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BigPanda vs PagerDuty Operations Cloud vs xMatters comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the IT Alerting and Incident Management category, the mindshare of BigPanda is 4.5%, down from 5.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PagerDuty Operations Cloud is 21.5%, down from 26.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of xMatters is 6.8%, down from 7.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Alerting and Incident Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
PagerDuty Operations Cloud21.5%
BigPanda4.5%
xMatters6.8%
Other67.2%
IT Alerting and Incident Management
 

Featured Reviews

Michael Wenn - PeerSpot reviewer
Experience boosts operational efficiency while requiring smoother setup and cost adjustments
I am a customer and end user of the BigPanda solution. My role is CEO/co-founder at AI Ops Limited, and I can be reached at mike.van@aiops.co.uk. I have opted to receive email notifications relevant to my review, which I can opt out of at any time. If I don't already have an account on peerspot.com, PeerSpot will create an account and email me login credentials.
JeremyEmmett - PeerSpot reviewer
Centralized alert management with customizable routing and superior scheduling
Everything can always be better. Operations are somewhat limited by their integration package. For example, integrating with Jira was problematic until they updated to a better plug-in. The ability to build customized modules would be advantageous, allowing organizations to define their own integration modules. It would be useful to have a way to define all configurations in code that is similar to how Terraform operates.
Dean-Robinson - PeerSpot reviewer
A versatile solution with excellent logging capabilities that reduced our time to resolve
The reporting functionality could be improved, though I know that's something xMatters, inc. is working on. For example, sometimes I need to go into the platform and find users who aren't in groups that have been created recently, haven't logged in and so on. Previously, this was hard work, but they added loads of filters, making it more accessible. Still, the ability to create custom-designated reports that I could run and schedule would be fantastic for me. It would be good if they keep improving the reporting functionality, as it can be somewhat restrictive sometimes. There are a couple of improvements that xMatters could make to the incident hub, where we can manage high-priority incidents. More sharing capability between collaborating incident managers would be good to see, including the ability to whiteboard. That would allow them to share and sketch out ideas while looking for a solution. Those two features are essential, and that's why we want to use the solution in conjunction with Everbridge because xMatters doesn't have them.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Easy integration - We've had challenges in the past integrating all of our various monitoring sources and tools into one central system. BigPanda, with the integrations that it already has, as well as offering webhook/REST API, has made it very easy for us to plug everything in."
"I would definitely recommend BigPanda for its time-saving features, root cause analysis, topology overview, and visual event representation capabilities."
"BigPanda improves service reliability with instant resolution, increased uptime, and reduced mean time to resolution, thus enhancing service quality."
"The event correlation is really good and it is able to reduce the noise. It is a good tool for anomaly detection."
"The main thing that we like about BigPanda is the user interface."
"BigPanda integrates well with other solutions, such as WatchGuard,"
"BigPanda simplifies the process by consolidating multiple monitoring platforms into a single console where I can view all issues."
"The solution is user-friendly and has good performance and certification."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"The most valuable feature of PagerDuty is its integration with other tools, such as Amazon AWS, to receive notifications or create automatic instances."
"The most valuable features of PagerDuty are customization, access, policies, and different rules regarding the path of escalation. Additionally, it's easy to use and create overrides. For example, if you all are on a call for one week each, but somebody wants to go on PTO, the team needs to swap shifts in PagerDuty. This is easy to do by creating overrides to switch up the set schedules. It's very user-friendly in that aspect. It works well for monitoring and alerting."
"It has scaled well for us."
"PagerDuty helps you bifurcate teams and redirect alerts to specific teams"
"It integrates with multiple applications and is highly customizable, with policies, escalation procedures, and an event routing tool that ensures contacting the right person."
"PagerDuty's notification process is the most valuable feature."
"A cool feature is that it helps us to understand the flow of the alert. If the alert was coming to the current on-call and he didn't catch the call or didn't notice it for any reason, it starts being escalated automatically, according to the escalation schedule, or to other teammates. You can see the flow very easily on your phone or via the website, if you want to do a post-mortem."
"xMatters stood out to us during our research because of the versatility of its rotas, how we could set up various group rotas, different shift patterns, the ability to order devices and add personal devices etc. It's a much more flexible solution than ServiceNow, the in-house tool we also evaluated."
"We're able to communicate better with specific groups or offices. We didn't have that capability or granularity before. It has helped in that regard."
"Being able to split the week however we want is definitely most valuable. We can create shifts and also see other teams' schedules. It is a very easy search to do these things."
"One of the things that really attracted me is in workflows, you can write your own custom steps in JavaScript. You are not restricted to the steps that they provide. If you can write it in JavaScript, you can pretty much do anything. It gives me flexibility in ways that other platforms don't. For example, the online dashboard system we use is not a widely used one, but they have an API. So, I'm able to write the JavaScript steps to do things like check if a system's in the maintenance window or create an instant on the dashboard or change the status of an instant. I'm not dependent on the dashboard provider or xMatters creating steps for me."
"We're able to point all of our alerting tools at xMatters and have it route alerts to the right people at the right time. We're able to generate major instant notifications for product outages, get all of our people on the bridge at the same time, and include information from our monitoring tools with that. So everyone is speaking the same language and seeing the same information. We're able to route those notifications not only to people, but also to other tools like Slack channels, where everyone can get in and collaborate."
"Being SaaS-based is a plus. Regardless of the state of our network or infrastructure, xMatters will still be available via a mobile device."
"By adding the ServiceNow integration, we have been able to page support groups for critical incidents and move scheduling from ServiceNow into xMatters, offering more control to our support groups."
"We saw the value by being able to import everyone's schedule into one common central repository and have one tool for all the operational teams, or any team for that matter. It gave us the technology to find out who is on call. The incident management of xMatters' integration was another key aspect, where we could say, "You can configure this when a high ticket fires.""
 

