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JIRA Service Management vs ServiceNow 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

IT Service Management (ITSM) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
JIRA Service Management8.8%
ServiceNow21.5%
BMC Helix ITSM8.1%
Other61.6%
IT Service Management (ITSM)
IT Service Management (ITSM) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
ServiceNow21.5%
JIRA Service Management8.8%
BMC Helix ITSM8.1%
Other61.6%
IT Service Management (ITSM)
IT Alerting and Incident Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
xMatters7.1%
PagerDuty Operations Cloud22.5%
Opsgenie13.7%
Other56.7%
IT Alerting and Incident Management
 

Featured Reviews

Karim Yousef - PeerSpot reviewer
Efficiently track and document projects with seamless tool integration
We are a management warehouse that provides services to different customers in different sectors. Primarily, we serve the banking sector and the military sector. We manage all the software delivery projects through tools such as JIRA Service Management or TFS Confluence is a great tool for…
Nikhil Gohil - PeerSpot reviewer
Enables effective incident management and seamless workflow automation with valuable mobile accessibility
I haven't thought deeply about improvements for ServiceNow or what might be missing right now. There are so many modules and features in ServiceNow that I haven't explored them all, so it's hard to say what might be missing or should be improved. I suggest making the cost more affordable for smaller companies.
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

"Jira Service Management has a workflow feature you can configure for your specific requirements. It also lets you efficiently manage service requests with team members."
"JIRA helps integrate Kanban Board features and for this reason what it does it does well."
"The dashboards in Jira have been the most useful feature."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its SLA, which everybody wants when it comes to a service-based offering."
"We can track, monitor, and get all the details we need from the end-user's point of view for any service request."
"One of the best features is that I can share tickets with team members, at which point any team member is able to pick one up and work on it."
"This service management solution has a good user interface. It helps improve your IT request requirements and makes tracking requests easier."
"A good organizational tool."
"Simplicity of Change Manager."
"It's more about the ease of use of ServiceNow. Plus, everything is there in a single platform. If you need any additional functionality, you just need to enable the plugins without even installing anything on the servers"
"Identifies better ways to license software or eliminate unused software to save money."
"It's actually easy to understand."
"It can scale well if you are managing IT assets."
"It actually has quite a wide list of modules and processes. Currently, we are implementing project management and Scaled Agile Framework for one of our customers."
"We can keep track of incidences. There is a bucket where we keep all our information, and it enables communication between stakeholders. It helps us collaborate with each other."
"It's great to do statuses or to review tasks."
"It helped change behavior across the organization to improve accountability."
"We use xMatters for alarming infrastructure outages and failures of batch jobs (post-processing)."
"It reduces the amount of oversight required, and consequently, the amount of time to assign and get a response on a ticket."
"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 most valuable feature is getting alerts out to my user base. xMatters is the only solution that I know that has robust scheduling, calendaring for groups, and that provides very good delineation of who gets alerted and on which devices they receive their alerts."
"We have not noticed any scalability issues in the two years that we have used the system."
"Support has been great. They responded very quickly to all the support cases that I have submitted.​"
"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."
 

