurate than about what the agent seat costs.