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PagerDuty Operations Cloud vs ServiceNow vs Splunk On-Call 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 Alerting and Incident Management
IT Service Management (ITSM)
IT Alerting and Incident Management
 

Featured Reviews

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.
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.
Wojtek Witowski - PeerSpot reviewer
Allows us to create flexible schedules for on-call rotations
For alerts, we could choose to get a text message, app notification, or a phone call. The phone calls were very unusable, because it just read a bunch of numbers, like an ID of the alert. If there was a way to customize the phone call message, that would be great. Later, we would try to read the message, but it wasn't great at reading that. They had some sort of internal chat functionality where if we got an alert, we could write to somebody else and ask them for help, but that was super cumbersome. There could be improvements with communicating an incident or alert. Imagine you call the help desk and you say that your computer is broken and then they say, "Actually, the internet is broken, so let us forward your alerts to the network people." And the network people say, "Actually, the electricity is the problem, so let us forward it to the electricity people." Basically, you could send the alert between the support teams inside the company.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product easily integrates with other solutions."
"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."
"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."
"The alerts are immediate in this solution, which allows us to respond to errors quickly."
"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 scaled well for us."
"It integrates with multiple applications and is highly customizable, with policies, escalation procedures, and an event routing tool that ensures contacting the right person."
"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 impactful feature in our day-to-day operations is the ticket status, which provides crucial visibility into the progress of each resource or incident."
"We always get good support."
"It is robust and very user-friendly."
"This solution is a single-storage for our user community to submit help desk tickets."
"We used ServiceNow for change management, release management, and event management."
"I think the technical support is pretty good. They can be a little bit slow sometimes, but overall I think they're good."
"For the nuts and bolts running of an IT organization, I can't really say there's anything lacking feature-wise."
"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"
"The alert calling feature is the best because notifications are delivered via phone messages."
"VictorOps has been good enough for us and it's effective for our needs in case of an on-call escalation process."
"The flexible schedule is the most valuable feature. It was very easy to set out a rotation."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is helpdesk escalation."
"Transmogrifier and automatic solution report gives me a report with the solution and the way to solve issues when an error occurred."
 

Cons

"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."
"PagerDuty's webhooks need some improvement."
"It’s quite hard to reach the support team."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I find ServiceNow to be a little bit clunky. If I need to report an issue they have a number of different options. I can report an issue, I can ask a question, I can make a request and it has varying levels of importance or levels of attention required. I find that what's required to submit is not always clear."
"Creating service catalog forms could be made easier."
"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."
"System deployment and automation capabilities could be within the platform, similar to competitors."
"Before implementing this solution, you should have the ITSM model in place for chain management requests. That is a prerequisite because you cannot perform tasks without it."
"Licensing costs are very high."
"The solution could be made cheaper. Machine learning and artificial intelligence should be introduced in the next release."
"The product’s standard user experience is not the best."
"Should have more YouTube webinars."
"The solution can be improved by including a wider list of permissions."
"The third-party configuration tool could be easier to use."
"At that stage, all our needs are fulfilled, but at the beginning, we had some feature requests and they were deployed during their roadmap."
"There could be improvements with communicating an incident or alert."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"If you add more people, then you have to pay more, which is always a thing with the SaaS solutions."
"The solution is paid on a monthly basis and represents about 1% of the platform's budget."
"The pricing may be about $1,000 per user."
"The cost is based on the package you select."
"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..."
"The cost is quite high."
"The solution is priced for medium to enterprises sized businesses. However, it is expensive compared to competitors."
"I know that it's not too bad because people continue to use it and they are happy to renew up their contract."
"I'm not aware of any additional costs. I'm pretty sure that the current client is paying just the licensing fee per user. I do know that they've got some support agreement with ServiceNow, but I don't think that is broken out or specific to Project Management. It is just inclusive."
"It's sold as a less expensive solution, but it has to be highly modified. That's where you get into the cost."
"The price could be a little lower for the solution. Many of my customers have issues with the licensing process, they have to make it easier and straightforward."
"Getting the solution up and running is expensive."
"The license model is based on a number of fulfillers (active users who play some role within the ServiceNow functionality). Therefore, you can serve as many end-users as you want, without additional costs."
"The price of the solution could be less expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
Educational Organization
21%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
35%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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...
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.
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Also Known As

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VictorOps
 

Overview

 

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    
NVIDIA, Cisco, NBC, Rackspace, Intuit, DirectTV, NASCAR, Arrow Electronics, Alliance Health, NetApp, Edmunds, New York Times, Return Path, Sony Playstation, CA Technologies, Sphero, Symantic, HBO, Weatherford, Blackboard, Epic Games
Find out what your peers are saying about PagerDuty, Atlassian, Splunk and others in IT Alerting and Incident Management. Updated: June 2025.
858,327 professionals have used our research since 2012.