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Clarity SM 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Clarity SM
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
107
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (24th), IT Service Management (ITSM) (26th)
xMatters
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
IT Alerting and Incident Management (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Systems Management solutions, they serve different purposes. Clarity SM is designed for IT Service Management (ITSM) and holds a mindshare of 1.1%, up 1.1% compared to last year.
xMatters, on the other hand, focuses on IT Alerting and Incident Management, holds 6.8% mindshare, down 8.5% since last year.
IT Service Management (ITSM)
IT Alerting and Incident Management
 

Featured Reviews

Türker Kara - PeerSpot reviewer
Quite good back-end architecture for end users but the API is very, very bad
Our company uses the solution for system, program, service request, change, and knowledge-based management.  We perform CMD authorizations and use a lot of integrations for our in-house or third-party applications. We also use Salesforce automations and Microsoft orchestrations.  We have about…
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

"We can search open and closed cases to find what we have done in other incidents."
"Right now, we are starting to be dependent on the CMDB a lot."
"The UI is very user-friendly."
"The use, from administrative stance, is pretty simple; and even from an analyst and employee's stances. It's an easy to use system, as far as ticketing systems go, because some of them can be really inundating and complex."
"All the interactions and orchestrations of every problem, we can analyze what happens in the organization and which kind of incident we have."
"Scalability is very good. We have scaled to more users and more functionality."
"We have decreased training and talk time, and all those good stats, just by reusing information, not reinventing it, every time we get a call."
"The view it provides into who's doing the work."
"The two-way integration between ServiceNow and xMatters allows us to assign tickets to support personnel faster and respond to incidents faster."
"The feature that I have found to be most valuable is the entire alert notification configuration, having an external system to trigger events that will process the alert to the supporting team. If a system is down, then you need to get it attention. Sometimes, it cannot wait until the next day. Therefore, how xMatters provides this type of integration is critical."
"The automatic logging that's built into xMatters, especially the timeline of events, is very helpful because we can figure out why a particular person got a call... Having that level of detail built-in makes it really easy for me or the managers to prove that's what happened, and we can self-serve that information. It gives people the autonomy to know why they got a call."
"For us, their biggest feature is event alerting and the retention of those events. This way, if something goes wrong, we can provide a report of everything that was sent out and everything that was captured."
"The ability to have the rota and then configure notifications that you can directly fire them into the group is most valuable. The India shift is from 2:00 AM to 9:00 AM, and then it is the UK shift from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM UK time, and then there is also a defined US shift and on-call hours. It allows us to make sure that everyone is going to get notified when they need to be about an issue. We can target specific locations or users with notifications."
"It has been easy to use and very reliable."
"It helped change behavior across the organization to improve accountability."
"Having our users manage their own notification devices within xMatters is huge, since it takes the burden off our datacenter."
 

Cons

"The product needs to have a better user experience in the interface and mobile functionality.​"
"Clarity tech support has gotten worse since Broadcom acquired CA Technologies. We're not getting the support we've come to expect as a large enterprise. Clarity's support needs to improve, or it's going to lose market share."
"They should enhance the service desk manager's service point function to be more customizable."
"We went from 12.1 to 14, so there was a lot involved in it. The issues we had were migration issues, getting our information from one place to the next and making sure everything was as everyone needed."
"We need a mobile solution. We are not using any mobile functionality for the product, but we think that this necessary."
"They need to improve the High Availability, and the native integration between CA Service Desk Manager, CA Process Automation, CA Service Catalog and CA Unified Self-Service."
"Although I wasn't involved in the initial setup I have been involved with upgrades. They have been fairly complex. We've had some issues with upgrades where we had to roll back and get some things fixed. Some things that we ended up tracking back to not following directions right, but then other things we've run into issues."
"The UI needs to be upgraded."
"It has not improved our organization."
"While the documentation is good, the knowledge base - the collection of user supported community forums - is a little weak compared to some of the other products I've used. If I have a problem that I can't find the answer to in the documentation, there are very few places to go after that, because the user base, the community forums, are not strong for me to find someone who's had the same issue as me, and find out what the answer to their problem was. That's somewhat of a weak point."
"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."
"I would like some minor UI changes. I believe I filed some enhancement requests with xMatters. For example, in one area, they have some way for you to look at a particular functionality with different sets of reporting UI. However, that same reporting UI is not yet available with some other functionalities. Essentially, in their existing functionality, the xMatters application does an excellent job, but in other functionalities within their UI, they don't have that. On the back-end, they are related. Instead of one click where you can see everything, right now you need to go to different areas to access similar information. It would be nice to have everything in one place. While they have an excellent element A, I am hoping that they could just simply make that feature also available in their element B."
"​Integrations seem to be the most difficult part. Once setup though, they work well.​"
"While they do have an extensive library of integrations, sometimes those integrations or custom integrations, require a more technical level of expertise in products outside of xMatters, such as Java."
"They could make the product more customizable."
"We would like to see a greater variety of integrations with ServiceNow. It works fine as it is, but an enhancement would be the ability to interact with the major incident module in ServiceNow... The way our major incident process works, when an incident is elevated from a P1 to a major incident, that is an extra flag in ServiceNow. It would be awesome to have xMatters get notification when something goes from a P1 to a major and then have it go through a different workflow, rather than our regular P1."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I don't see anyone other than large companies being able to afford this system."
"Pricing is simple, as it’s per concurrent analysts."
"The solution is quite reasonable compared to other solutions in the market."
"I think pricing of this model is suitable for growing corporations."
"It is a bit expensive, but you definitely get what you pay for. It is worth it!"
"The pricing is based on a subscription model."
"There is a subscripted needed to use Clarity SM. The price of the solution could be less expensive. ServiceNow is less expensive and BMC Helix is priced similar to Clarity SM."
"Clarity offers a perpetual license. Customers purchase the license once and then pay for maintenance. CA provides a subscription model as well. Both models are available for our customers."
"​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. ​"
"​Pricing is pretty straightforward and listed on their website. I recommend starting small and expanding later.​"
"I know roughly what we pay per year. For what we use it for and what its purpose is, it is very valuable."
"I'm not really involved with the cost standpoint. I've only heard rumors of how much it costs, and if it costs what I think it costs, its cost is very high as compared to a lot of other tools that we're using here. It seems on the higher end from a cost standpoint."
"If you are willing to pay for the licensing of it, it is able to scale out.​"
"The cost depends very much on the company's size and usage. We're a very high use case compared to many companies, so we had to consider licensing costs carefully. If we added all our users, that would be 30,000, and that's no good; we wouldn't have been able to afford it. For example, we had to put in customization to sync across on-call users. For the license per user, the price is very reasonable and comparable to ServiceNow when factoring in everything that needs to get up and running."
"I don't make the decisions on the cost aspect. We haven't had any complaints. I think it has a reasonable price."
"It seemed comparable or more reasonable than some of the other solutions, at least when we evaluated it. There are no extra costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. Its cost is good, given the breadth of features provided by xMatters."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Performing Arts
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
29%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Performing Arts
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Also Known As

CA Service Desk Manager, Clarity Service Management, CA Service Management, Unicenter Service Desk, CA SDM, CA Service Catalog, CA Business Service Insight
xMatters IT Management
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Banco G&T Continental City of Perth, FEMSA, Fujitsu, Manpower, Muslim Commercial Bank - MCB, Punjab National Bank, Santa Clara County Social Services, Stefanini
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 ServiceNow, Atlassian, BMC and others in IT Service Management (ITSM). Updated: June 2025.
862,514 professionals have used our research since 2012.