Cons

"BigPanda sometimes creates false incidents and workarounds, causing financial disturbances because we pay for each incident."
"The planned maintenance feature in BigPanda needs enhancements due to its limited scheduling options."
"The usability needs to improve, because it is a pure code environment."
"The solutions were quite useful but not completely stable."
"The cost of this product is too high compared to New Relic."
"It would be beneficial for BigPanda to offer detailed error descriptions similar to what AppDynamics and ThousandEyes provide."
"We had to use a partner for the deployment."
"The observability can be enriched with regards to infrastructure and the application-integrated environment. The dashboard and reports could be improved."
"Something that needs to be improved, is adding multilingual support."
"The solution does not code all alerts correctly so sometimes you get false positives or multiple alerts for the same issue."
"It is a very non-customizable product, so you cannot add things like root cause analysis or the classification of incidents based on the area where you are getting more incidents. For example, if you're getting a lot of database issues, that may be an are you want to probe."
"PagerDuty should be integrated with other tools, so it can import the IT roster automatically. Our other rules continue to work once they're configured, but the roster must be added manually."
"The user interface could be more intuitive."
"Because of the way you have to structure the rosters, if an engineer has to go on leave (or something), you can't just go in and reassign/take this person out of all of the different rosters that they're in. You have to go into each of the rosters and take them out. There might be a roster for business hours, after hours rotation, and monitoring deployments. Each time we need to take an engineer out of the pool, e.g., if they're sick or on leave, then we have to go and touch all of those rosters, updating and replacing them. Whereas, if we could just take the person out and have it automatically fill in the rostering, then that would make life a lot easier for managing it."
"PagerDuty's webhooks need some improvement."
"PagerDuty could improve the event orchestration by enhancing features, such as easier condition setup inside the orchestration."
"In terms of intuitiveness and flexibility of xMatters when it comes to customizing on-call schedules, rotations, and escalations, for me, as an IT professional, setting it up isn't that big of a deal, but I understand that some people struggle with it because when you get wrapped up into it. You can get lost. It's not super complex, but it's complicated enough to the point where you can say that you should have done it another way. The shift part can be confusing for some people. In that respect, one of the shortcomings my team has found is when we have to add another person, such as a new hire, to xMatters, we can't add them to a group within xMatters without having to put them on a shift. If we put them in a group, they have to be on-call. We can create their account, and then they're just out there in limbo until their team says, "You have to be on this shift." One piece of feedback for xMatters is to figure out how to have manageable groups so that they're contactable from xMatters. They do not necessarily have to be on a shift right from the start or at all for that matter."
"​The REST API is still missing some important functionality, which we require."
"We would like to see the integration between our ITSM solution and xMatters."
"The data validation and verification need to be enhanced so that when data is changed, it reviews it in an automated manner and catches all of the anomalies."
"When you are not using the conference bridge from xMatters and you are using an external one, it is a little bit hard to get the person whom xMatters calls to jump directly to the external bridge. They need to hang up the phone and then get to the email to get the URL so that they can jump on the bridge. There is no direct connection from xMatters to that external bridge, but I understand that part of the business."
"The user interface could be more intuitive. Once you know what you're doing, you're fine. However, if you don't know where to start then it can be a bit difficult to figure out how to make it work and how it will function together with different tools in the Flow Designer."
"They recently released an incident module that allows users, or at least teams, to track major incidents and other things, and you can send out communication via that one webpage. You can engage on-call teams and communicate to stakeholders as well, but one thing that is missing there is a group chat. If there is a group chat on the same webpage that all of the support teams could use, it would be a one-stop shop that all of the major incident managers would use as their product to manage a major incident. Without that, at the moment, they are mainly referring to teams and then adding data into xMatters as and when they can."
