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BigPanda vs xMatters comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 2, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

BigPanda
Ranking in IT Alerting and Incident Management
12th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (51st), AIOps (18th)
xMatters
Ranking in IT Alerting and Incident Management
9th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the IT Alerting and Incident Management category, the mindshare of BigPanda is 5.3%, up from 4.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of xMatters is 6.1%, down from 9.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Alerting and Incident Management
 

Featured Reviews

Ankit-Mathur - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers comprehensive alert monitoring and a user-friendly interface but requires manual validation to provide accurate alerts
For new users, I would advise using BigPanda for its comprehensive alert monitoring and integration with ServiceNow. Its mapping capabilities and user-friendly interface make it valuable for incident analysis and prioritization. As users become more familiar with the tool, its full potential will become apparent, enhancing efficiency and effectiveness over time. It is easy for someone to learn to use BigPanda for the first time. We start with basic examples that everyone can understand, then provide verbal introductions followed by hands-on training over two weeks. We encourage making mistakes and asking questions to ensure understanding. It depends on the trainer's approach, but with proper guidance, anyone can learn effectively. Overall, I would rate BigPanda as a five out of ten. For it to be a perfect ten, it would need to consistently provide accurate alerts without requiring manual validation. This means it should effectively suppress similar incidents, eliminating the need for constant monitoring. Once it reaches this level of reliability, BigPanda would be exceptional.
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

"Alert deduplication and correlation - In an environment like the NOC where you're ingesting hundreds and thousands of alerts from various monitoring sources, it's time consuming and difficult to go through individual alerts and also difficult to spot critical issues. It's been great to have BigPanda not only deduplicate alerts but also correlate alerts that are seemingly unrelated, to create a clearer picture."
"Alert aggregation was the primary requirement. BigPanda pulls all this together into a single UI for us, allowing us to see related alerts grouped together into an incident, and enables us to easily create a JIRA ticket and Slack channel to manage an issue."
"The most valuable features of BigPanda include event deduplication, correlations, and enrichment, which reduce the noise in the environment."
"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."
"We have also made extensive use of the outbound integrations to ticketing systems (JIRA) and collaboration tools (Slack). The main driver for us has been getting all alerting into a single UI and enabling us to streamline our incident management process."
"The most useful feature has been the AI/ML. The way BigPanda uses the AI/ML is good compared to other SRE tools."
"BigPanda simplifies the process by consolidating multiple monitoring platforms into a single console where I can view all issues."
"The most valuable features of BigPanda are the API integration was good. It enables us to do faster onboarding."
"People are able to go in and update their contact information and even set things like when they're going to be on vacation and who their backup is."
"This has made it much easier to send notifications to a group or individual, as you just need to know the name and the message to send."
"The two-way integration between ServiceNow and xMatters allows us to assign tickets to support personnel faster and respond to incidents faster."
"Its ease of use and self-service are important to me. It's very easy for users to go in and modify their own contact information, for managers to go in and manage their own on-call rotations and shifts."
"Having our users manage their own notification devices within xMatters is huge, since it takes the burden off our datacenter."
"We have reduced the time it takes to resolve major incidents through xMatters’s conference bridge management solution."
"Simple features create flow sets and build APIs for integrations."
"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."
 

Cons

"Analytics is an area for improvement, being able to break down the actions that are being taken by users of BigPanda, as well as the auto-magical work that is being done by BigPanda."
"When handling critical traffic, the BigPanda site can slow down, which we manage with a load balancer."
"The observability can be enriched with regards to infrastructure and the application-integrated environment. The dashboard and reports could be improved."
"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."
"I am not sure if we can pull reports of bulk incidents in different formats like PDF, Excel, or CSV. This feature would allow us to extract monthly incident reports similar to ServiceNow."
"BigPanda can improve the correlations. We didn't see any big value. It is still good at the same event deduplication, event processing, and ticket creation, but I was more looking at event analysis and event correlation. In that area, it is still no big difference between the other solutions on the market. All of them, are in the same immature stage."
"The solution could improve by having better integration."
"One of the main reasons why we don't use xMatters for monitoring and alerting is that it doesn't use the rota to call the person who's on-call. It doesn't look up the rota to find out who's on-call and then contacts that person directly. I am not sure if this has changed now, but the last time we checked, this functionality wasn't there. This is one of the main improvements. We're happy with the rest of it."
"We would like to see the integration between our ITSM solution and xMatters."
"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."
"It took me awhile to get used to whatever was available in the interface. The interface from two years ago was a bit more confusing when looking at where you should go"
"If you want to alter a custom field, you can do so via import/export. But you can't have an unlimited number of custom fields, so in a large environment with a lot of teams, team provisioning becomes more difficult."
"​The REST API is still missing some important functionality, which we require."
"Reporting is the weakest point of xMatters. Since xMatters has very limited reporting and only maintains logs of events for a short period of time, we export event and conference logs to our ITSM solution."
"I would like xMatters to provide users with the capability of administering it on their own. I do a lot of hand-holding with them."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"BigPanda is cheaper than the competitors."
"We pay $200,000 USD per year."
"They were great to work with on pricing/licensing. Given we are a high-growth company, we needed a flexible site license."
"The price of BigPanda is in the middle compared to other solutions."
"This is our biggest issue: licensing. Our customer has only purchased a set number of full licensed users, and we are constantly running up against our license limit. To mitigate licensing concerns, we completely control at the admin level user additions and removals, and do a monthly cleanup process driven by security contractor removal reports."
"There's a significant difference between a full license, which allows people to respond to and acknowledge receipt of messages, and a more scaled-down license, which just allows people to see the notification. So we need to evaluate what license they need when onboarding new users because the full license is significantly more expensive."
"We're currently per license. We're paying around $44,000 per year for 80 full users and 300 standard users. For a new implementation, we also need to pay for an expert."
"The only potential concern is professional services. They are capable, but like to bill on an hourly basis."
"Cost is probably my biggest concern. I know the solution was recently acquired by Everbridge, and Everbridge was one of the competitors that was included in our RFP five years ago. Everbridge's costs were astronomical compared to where every other solution was, not just xMatters."
"The pricing is tiered so we took that into account. If we were to license 10 or 20 people, that would be a certain price. And if we were to license 50 or 100, there would be a little bit of discounting. But the per-user license was right in line with what we were expecting."
"xMatters is pricey, but you have to consider what a critical incident costs your organization."
"If the licensing were cheaper, our customer might buy more."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
19%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
7%
Computer Software Company
33%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Healthcare Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...
What do you like most about BigPanda?
One of the most valuable features of BigPanda is its user-friendly interface.
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
xMatters IT Management
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nagios, ServiceNow, ITSM, NOC, CMDB Evolved, RemedyIncident Management Process
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 BigPanda vs. xMatters and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.