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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

"The value for the clients is that you can save information in the application and get reports with that information."
"Scalability is very good. We have scaled to more users and more functionality."
"You can customize it and make it work to the client's needs."
"It's fairly easy to use, from a UI standpoint."
"Our users access it via the web. We have external and internal sources, and we're now introducing the mobile app portion so our computer engineers can respond to tickets remotely."
"The view it provides into who's doing the work."
"It gives us one central location to know, not only who is contacting us, but what they're contacting us for, what application they're contacting us for."
"Being able to specify event rules and SLAs that can help to automate some of the processes that people are doing manually is valuable."
"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."
"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 haven't evaluated any product recently, but from what I can tell, looking around online, what xMatters has that others don't have are the custom forms. That's the big differentiator at the moment because that's something that we heavily use."
"We have not noticed any scalability issues in the two years that we have used the system."
"The two-way integration between ServiceNow and xMatters allows us to assign tickets to support personnel faster and respond to incidents faster."
"The on-call schedule that they have for groups is amazing in terms of how it works and how it triggers. You don't need to do anything. You just upload the users, and you have the calendar of the schedules. It is amazing how it works and how easy it is to work with this feature."
"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."
"Through one tool, we're able to generate email notifications, voice notifications, mobile push notifications, Slack channel notifications, all managed from one place, simple and easy to use. People are able to join the conference bridge directly from the phone call by pressing one button instead of having to dial into a bridge and remember a conference code."
 

Cons

"We just upgraded about a year and half ago and it was painful. We had the testing of the dev environment, and then testing of the production environment, so it was two weekends out of my life. And stuff broke."
"The monitoring tool is in need of improvement."
"When I am reviewing an incident, sometimes there is too much information on the same screen and it is difficult to discern what is of value."
"The CA products integrate well together but I would like to see better integration with third-party solutions."
"The interface for the users is a bit old-fashioned and not user-friendly."
"It doesn't yet have the ability to integrate with other products."
"Right now, you have to create the Scoreboards individually for roles or users. If they could separate that functionality, and create the scoreboards separately, and then just link scoreboards to roles and users - that way you could reuse the same ones - that would be a huge benefit. I know, because they're a nightmare to manage at times."
"I am not able to see tickets on a bigger scale. I can't see the overall bigger picture."
"If you are not one of the big players of their customers, the chance that one of your minor wishes will granted are very small."
"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."
"As an agent, as someone who is on call, I can mark an absence time and I can optionally put somebody in my place, but once you've done that, you can't edit it. You have to delete it and create a new absence, which is annoying, but it's not a massive issue. It's a minor annoyance. That's probably about the only thing I can come up with because I absolutely love the product. It's met our needs so well."
"I've asked for the ability to have tags on groups, and for dynamic lists, meaning the ability to pull data from another location and use it in xMatters dynamically. Right now, for example, if I have a form and want to populate a list, it's a manual process. I have to copy and paste the list items."
"It has not improved our organization."
"We would like to see the integration between our ITSM solution and xMatters."
"They could make the product more customizable."
"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

"The solution is quite reasonable compared to other solutions in the market."
"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."
"I don't see anyone other than large companies being able to afford this system."
"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."
"It is a bit expensive, but you definitely get what you pay for. It is worth it!"
"Pricing is simple, as it’s per concurrent analysts."
"I think pricing of this model is suitable for growing corporations."
"The pricing is too high... we procured 150 licenses and we have almost 1,500 users in IT. We had to come up with a few ideas for determining which users get a license and which users don't need one. Due to the limitation of the number of licenses, we were unable to integrate the user profiles with Active Directory."
"The only potential concern is professional services. They are capable, but like to bill on an hourly basis."
"​I do not think it is worth the value.​"
"I don't make the decisions on the cost aspect. We haven't had any complaints. I think it has a reasonable price."
"I am not really privy to how much my client is paying for this service. They just tell me the number of licenses that they have. Every time that I say, "I need extra licenses to make sure that all Level 1 and 2s have their own xMatters account," they keep telling me that it is too expensive. If the only purpose is to call people, it doesn't justify the cost of paying more than the number of licenses that they already have."
"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."
"If the licensing were cheaper, our customer might buy more."
"This is a subscription-based, SaaS solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Performing Arts
8%
Computer Software Company
31%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Performing Arts
5%
 

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.
860,825 professionals have used our research since 2012.