JIRA Service Management vs ServiceNow vs xMatters comparison

Read 225 ServiceNow reviews

24,579 Views
8,848 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

xMatters

Read 31 xMatters reviews

1,528 Views
1,329 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

JIRA Service Management

xMatters

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between JIRA Service Management, ServiceNow, and xMatters based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, Atlassian, ManageEngine and others in IT Service Management (ITSM).

To learn more, read our detailed IT Service Management (ITSM) Report (Updated: March 2026).

IT Service Management (ITSM)

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Helped 885,789 peers since 2012

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) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
JIRA Service Management	7.3%
ServiceNow	15.8%
BMC Helix ITSM	5.7%
Other	71.2%

IT Service Management (ITSM)

IT Service Management (ITSM) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
ServiceNow	15.8%
JIRA Service Management	7.3%
BMC Helix ITSM	5.7%
Other	71.2%

IT Service Management (ITSM)

IT Alerting and Incident Management Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
xMatters	6.0%
PagerDuty Operations Cloud	13.1%
Opsgenie	9.1%
Other	71.8%

IT Alerting and Incident Management

Featured Reviews

Sohaib Ahmad

Vice President Service Delivery at quixel

Comprehensive workflows and data views have supported complex teams but still need cost improvements

JIRA Service Management is costly. The pricing structure needs improvement. When I add some plugins, I have to pay the cost for every user whether they are using it or not. For smaller companies, the detailed workflow editing and the kind of details that JIRA Service Management provides would be complex. For startups and smaller companies, JIRA Service Management would be complex. The cloud offering is easier because I don't have to manage the infrastructure. There are two templates of the project: company-managed and team-managed. Team-managed is a newer feature, which is good for startup-kind companies where they don't need control over data from multiple projects displaying in one dashboard. For startups, JIRA Service Management is somewhat complex with its schemes and everything. Capacity management should be improved in terms of additional features in the next release of JIRA Service Management.

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MichaelTang1

Manager of Security Engineering & Architecture at a outsourcing company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Seamless data integration and advanced automation improve service delivery efficiency

I think that nothing needs to be improved with the product; you just need the user to commit and spend appropriate time to overcome that learning curve. Once that is done, the product itself is pretty wonderful. I've seen a very nicely built interface with ServiceNow, and I've also seen the ugliest version that feels outdated. ServiceNow does allow that team to exist. They should modernize their fonts and their layout, the UI friendliness. They did introduce AI, chatbots, and AI on the back end, so that's wonderful and extremely useful if you train it. If you don't train it, it's pretty useless. Assessing the impact of ServiceNow's automation on service delivery times is complicated. The engineers who operate on ServiceNow find it isn't straightforward because the data set is accessible by everybody. The problem is that understanding how to manage that data set requires an enormous amount of engineering skill set to run the product. I would not hand the key to the customer; I would highly recommend that ServiceNow take control of that. Instead of offering support for the software, they should offer administrative support for the software. They should provide professional service or some kind of support system that allows us to use their product at a faster pace. I'm sure they offer something, but it's often outrageously expensive, or they rely on another company to resell their product and offer professional service. It makes no sense in my opinion, and they should offer the team at the front to help customize the product to fit each company's needs, as every company has different demands and forms of submitting a request that need adjustment over time.

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reviewer1855452

Infrastructure Analyst at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Helps in ensuring that everyone gets notified when needed, and provides the flexibility to integrate it and build what we want on top of it

They recently released an incident module that allows users, or at least teams, to track major incidents and other things, and you can send out communication via that one webpage. You can engage on-call teams and communicate to stakeholders as well, but one thing that is missing there is a group chat. If there is a group chat on the same webpage that all of the support teams could use, it would be a one-stop shop that all of the major incident managers would use as their product to manage a major incident. Without that, at the moment, they are mainly referring to teams and then adding data into xMatters as and when they can. Some of the workflow development work that we do for the in-house piece can be quite complicated if you don't have experience using the tool. You have to have to go through the documentation, but I suppose that's an expectation. When users first log on and they're configuring the rotas, it does take them a bit of time to get their heads around how to configure the shifts. Some of them do need guidance. We have got a support document, and xMatters also has a support page where they can go and read through the details. Our roles and access for each user are locked down, as opposed to just letting them access the xMatters portal because it can add more confusion because the support portal explains that they can do X, Y, and Z. So, we're removing that ability, but once the users get their head around how to configure the rotas, the overall intuitiveness of the UI is pretty good. It is simple and clean, and they don't have to do that many steps. There are probably one or two group supervisors that configure the rotas, and the rest of them log on. We've already pre-populated the contact details from our directory, so usually, they'll just go and add a personal device, if they do want to get called on a personal device, or they want to set up the app, which is pretty easy using the QR codes. The product looks nice and clean. The only thing is that it takes a little bit of work to get your head around the rotas, but once you do, it's pretty darn simple.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"My advice to users is that JIRA Service Management is a good project management tool to handle projects respectively and efficiently."

