PagerDuty Operations Cloud vs ServiceNow comparison

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3,598 views|2,545 comparisons
97% willing to recommend
ServiceNow Logo
17,450 views|10,561 comparisons
91% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between PagerDuty Operations Cloud and ServiceNow based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about PagerDuty, Atlassian, Everbridge and others in IT Alerting and Incident Management.
To learn more, read our detailed IT Alerting and Incident Management Report (Updated: March 2024).
768,857 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Q&A Highlights
Question: What are the differences between PagerDuty and ServiceNow?
Answer: ServiceNow ServiceNow is a platform-as-a-service provider of IT service applications. The company provides a range of pre-built ITSM products to automate and manage numerous IT enterprise services. Using the single software, you can automate processes and create custom applications to meet all your IT service needs. ServiceNow can be used for cloud and virtualization lifecycle management, change orchestration, infrastructure discovery, and IT governance. You can also use the software to report on all applications, as well as to generate reports on KPIs and benchmarking and create executive dashboards. Key benefits of using ServiceNow IT Service Automation: One solution for asset management, change and release management, configuration management, incident management, IT cost management, problem management, and a service catalog. On top of that Custom Application Development: Build and deploy custom applications in days, integrate your existing and new apps, and require minimum to zero coding knowledge. Service Automation: Standardize service processes and implement automation to replace manual tasks. Service now offers custom workflows, apps, and forms. PagerDuty PagerDuty is a cloud software that connects people, systems, and data into a single view - creating visibility and actionable intelligence across their operations. PagerDuty's SaaS alerting and incident tracking system helps IT operations and DevOps engineers resolve critical errors in their IT systems as quickly as possible. Key benefits of using PagerDuty Alerting that works (and wakes you up)- When your systems go down, PagerDuty will wake you up. You choose how you want to be alerted - via phone, SMS, or email, to multiple numbers, with retries. Integrate all your existing monitoring tools- PagerDuty works excellently with almost all monitoring tools including Nagios, Icinga, Keynote, New Relic, Pingdom, Cloudkick, Circonus, Splunk, Zenoss, Monit, Munin, SolarWinds, and many others. If it can send an email, it works with PagerDuty. Reliable, distributed architecture- PagerDuty's infrastructure is fully replicated in multiple data centers with fast failover when problems occur. PagerDuty can easily set up schedules to share on-call duty responsibilities with your team.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"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.""PagerDuty let us set up rosters based on our shifts. We could assign a hierarchy for how the calls should be escalated and the number of times the call will be transferred between people before it is answered. It makes it easy to access an agent via mobile phone.""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.""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.""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 inbound integrations that PagerDuty provides with most of the DevOps tools are valuable.""PagerDuty is very stable and very reliable."

More PagerDuty Operations Cloud Pros →

"In terms of the most valuable features, it's nice to have everything in one place. Things are easy to follow up on. ServiceNow provides that workflow. I know at some level it is in the pipeline and then if I need to follow up, everything's there. Those are the key benefits of ServiceNow.""I like that in ServiceNow creating workflows is simpler than that in HP Service Manager. Also, I really like the customization feature. It allows us to customize the service portal and permits us to do a lot of customization per business needs.""The most recent addition of SAM Premium is a game changer for many organizations.""I like the ease of use.""I like ServiceNow's Workspace feature. With Jira, we had to edit a ticket by going into it. We couldn't perform edits from within the project plan. ServiceNow allows you to edit everything from one screen. It's like an Excel spreadsheet, but Jira requires you to drill down into the ticket. ServiceNow is more convenient if you are working on multiple projects and workflows.""The flow designer feature of ServiceNow has had the biggest impact on our productivity because it has helped me reduce manual efforts by creating automation and robotics.""It's great to do statuses or to review tasks.""I like that it's always up and running."