Cons

"I don't think the program is very scalable."
"I feel that Atlassian isn't really interested in fixing everything because if they did, the partners that are developing the fixes and features would not have a place in the market."
"We faced challenges with integration for different frameworks like TestComplete."
"Include a split configuration in a layer part to allow cloud services to have almost full admin rights in SaaS."
"There is no notification regarding language upgrades."
"The product does not have the capability to sort queued tickets by product. This would be useful in making workflows more efficient."
"Jira Service Management is expensive and not worth the money compared to monday.com."
"Jira Service Management could improve by offering more control similar to Monday.com, such as easier automations, file addition, and sharing with different people."
"Its setup is tough. It takes a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience."
"Where it could be improved is Discovery. This may sound odd since I just praised the value of ServiceNow Discovery, but improvements to its automatic detection, the breadth of devices, and the depth of devices covered, as well as keeping up with new technologies, are all essential."
"The pricing of the solution could be better. It's a bit high."
"The solution’s user interface could be improved and given a better design."
"The pricing structure could be more budget-friendly."
"The Software Asset Management feature can be improved. We would like to see more features for the Software Asset Management functionality. Its price can also be better. It is currently more expensive than other solutions."
"We can't update bulk tickets using a simple query language. Jira lets us update hundreds of tickets with one command. In ServiceNow, you need to select each task separately to close them. The dashboards could also be more user-friendly. Monday.com has better dashboards."
"Its stability and pricing need improvement."
"When you are not using the conference bridge from xMatters and you are using an external one, it is a little bit hard to get the person whom xMatters calls to jump directly to the external bridge. They need to hang up the phone and then get to the email to get the URL so that they can jump on the bridge. There is no direct connection from xMatters to that external bridge, but I understand that part of the business."
"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"
"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."
"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."
"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."
"In terms of intuitiveness and flexibility of xMatters when it comes to customizing on-call schedules, rotations, and escalations, for me, as an IT professional, setting it up isn't that big of a deal, but I understand that some people struggle with it because when you get wrapped up into it. You can get lost. It's not super complex, but it's complicated enough to the point where you can say that you should have done it another way. The shift part can be confusing for some people. In that respect, one of the shortcomings my team has found is when we have to add another person, such as a new hire, to xMatters, we can't add them to a group within xMatters without having to put them on a shift. If we put them in a group, they have to be on-call. We can create their account, and then they're just out there in limbo until their team says, "You have to be on this shift." One piece of feedback for xMatters is to figure out how to have manageable groups so that they're contactable from xMatters. They do not necessarily have to be on a shift right from the start or at all for that matter."
"We would like to see the ability to support custom devices. We have a lot of users who use Slack, which is another tool for communication. xMatters currently does not support Slack as a communication method. It can't send events to Slack and respond to them."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten, where one is low price, and ten is high price. It's competitively priced."
"I am using the free version, but my clients are paying for it. When they start, they evaluate it for 30 days, and after seeing the value, they move to its paid version."
"Jira Service Management has affordable license fees. It's $12 a month per person."
"I rate Service Management four out of 10 for affordability. The price could be better, especially for companies using more than one Atlassian product. It's suitable for SMBs that can afford it. I don't think there's another tool that's both better and cheaper. All help desk tools are relatively expensive."
"We need a license because we have a higher number than the free part."
"This is pricey solution. Should we move to using all cloud solutions in our business, we may move to different tools that have multiple functionality versus having a solution for each area. This would be too pricey and we would need to replace Jira with a different solution that also offers other features."
"The price for JIRA Service Management is reasonable and cheaper than other ITSM solutions, but the licensing model is different, so you cannot compare it with other solutions. Overall, the pricing for the solution is acceptable."
"The price of JIRA Service Management could be reduced."
"The solution is priced for medium to enterprises sized businesses. However, it is expensive compared to competitors."
"We are happy with the pricing."
"Some time ago it was expensive, but large companies have special contracts. It's enterprise prices, and we're talking about millions per year."
"The solution is expensive."
"There is an annual subscription to use this solution."
"ServiceNow is a leader and its pricing is quite good, quite competitive... Sometimes some plugins are not priced reasonably but, generally, the platform itself, its modules, are priced reasonably."
"I am from Brazil. For Latin American markets, ServiceNow is very expensive as compared to other vendors, such as VMware."
"It is fairly expensive."
"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."
"The features they provide, versus the cost, are pretty good."
"I don't make the decisions on the cost aspect. We haven't had any complaints. I think it has a reasonable price."
"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."
"The only potential concern is professional services. They are capable, but like to bill on an hourly basis."
"Licensing varies widely, depending on usage. It can be cheap or quite expensive, depending on volume and features."
"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."
"You should perhaps arrange an evaluation or trial to just test it out. Get your feet wet. That is so important. If you don't try it, then you won't know."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Educational Organization
6%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
9%
Computer Software Company
29%
Performing Arts
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business30
Midsize Enterprise23
Large Enterprise33
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business54
Midsize Enterprise36
Large Enterprise163
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise24
 

Questions from the Community

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What do you like most about ServiceNow?
The solution has a user-friendly interface.
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Also Known As

JIRA Service Desk
No data available
xMatters IT Management
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

mgm technology partners, Telestream, Build.com, Zend Technologies, OfficeDrop, PGS Software, American Diabetes Association, NEPTUNE Canada
AAA, AstraZeneca, Becton, Dickinson and Company, Broadcom, Christus Health, Epicor, Equinix, GE Capital, Intuit, KPMG, Loyola Marymount University, OshKosh, Quantas, RedHat, Royal Bank of Scotland, Swiss Re, U.S. Department of Energy, Safeway, Yale University, and Zillow    
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: September 2025.
868,229 professionals have used our research since 2012.