"Its integration is most valuable. It is pretty open for integration."

"The centralized feature allows us to track test cases and integrate with automation and bug fixing."

"The simplicity is good for our clients. The price is good."

"We have an Agile environment and using Jira makes it easy to adhere to Agile best practices."

"JIRA Service Management provides comprehensive data management, different views with customizable dashboards, a detailed level of customization from items to workflows to roles and teams, and very flexible integration through the Atlassian marketplace plugins."

"It is worth its weight in gold in being able to link everything together and have everything in one place."

"Developing processes is easy and user-friendly."

More JIRA Service Management pros

"The solution has very good automation tools."

"The feature that I have found most valuable from ServiceNow is the ability to assign sub-tasks to different teams, including problem tickets and the regular and chain tasks."

"In 12 years, I've rarely seen a failure of their cloud hosting, if ever."

"ServiceNow is the best ticketing tool I have used so far."

"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."

"Very good incident management, chain management and problem management features."

"Compared to HPE Service Manager, ServiceNow offers a lot more customizations and a lot more plug-ins that you can throw in there."

"It is a very promising product, they have a new release every six months, they're investing quite a lot, and you can do many creative things with the product."

More ServiceNow pros

"It is the sort of thing that we can't live without anymore."

"I don't think I've ever had a complaint about it; xMatters just works."

"Probably the most important one is that it persists in attempting to contact to someone until someone is engaged on the event."

"It has been easy to use and very reliable."

"xMatters provides targeted, content-rich notifications to reduce response times in our organizations."

"One of the things that really attracted me is in workflows, you can write your own custom steps in JavaScript. You are not restricted to the steps that they provide. If you can write it in JavaScript, you can pretty much do anything. It gives me flexibility in ways that other platforms don't. For example, the online dashboard system we use is not a widely used one, but they have an API. So, I'm able to write the JavaScript steps to do things like check if a system's in the maintenance window or create an instant on the dashboard or change the status of an instant. I'm not dependent on the dashboard provider or xMatters creating steps for me."

"It reduces the amount of oversight required, and consequently, the amount of time to assign and get a response on a ticket."

"It helped change behavior across the organization to improve accountability."

More xMatters pros

Cons

"Jira Service Management could improve by offering more control similar to Monday.com, such as easier automations, file addition, and sharing with different people."

"During the updates, when another version gets released, whatever I am tracking at that time gets lost and I have to type it all over again."

"The documentation needs improving, it's difficult to find specific procedures."

"It is difficult to navigate if you don't have any prior knowledge."

"You can use different plug-ins for JIRA Service Desk to add some functionality, but these plug-ins are very expensive."

"With Jira, we were unable to implement time-based automation in its ticketing system."

"The product is supposed to include an interface where the customer can report issues, things they cannot resolve easily. It's not there at the moment so it's more difficult to resolve issues with the OEMs."

"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."

More JIRA Service Management cons

"I am interested to see the firm's strategic plans for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), and how the particular areas it will expand on from its existing investments (that feature, for example, in its ITSM Pro and CSM Pro modules)."

"They can maybe improve the area of agile project management. They do have user storyboards and other things, but we kind of lean on Jira for that work."

"The licensing needs to be divided into tiers in order to attract lower-level users."

"ServiceNow's mobile app should be seamless and it is not right now."

"The solution could improve by making the CMDB integrate with a CI better to allow it to be seen across multiple platforms."

"HR Service Management is one module that needs a lot of improvement because it's a pretty new module. It was introduced in the last two years. It's becoming more mature day by day, but there is a lot of scope for improvement in that module."

"ServiceNow is such a complex piece of software. It's trying to be everything."