More ServiceNow Pros →

Cons
"I would like to see more content in the notification messages; although, that might be a configuration on our end.""Something that needs to be improved, is adding multilingual support.""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.""PagerDuty can improve the integration with Terraform.""The product can be improved by including out-of-the-box integration with other standard tools used in our fields such as Confluence, and Jira.""PagerDuty should be integrated with other tools, so it can import the IT roster automatically. Our other rules continue to work once they're configured, but the roster must be added manually.""There is room for improvement with the time schedule. The way the schedule currently works is you assign all the team members in one schedule and it automatically spreads them around throughout the schedule... It would be better to be able to edit the schedule and place my team members where I want, or at least to have that option in addition to the automatic process.""PagerDuty could improve the event orchestration by enhancing features, such as easier condition setup inside the orchestration."

More PagerDuty Operations Cloud Cons →

"ServiceNow's mobile app should be seamless and it is not right now.""I know that discovery tools are not meant to be simple, but somehow, if they could make it more simple and robust, that would be great.""I would like the reporting aspect to be better, including the graphs. It could have some way for us to easily to export to a csv or spreadsheet so that if a graph cannot be provided by ServiceNow itself, we would be able to use other applications to create them. Also, if there was a feature that enabled us to interact with end users directly from ServiceNow, like an instant-messaging type of feature, that would be great.""A new user does need training or time to learn the solution before jumping in. It was very hard in the beginning to understand everything. I couldn't find the models I needed at the time.""The setup was time-consuming and required a lot of internal resources.""There is a need to learn scripting because as in the case of all the ITSM tools, scripting is needed for customization. If you're not very comfortable with scripting, then you may feel that you cannot do everything in ServiceNow without learning scripting.""When we are using the solution on mobile phones on their networks the performance is reduced with a delay of approximately 8 seconds. There is less delay using the desktop computers connected to the WiFi or to the network directly.""Their GUI could be updated."

More ServiceNow Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Licensing costs are around $700 a month, and the only additional costs, are phone costs in some instances."
  • "The cost is quite high. But if you want to get a full-featured application and you have a big team..."
  • "If you add more people, then you have to pay more, which is always a thing with the SaaS solutions."
  • "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."
  • "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 solution is paid on a monthly basis and represents about 1% of the platform's budget."
  • "There is a license needed to use PagerDuty."
  • "PagerDuty has monthly and yearly licenses available, the costs of which can get quite high if you have a large number of users."
  • More PagerDuty Operations Cloud Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "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."
  • "It has a higher cost compared to local/regional solutions."
  • "We know that ServiceNow is not cheap, it's more expensive than other solutions. But we are trying to increase our ability to handle tickets so that the cost per ticket is less."
  • "It's sold as a less expensive solution, but it has to be highly modified. That's where you get into the cost."
  • "ServiceNow pricing is an art, not a science. The deal depends on how commercially savvy you are, which does make it something that is quite difficult to get right. It is most definitely an opportunity area for ServiceNow to improve and have more visibility around pricing of the different products within the platform."
  • "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."
  • "Isn't pricing always too much? We really do chafe at the ITIL licensing. ITOM is also pretty expensive."
  • "Initially, the licensing model ServiceNow came up with was very good. But now, from a licensing perspective, they are changing their model day by day. It is becoming a bit expensive for customers."
  • More ServiceNow Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The product easily integrates with other solutions.
    Top Answer:The price is very high. I rate the pricing a six out of ten. The license for stakeholders is very limited.
    Top Answer:It’s quite hard to reach the support team.
    Top Answer:The short answer is that OutSystems is far better for 2 main reasons. Firstly, with Service Now you are locked into that platform for good. The business model is to lock in and then keep pumping the… more »
    Top Answer:Hi Netanya I will choose ServiceNow because ServiceNow is a very good tool compared to Microsoft PowerApp.  Because ServiceNow has a very strong module (Performance Analysis) reporting which will… more »
    Top Answer:It is user-friendly and simple to use.
    Ranking
    Views
    3,598
    Comparisons
    2,545
    Reviews
    16
    Average Words per Review
    401
    Rating
    8.4
    Views
    17,450
    Comparisons
    10,561
    Reviews
    23
    Average Words per Review
    452
    Rating
    8.5
    Comparisons
    Learn More
    Overview

    The PagerDuty Operations Cloud is the platform for mission-critical, time-critical operations work in the modern enterprise. Through the power of AI and automation, it detects and diagnoses disruptive events, mobilizes the right team members to respond, and streamlines infrastructure and workflows across your digital operations. The Operations Cloud is essential infrastructure for revolutionizing digital operations to compete and win as a modern digital business.