"A lot of the issues that we've had have already been addressed. However, they could be clearer with the actual throughput and the costs. The throughput that we signed up for was a lot lower than what we needed, and we had to pay a lot more to get the throughput that we needed."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"They were great to work with on pricing/licensing. Given we are a high-growth company, we needed a flexible site license."
"We pay $200,000 USD per year."
"The price of BigPanda is in the middle compared to other solutions."
"BigPanda is cheaper than the competitors."
"They're very good in pricing compared to the competitors in the area. I would rate them a five out of five in terms of pricing."
"The cost is quite high. But if you want to get a full-featured application and you have a big team..."
"The cost is based on the package you select."
"There is a license needed to use PagerDuty."
"If we wanted phone calls or additional SMSs, we would have to pitch up for those. They give us so many per month per user, then we have to pay extra if it goes over that."
"The price is very high."
"The solution is paid on a monthly basis and represents about 1% of the platform's budget."
"PagerDuty has monthly and yearly licenses available, the costs of which can get quite high if you have a large number of users."
"I know roughly what we pay per year. For what we use it for and what its purpose is, it is very valuable."
"The pricing and licensing are okay. I wish that the user licenses were cheaper but the stakeholder licenses are at a reasonable cost."
"The features they provide, versus the cost, are pretty good."
"The only potential concern is professional services. They are capable, but like to bill on an hourly basis."
"​You pay for the user, not the number of alerts. Therefore, xMatters provides a better ROI, if you can leverage it for notifications based on alerts from other monitoring tools. ​"
"xMatters shortens the time to resolution, so the amount saved in potential lost revenue and productivity has justified the cost for our organization.​"
"It is worth the cost. You need to know the number of users that are going to use it, which is usually pretty easy to calculate. It's on a per-user license."
"If the licensing were cheaper, our customer might buy more."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
24%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
6%
Computer Software Company
15%
Performing Arts
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
29%
Performing Arts
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise19
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise24
 

Questions from the Community

Any advice about APM solutions?
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems,...
What do you like most about BigPanda?
One of the most valuable features of BigPanda is its user-friendly interface.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BigPanda?
The pricing of BigPanda includes considerations for pricing, licensing, and setup costs of the solution.
What do you like most about PagerDuty?
The product easily integrates with other solutions.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PagerDuty?
The solution was expensive, but if all its features were utilized, it was considered worth the cost. The tier-based p...
What needs improvement with PagerDuty?
Everything can always be better. Operations are somewhat limited by their integration package. For example, integrati...
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Also Known As

No data available
No data available
xMatters IT Management
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nagios, ServiceNow, ITSM, NOC, CMDB Evolved, RemedyIncident Management Process
40% of the Fortune 100 TrustPagerDuty. Customers include: Slack, Intuit, Zendesk, Panasonic, Pinterest, Airbnb, eHarmony, McKesson, Comcast
Over 2.7 million users trust xMatters daily at successful startups and global giants including athenahealth, BMC Software, Box, Credit Suisse, Danske Bank, Experian, NVIDIA, ViaSat and Vodafone. xMatters is headquartered in San Ramon, California and has offices worldwide.  Visit our website to see how business like yours found solutions with xMatters.
Find out what your peers are saying about PagerDuty, Splunk, Atlassian and others in IT Alerting and Incident Management. Updated: September 2025.
868,759 professionals have used our research since 2012.