More ServiceNow cons

"The reporting functionality could be improved, as it can be somewhat restrictive sometimes."

"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."

"It has not improved our organization."

"Support may take longer than desired to resolve some issues."

"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"

"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."

"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)."

More xMatters cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have an annual license with JIRA Service Management, but it is billed monthly."

"The license we use is on a yearly basis. As a Solution Partner, we were using the free one and were using the free plugins. We were also giving our own plugins to the Atlassian Solution Partners for free. We don't pay anything to Atlassian."

"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."

"Licensing can become quite expensive."

"I price of JIRA Service Management is reasonable."

"Buying a software solution is only a half part of the solution (or even less). You need to optimize usage of the software by hiring professionals who will help you to make the most of the software, especially in the beginning."

"We have paid $20,000 recently for a one-year license for our on-prem server."

"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."

More JIRA Service Management pricing and cost advice

"The solution is expensive."

"I am from Brazil. For Latin American markets, ServiceNow is very expensive as compared to other vendors, such as VMware."

"The licensing expenses are excessively high."

"The pricing is on the high side, but if you look at the stability and option to work, it's kind of justified."

"I know that it's not too bad because people continue to use it and they are happy to renew up their contract."

"The first impact for the customer is that it is expensive, but do not forget that it is a solution that includes infrastructure; a single cost, easy to justify."

"The product cost is higher than that of other vendors."

"Certainly, from a product-platform perspective, the price is not too bad."

More ServiceNow pricing and cost advice

"The only potential concern is professional services. They are capable, but like to bill on an hourly basis."

"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."

"Then, in pricing, you are limited on your number of SMS messages that you can send a month and the licensing cost annually."

"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 do not think it is worth the value."

"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."

"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."

More xMatters pricing and cost advice

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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions are best for your needs.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Educational Organization

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Government

Performing Arts

12%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	30
Midsize Enterprise	24
Large Enterprise	33

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	55
Midsize Enterprise	35
Large Enterprise	169

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	24

Questions from the Community

What is your favorite Help Desk Software and why?

JIRA Due to its agility.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for JIRA Service Management?

The price is actually reasonable.

What needs improvement with JIRA Service Management?

JIRA Service Management is costly. The pricing structure needs improvement. When I add some plugins, I have to pay th...

Which solution is better for developing non-ITSM applications: OutSystems or Service Now?

The short answer is that OutSystems is far better for 2 main reasons. Firstly, with Service Now you are locked into t...

Would you choose ServiceNow over Microsoft PowerApps?

Hi Netanya, I will choose ServiceNow because ServiceNow is a very good tool compared to Microsoft PowerApp. Because ...

What do you like most about ServiceNow?

The solution has a user-friendly interface.

BMC Helix ITSM vs JIRA Service Management

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Comparisons

Compared 8% of the time

Zendesk vs JIRA Service Management

Compared 7% of the time

PagerDuty Operations Cloud vs JIRA Service Management

Compared 5% of the time

Freshservice vs JIRA Service Management

Compared 5% of the time

Atera vs JIRA Service Management

Compared 4% of the time

More JIRA Service Management Competitors

BMC Helix ITSM vs ServiceNow

Compared 5% of the time

IBM Maximo vs ServiceNow

Compared 5% of the time

Zendesk vs ServiceNow

Compared 4% of the time

Freshservice vs ServiceNow

Compared 3% of the time

TeamDynamix vs ServiceNow

Compared 3% of the time

More ServiceNow Competitors

PagerDuty Operations Cloud vs xMatters

Compared 35% of the time

Opsgenie vs xMatters

Compared 20% of the time

Everbridge IT Alerting vs xMatters

Compared 18% of the time

FireHydrant vs xMatters

Compared 9% of the time

OnSolve Platform for Critical Event Management vs xMatters

Compared 4% of the time

More xMatters Competitors

Product Reports

JIRA Service Management

Download JIRA Service Management product report

Download ServiceNow product report

xMatters

Download xMatters product report

Also Known As

JIRA Service Desk, Atlassian Jira Service Management

No data available

xMatters IT Management

Overview

JIRA Service Management is recognized for customization, ease of use, and integration capabilities, offering flexible workflows and dashboards that enhance ticket management in organizations.

