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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 June 2025, in the IT Alerting and Incident Management category, the mindshare of Everbridge IT Alerting is 8.7%, down from 9.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PagerDuty Operations Cloud is 20.5%, down from 29.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of xMatters is 5.5%, down from 8.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Alerting and Incident Management
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2405115 - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides good detection and escalation features to reduce downtime
We are using Everbridge IT Alerting for incident and crisis modules. The tool is powerful in itself, but as with any tool, you need to adapt it to the organization to be suitable for managing specific situations. When we did the analysis, Everbridge IT Alerting was one of the main products in the markets adapted to our organization's expectations. Currently, we are using it for a different aspect. Overall, the solution gives a better understanding of the incident response aspect. It helps manage that kind of situation. The solution's detection and escalation features are crucial in reducing downtime. The solution's automation capabilities help quickly identify the right members and skills. Everbridge IT Alerting is deployed on the cloud in our organization. We tried to make the solution more independent. However, we tried one or two integrations, and they went well. You need to have the right skills to integrate the solution with other tools. I would recommend the solution to other users based on their industry and business requirements. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.
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

"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 post mortem reports are descriptive, indicating who joined the call and when."
"The most valuable feature is automated escalation, as it eliminates a manual process which is prone to errors."
"The email integration, the ability to launch from other programs using email triggers, was the primary reason we got the solution and it's been really helpful"
"One key aspect of the solution is that it can send information very quickly and is connected to different nodes."
"Email Ingestion - Having the ability for ticket generation to auto-generate an incident through Everbridge has saved my team hundreds of man-hours it would have taken to manually create them."
"I personally love VCC because I just think there needs to be more data to support it so we can be more proactive and easily assess the impact. So, I appreciate the visual aspect, but it has to have the data to support it. It has proved very useful, particularly because we have a GSOC that's not technically 24/7. We do have an 800 number that people call 24/7. If something happens, they can easily send Everbridge a notification to activate the team off hours. It is useful in that respect too. We use it in conjunction with teams, but off-hours and for additional people outside of the core team, we use Everbridge, which is useful."
"With SaaS, we can implement in other regions without having to physically go to there."
"The SMS pages and the mobile application are pretty much the top two features."
"PagerDuty's best features are the dedicated application that allows me to reach my engineers immediately and the ability to directly assign specific tasks to individuals and have them report back."
"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."
"Notification is the most valuable feature."
"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."
"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."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"PagerDuty helps you bifurcate teams and redirect alerts to specific teams"
"Made it very easy to implement our roster of people who receive alarms with the REST API."
"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."
"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."
"The most valuable features are the ability to have groups and then have an on-call rotation in the groups. Outlook lacks both these features. Outlook gives you the ability to contact an individual or groups, but you can't contact them based on an on-call rotation, and you can't have built-in timing escalations inside of that. xMatters gives you the ability to do that, which is important when you have 50 or so people in the team, but you only want to contact the person who is on-call. You don't create any unnecessary noise. xMatters allows you to page the right person who is on-call versus just creating excessive noise."
"That automation is the critical aspect of xMatters. Without those workflows, then we would have a system that maintains an on-call schedule in Excel. So xMatters provides the notification workflow and ensures you're notifying the right person at the right time."
"Support has been great. They responded very quickly to all the support cases that I have submitted.​"
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"I would like them to add GPS going forward."
"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."
"Lacks ability to customize messages."
"The initial setup was very complex. We did not have a very good experience with our initial deployment. Most of this was due to customizations in our ServiceNow instance."
"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."
"I know that we get frustrated at the capacity of SMS messages. It's not very long, and if you want to send a long message, they end up sending you a link to the rest of the message."
"The solution's analytics are okay. I don't think the features, at this point, give you a lot of insights. We have actually been trying to get insights from it but it hasn't really given us a lot of extra points to explore. We were looking at the number of alerts to see where many of the alerts were coming from. We never managed to get many insights on this."
"The user interface could be more intuitive."
"This solution works best in conjunction with a proper logging system, which can be an additional cost to organizations."
"PagerDuty's webhooks need some improvement."
"I would like to see more content in the notification messages; although, that might be a configuration on our end."
"Operations are somewhat limited by their integration package. For example, integrating with Jira was problematic until they updated to a better plug-in."
"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."
"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."
"Support may take longer than desired to resolve some issues."
"What I would like it to do is tell me anytime there is a P1 incident, except when the ticket is assigned to this team or when this word is in the summary, but there is no exclusion option. I have been complaining about this for a couple years. At one point, we created a ticket for this with the developers to review. I assume that once enough people complain about it, they will bump it up in priority to work on. However, if not enough people think it is an issue, then they prioritize their work and work on other features and functionality. However, this is something that has been challenging for us because we have needed to find ways to work around it or just deal with it. So, I would love to see an exclusion option."
"I would like to see some more user templates. There are roles — administrator, user, etc. — but it would be nice to create a user template that restricted what people assigned that role could do."
"An additional knowledge-sharing program could be helpful and part of the demo workshops (right now, these only provide partial information)."
"Beyond the typical grouping, xMatters has what is referred to as dynamic teams. Dynamic teams are criteria for setting up and targeting a group of people that meet specific criteria. The bad thing about this setup is that you cannot alter those criteria through the typical xMatters import/export process. The attributes that create the criteria for dynamic teams can only be altered via the Web UI. So, if you want to create a new dynamic team in a mature xMatters environment (one that is already populated with hundreds of users), and you want to add, say, 100 users to that dynamic team, you have to do it manually."
"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."
"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

"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."
"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."
"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."
"Their pricing is a good value and very reasonable. They are very upfront about their pricing. There is nothing confusing about it."
"The pricing was under $25 a month per user. We had about 1,000 defined users."
"Everbridge is not an inexpensive tool, but as the adage says, you get what you pay for."
"I do not know about the licensing costs, but I know they're in groups, and there are permission caps. For example, you can have five admin accounts, and anyone can receive a notification. There's a mobile component too, which I find particularly useful, but it has to be a part of the contract."
"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."
"Licensing costs are around $700 a month, and the only additional costs, are phone costs in some instances."
"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 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."
"The cost is quite high. But if you want to get a full-featured application and you have a big team..."
"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."
"If you add more people, then you have to pay more, which is always a thing with the SaaS solutions."
"There is a license needed to use PagerDuty."
"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."
"It feels like good value in the sense that the service is excellent. The people above me who look at such things have renewed it a couple of times, and I think they would have thought whether it was good value, whether it was wildly overpriced, or whether there were better and cheaper alternatives. So, from that perspective, the pricing is fair and proper."
"​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. ​"
"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."
"I don't make the decisions on the cost aspect. We haven't had any complaints. I think it has a reasonable price."
"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."
"If the licensing were cheaper, our customer might buy more."
"The only potential concern is professional services. They are capable, but like to bill on an hourly basis."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Healthcare Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
Computer Software Company
34%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Healthcare Company
5%
 

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: June 2025.
858,435 professionals have used our research since 2012.