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Everbridge IT Alerting 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 May 2025, in the IT Alerting and Incident Management category, the mindshare of Everbridge IT Alerting is 10.0%, up from 8.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PagerDuty Operations Cloud is 21.4%, down from 30.0% 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

it_user741570 - PeerSpot reviewer
Gets the right parties to the table at the right time - our mean time to restore has diminished, saving us money
In recent weeks we've been talking to Everbridge about leveraging some new functionality that they're demploying right now around orchestration. Imagine a full, closed-loop event remediation: auto-remediation. A server throws an alert. We catch it in our monitoring tool. We page or SMS text, using Everbridge IT Alerting. A group member receives that text and responds to the text with "Option One." Option one can say, "I want to go ahead and execute an orchestration that will automatically stop and restart the services on that box or even reboot the box." That would, again, further reduce service restoration time, and significantly reducing the manual engagement of logging a ticket, logging onto the box, restarting the box or the servers or services manually. All of that can be done through automation. We're not there yet, but that's what we're talking about right now, as a part of our next wave of moving along the crawl, walk, run journey. In terms of what could be improved, almost always, there is something that could be improved. I've been in this industry long enough to know that there is no perfect system. All the good ones still offer opportunities for getting better. I think if you were to look from their point of view, they would also see themselves in a crawl, walk, run journey. They may be further along in their walk, but they're probably not in the "Olympic sprint" or "Olympic marathon" stage yet. They've got lots of potential, room for feature enhancements, improvements. A couple of key ones might include - and I think they are working towards these things - analytics. If I want to do sophisticated reporting and analysis of the data that's being captured in IT Alerting, at the moment, the reporting interface is immature. They're very helpful. They get it. They're listening to us, but it's weak. It's growing. It's getting better. Reporting and analytics would be one space. Their integration capabilities are still progressing, but not quite where we'd like to see them yet. They're moving there with that orchestration capability where they're seeing the potential of an API-first mentality. So instead of trying to build custom connections into everything, you open up APIs to allow other systems to talk to IT Alerting and allow IT Alerting to talk to other systems. There is room for improvement, but they get it. They're listening in that space, too. Sure, there are things they can be doing better, but in partnership with them, us among other customers, I think we've got their ear, and they're being very proactive about listening.
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

"The most valuable feature is automated escalation, as it eliminates a manual process which is prone to errors."
"You can configure the tool to escalate if no action is taken within a certain time period. That avoids sending off an alert that nobody deals with and where nobody knows that nobody has dealt with it."
"It helps to pull the right people in very quickly, through a collection of utilities where you can say, "I want to notify more than one person at a time. I want to escalate at my discretion and via rules within the system.""
"The rotation and replacement options save our managers a lot of time."
"Even in the first few months, we realized some of those benefits around shortening the time to resolution."
"With SaaS, we can implement in other regions without having to physically go to there."
"It just runs. I do not think we have had a single outage; nothing. There has not been a single issue with it in the time that we have had it running. It just works."
"The most valuable feature is the support calendars."
"The product easily integrates with other solutions."
"It reduces the amount of white noise. If something comes through, then it will alert somebody. However, if it's a bit of white noise that comes through at night, then it gets dealt with the next day. Everything is visible to everybody. It's not just a single person getting an SMS, then going, "Oh, I'm not going to worry about that." The visibility to everybody on the team is one of the great things about it because it reduces the white noise."
"It has scaled well for us."
"The product has valuable on-call scheduling, escalation, and incident workflow management features."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"PagerDuty helps you bifurcate teams and redirect alerts to specific teams"
"The most valuable feature is the phone app that allows us to send notifications without the additional fees when sending by SMS or phone calls."
"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."
"It has been easy to use and very reliable."
"Being SaaS-based is a plus. Regardless of the state of our network or infrastructure, xMatters will still be available via a mobile device."
"Allows us to define scenarios that notify only the necessary people when we need to open a conference bridge."
"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."
"The UI: It is easily navigable."
"It has improved our time to respond. Prior to the use of xMatters, it might take hours or even a day to get someone involved on a problem. Now, it's down to minutes."
"The two-way integration between ServiceNow and xMatters allows us to assign tickets to support personnel faster and respond to incidents faster."
"Made it very easy to implement our roster of people who receive alarms with the REST API."
 