    PagerDuty Features

    PagerDuty has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • 650+ integrations
    • Alerting
    • Native apps with push notifications
    • On-call duty scheduling
    • Automatic escalation of alerts
    • Reliable, distributed architecture
    • Incident reporting
    • Real-time monitoring
    • Network analysis
    • Issue tracking
    • Access controls/permissions
    • Service Level Agreement (SLA) management

    PagerDuty Benefits

    There are many benefits to implementing PagerDuty. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Ideal for developers: With the PagerDuty solution, developers can spend more time focused on code. The solution’s powerful automation and noise reduction capabilities minimize interruptions and mobilize the right team in seconds.
    • Security incident response: Because of its integration ecosystem, PagerDuty enables you to respond to threats faster, tighten up security vulnerabilities, and get better cross-team visibility.
    • Critical event management: The solution makes it possible for your organization to get your crisis management team up and running quickly, keep all your business leaders and stakeholders informed in critical moments, and limit any disruptions that could impact your reputation or core business.
    • Service ownership: PagerDuty’s service ownership allows you to give everyone more autonomy, boost accountability, and minimize the impact of issues by quickly pulling in the right responder every time.
    • CollabOps: With this solution, you can integrate with chat and video tools like Slack, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams. Doing so makes it easier to contain incidents quickly, avoid manual errors, and streamline work across DevOps, CSOps, BizOps, and ITOps organizations.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the PagerDuty solution.

    Brandon J., Director of engineering at a wellness & fitness company, says, "The SMS pages and the mobile application are pretty much the top two features."

    PeerSpot reviewer Pramodh M., DevSecOps Consultant at a tech services company, comments, “The inbound integrations that PagerDuty provides with most of the DevOps tools are valuable. There is a flexible and easy way of integrating with monitoring tools. It allows us to configure the integration with APIs and plugins as well.”

    Syed Mohammad A., Vice President - Operations and Client Services at a financial services firm, mentions, "PagerDuty let us set up rosters based on our shifts. We could assign a hierarchy for how the calls should be escalated and the number of times the call will be transferred between people before it is answered. It makes it easy to access an agent via mobile phone."

    A Principal Architect at an energy/utilities company states, “The most important feature that is used is call scheduling. We are also able to actually call IT folks in the case of an emergency.”

    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.

    Sample Customers
    40% of the Fortune 100 TrustPagerDuty. Customers include: Slack, Intuit, Zendesk, Panasonic, Pinterest, Airbnb, eHarmony, McKesson, Comcast
    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    
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm30%
    Comms Service Provider13%
    Computer Software Company13%
    Printing Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company21%
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Retailer7%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Manufacturing Company11%
    Healthcare Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization22%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Government7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business30%
    Midsize Enterprise25%
    Large Enterprise45%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business21%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise67%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business20%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise65%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business15%
    Midsize Enterprise30%
    Large Enterprise56%
    Buyer's Guide
    IT Alerting and Incident Management
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about PagerDuty, Atlassian, Everbridge and others in IT Alerting and Incident Management. Updated: March 2024.
    768,857 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    PagerDuty Operations Cloud is ranked 1st in IT Alerting and Incident Management with 35 reviews while ServiceNow is ranked 1st in IT Service Management (ITSM) with 211 reviews. PagerDuty Operations Cloud is rated 8.8, while ServiceNow is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of PagerDuty Operations Cloud writes "Effectively generates alerts for incidents, making it suitable for 24/7 monitoring of infrastructure". On the other hand, the top reviewer of ServiceNow writes "A stable and scalable solution that has excellent features and is useful for collecting data and building KPIs". PagerDuty Operations Cloud is most compared with Opsgenie, JIRA Service Management, Splunk On-Call, Everbridge IT Alerting and xMatters , whereas ServiceNow is most compared with BMC Helix ITSM, Microsoft Power Apps, Pega BPM, IBM Maximo and ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus.

    We monitor all IT Alerting and Incident Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.