This platform contributes to streamlining business operations with features like automation and real-time updates. Businesses implement JIRA Service Management to manage ITIL processes, support tickets, and issue tracking both internally and externally. It is utilized for project management and lifecycle tracking, with Kanban boards and Confluence integration supporting change, incident, and problem management.

What are the key features of JIRA Service Management?

Customizable Workflows: Adapt workflows to meet business needs.
Integration: Seamlessly connects with other tools, including Jira and Confluence.
Real-Time Updates: Keeps teams informed and synchronized.
Automation: Reduces manual tasks with automated processes.
Scalability: Grows with organizations, accommodating increasing demands.

What benefits and ROI can be expected from JIRA Service Management?

Efficiency Gains: Improves operational efficiency through streamlined processes.
User-Friendly Interface: Simplifies adoption with intuitive navigation.
Comprehensive Reporting: Provides valuable insights to drive decisions.
Quick Setup: Fast deployment enhances time-to-value.
SLA Management: Ensures service level agreements are met effectively.

Service management platforms like JIRA Service Management are integral to industries focusing on managing IT services, such as tech firms and support-focused sectors. Organizations frequently utilize its capabilities to enhance their customer service operations, supporting optimal SLA adherence and efficient query management across departments. By tailoring its application to unique operational workflows, companies achieve improved service delivery and responsive issue resolution.

Atlassian

ServiceNow is a cloud-based task-management platform that specializes in IT operations management (ITOM), IT services management (ITSM), and IT business management (ITBM). ServiceNow allows users to manage their teams, projects, and customer interactions using a variety of different plugins and apps with which it easily integrates.

ServiceNow offers prebuilt applications to support any process, as well as a framework and tools that allow you to build your own.

ServiceNow’s service management solutions include change, request, incident, problem, and cost management, as well as HR, IT, field service, and facilities management solutions. They also cover business management solutions such as vendor performance management, financial management, performance analytics and project portfolio suite, as well as governance, risk, and compliance.

“The Smarter Way to Workflow”

ServiceNow’s activities, processes, and tasks are overseen as part of a comprehensive managed workflow that supports such features as real-time collaboration, communication, and resource sharing. ServiceNow’s suite of products allow for operation using serverless computing, and include the categories of Business Apps, Customer Service, HR, IT, and Security.

ServiceNow can be used to support most workflows because of the wide range of tools it offers. These include on-suite ticketing tools, predictive modeling to manage workflows, and benchmarking for the tracking of progress. ServiceNow can assist with artificial intelligence and machine learning processes and can be used to organize the cases of a help/service desk as well as for instance management and problem management. It also smoothly integrates with many legacy systems.

ServiceNow offers service management software for industries including:

Cloud services
Education
Financial services
Government
Healthcare
Manufacturing
Telecommunications

Reviews from Real Users

PeerSpot users prefer ServiceNow to its competitors because of its scalability, stability, and ease of use. It helps everyone in the company to be on the same page by creating a single source of record across all departments. One user stated that “I’ve definitely used over 20 project management solutions, but they can't be compared with ServiceNow.” Another said that “ServiceNow is an industry leader in multiple areas and provides an excellent ROI.”

xMatters, an Everbridge company, is a service reliability platform that helps DevOps, SREs, and operations teams rapidly deliver products at scale by automating workflows and ensuring infrastructure and applications are always working. The xMatters code-free workflow builder, adaptive approach to incident management, and real-time performance analytics all support a single goal: deliver customer happiness.

To learn more, request a demo.

Reliable services, rapid innovation: Automate operations workflows, ensure applications are always working, and deliver remarkable products at scale with the xMatters service reliability platform.

Automate on the xMatters service reliability platform: Move faster with confidence. Our no-code and low-code integrations let you build flexible workflows to address issues proactively—even during deployments.

Frictionless on-call: Manage on-call seamlessly. Automatically escalate to the right people, schedule with ease, and act on detailed alerts from anywhere.

Adaptive Incident Management: Stay resilient in any scenario with our adaptive approach to incident management. Automate resolution, protect customers from disruptions, and learn from each event.

Signal Intelligence: Put situations in context and cut through the noise of multiple monitoring tools with filtering and suppression, alert correlation, enriched notifications, and routing based on role or function.

Actionable Analytics: Get quick insights into key metrics to understand inefficiencies, boosting collaboration and productivity across engineering and operations teams.

Everbridge

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.

IT Service Management (ITSM)