Cons

"An incident management feature would be nice because, as it stands now, you select different items when you're filling out a form to launch a notification. If those were more conditional it would help. Right now it just puts out whatever you put into the form, whereas, if you could specify a "yes" or "no" and it would input a different verbiage, that would be nice to have, instead of having to spell out all the verbiage."
"I would like them to add GPS going forward."
"One thing that could be improved would be to enable the mobile app to more easily display published calendars via the Member Portal. Currently, it is quite difficult."
"You have to create schedules in Everbridge. It would be better if it could tie into an existing solution, such as Microsoft Exchange or Google Calendar, so that you don't have to create it in both places. That's one thing it lacks right now. You can't just say, "Hey, look at this Microsoft calendar. That's what we want to use." You have to create it in Everbridge."
"With their templates, you can only have a maximum of three phases: new, updated, and resolved. It's not always that easy when we open up a call, that we identify who we need, page out, and we're good. A lot of time it requires multiple page-outs. Being restricted to those three phases, there's no way to say, "I want this variable to be persistent, and this one to not be." ...I would like to see a bit more flexibility and tighter control over the templates and the variables you can create."
"The solution's non-targeted communication with external parties could be enhanced."
"What I would like to see is vendor alerting. It's not structured to take into account that users outside of our environment, users outside of IT, may not be in the group. IBM is an outside vendor for us, and we have IBM CEs who come in on a regular basis. If there's a problem, we call those vendors in. That should be tied into the system where we can say that vendors A, B, and C have these users and we want them available to come into the office when there's an issue. We want to be able to alert them in the same way we alert internally."
"The company would like to have super detailed analytics, as we integrate this with our security software."
"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."
"It is difficult to send underlying trace files or statuses using PagerDuty."
"I am not a direct end user of PagerDuty. It's hard to consider its shortcomings in that sense."
"It’s quite hard to reach the support team."
"PagerDuty's webhooks need some improvement."
"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."
"I would like the UI to be more intuitive. I would like to be able to group or color-code the discoveries. When you create a system, you have a listing of all the different configurations. You can list them by teams, but some additional color coding would be helpful. I would break it down by incident controls. In other words, it should be broken down it into response teams and engineering divisions."
"The On-Call Teams feature could be better in terms of levels of conditions related to which team or member should get the responsibility of handling a matter or incident."
"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"
"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."
"The only thing that has caught us out a little bit is that on certain screens, you don't have the same admin options. There should be more consistency with the admin options because not all screens provide you with the same options. As an administrator, it feels like they should always be there. For example, on some screens, there is an Export button that provides fantastic, detail-rich exports, which obviously are very handy because then you can, as an administrator, do your administration, and extract what has been done to share with or prove to others. However, the Export button is not always present, and on the screens where it isn't, you miss it. You're like, "Oh, where's the Export button?", which can be quite problematic. There should be more consistency in the UI in terms of available options for anything that is referenced data or configurable. If you can put it in, there should be a way to run an export function to essentially pull it out. That's the only improvement that I can really think of."
"An additional knowledge-sharing program could be helpful and part of the demo workshops (right now, these only provide partial information)."
"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."
"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 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."
"​The REST API is still missing some important functionality, which we require."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The current pricing model is adequate. We feel that the pricing model for our IT Alerting solution is competitive with similar solutions on the market."
"They are one of the cheapest solutions on the market. We looked at all of the major competitors in the space. Everbridge was one of the most affordable for what they are offering."
"Licensing cost is driven largely by the number of users in the platform including admins, group managers, and message senders, so you want to consider your needs there."
"Pricing is reasonable."
"It's a seven out of ten for us in terms of pricing. We've just gone through a process of looking at other solutions."
"Their pricing is a good value and very reasonable. They are very upfront about their pricing. There is nothing confusing about it."
"For the one-way license, which refers to someone is just on the receiving end, it's very affordable. I was actually surprised that it was a really good price. The two-way license, like an on-call resource who is actually going to be in a calendar and be paged, it is a bit more expensive, but for the gains that we've realized, it's certainly worth the price."
"For us, the pricing is a good value. I can't say whether or not their list pricing looks favorable to everyone who's checking, but I can say that the process of sourcing and procurement with them was very professional, comfortable, and friendly. The negotiations were done well on both sides, and in the end, I'd say the price was very effective... I think that people will find that Everbridge is a great listener and is willing to meet in the middle."
"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..."
"Licensing costs are around $700 a month, and the only additional costs, are phone costs in some instances."
"The cost is based on the package you select."
"The solution is paid on a monthly basis and represents about 1% of the platform's budget."
"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."
"PagerDuty has monthly and yearly licenses available, the costs of which can get quite high if you have a large number of users."
"I would definitely say it's worth the value. I wouldn't say it's expensive, but most people who pick xMatters are not going to select xMatters based on price. There are other lower-priced competitors that are out there. But I would say for what we're getting, it's worth the money."
"If the licensing were cheaper, our customer might buy more."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Then, in pricing, you are limited on your number of SMS messages that you can send a month and the licensing cost annually."
"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."
"​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. ​"
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Healthcare Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Healthcare Company
6%
Computer Software Company
35%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Everbridge IT Alerting?
The solution's non-targeted communication with external parties could be enhanced.
What advice do you have for others considering Everbridge IT Alerting?
We are using Everbridge IT Alerting for incident and crisis modules. The tool is powerful in itself, but as with any ...
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...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

No data available
No data available
xMatters IT Management
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Choice Hotels, Alexion, Navy Federal Credit Union, EastWest Bank, IBM, Core Logic, Paypal, Charter Communications, Lowes, Express Scripts, Finastra, Worldpay
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, Atlassian, Splunk and others in IT Alerting and Incident Management. Updated: April 2025.
850,076 professionals have used our research since 2012.