PagerDuty Operations Cloud vs ServiceNow vs xMatters comparison

PagerDuty Operations Cloud

Read 221 ServiceNow reviews

8,783 Views
4,197 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

xMatters

Read 31 xMatters reviews

744 Views
409 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

xMatters

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

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

Find out what your peers are saying about PagerDuty, Atlassian, Splunk and others in IT Alerting and Incident Management.

To learn more, read our detailed IT Alerting and Incident Management Report (Updated: June 2025).

IT Alerting and Incident Management

June 2025

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Helped 858,469 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:

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IT Alerting and Incident Management

IT Service Management (ITSM)

IT Alerting and Incident Management

Featured Reviews

JeremyEmmett

Sr Director - Global Support APJ at HashiCorp

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.

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Nikhil Gohil

Solution Engineer - Digital Platform | Mobile at British American Tobacco

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.

Read full review

Dean-Robinson

Sr. Developer at a media company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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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

"The product easily integrates with other solutions."

"I'd rate the solution ten out of ten."

"It has scaled well for us."

"The most valuable feature of PagerDuty is its integration with other tools, such as Amazon AWS, to receive notifications or create automatic instances."

"Alert deduplication and noise reduction for alerts are the major features that I found useful."

"The most valuable features of PagerDuty are customization, access, policies, and different rules regarding the path of escalation. Additionally, it's easy to use and create overrides. For example, if you all are on a call for one week each, but somebody wants to go on PTO, the team needs to swap shifts in PagerDuty. This is easy to do by creating overrides to switch up the set schedules. It's very user-friendly in that aspect. It works well for monitoring and alerting."

"The initial setup is straightforward."

"PagerDuty's notification process is the most valuable feature."

More PagerDuty Operations Cloud pros

"I find almost all the features valuable. It can do nearly everything except make your coffee, as my colleagues always say. It's got pros and cons, like every software, but the good thing about it is that it has a very structured approach."

"It's easy to integrate. For instance, yesterday we closed the integration with SAP for the IP business management module to manage the forecast of projects. We created an interface between ServiceNow and SAP to control projects for accounting and on the forecast of the project. It was really easy. We don't have any problems with ServiceNow at the moment. As a company, they are improving constantly."

"I prefer ServiceNow to the competition because of its ease of use, installation and configuration."

"The most valuable features of ServiceNow for me are its ticketing and reporting capabilities."

"Your time-to-market, or TTM, becomes faster when you use ServiceNow. Even individuals that are not tech savvy can quickly change processes and workflows in it. This can make the organization as a whole more agile."

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

"The thing that I like most about it is the easy integration with the CMDB. I'm able to look at the CMDB for applications and develop my assessments and attestations based on the application and point them at that application owner. So, I can really automate the whole thing."

"In financial management, this platform has the infrastructure allowing us to expand the way we want to. For example, it gives you many business rules and budget models that you can use to optimize your workflow. It does not put you in a box. Additionally, integrating this solution with other platforms is extremely easy to do."

More ServiceNow pros

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

"The two-way integration between ServiceNow and xMatters allows us to assign tickets to support personnel faster and respond to incidents faster."

"The customer service is quite responsive. They are quick to answer your calls or emails."

"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'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."

"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."

"The Flow Designer is quite valuable, as you can set up integrations and flows without necessarily needing to know about code."

"For our organization, sending notifications out via subscriptions for outages."

More xMatters pros

Cons

"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."

"Something that needs to be improved, is adding multilingual support."

"It cannot be integrated with our upgraded Jira system."

"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."

"They could include incident merging and alert grouping features in the product."

"PagerDuty can improve the integration with Terraform."

"The solution does not code all alerts correctly so sometimes you get false positives or multiple alerts for the same issue."

"The user interface could be more intuitive."

More PagerDuty Operations Cloud cons

"The solution is lacking in the mobile application area that could be improved."

"The discovery of assets could be improved; right now they only allow for one domain."

"There are things that I would like to see improved in ServiceNow, such as the pricing, as it is a very costly solution compared to other tools."

"It became kind of complex to set it up without a general lack of knowledge of the particular feature-function capabilities. Features and capabilities could have been explained better to the end-users."

"There is a need for bug or error tracking in ServiceNow."

"Complexities in the organization made the initial deployment complex."

"The customer service of the product right now isn't very good. It's an aspect they really need to improve."

"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."

More ServiceNow cons

"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."

"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."

"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."

"We have had outages with the product. We have experienced functionality (defects), such as conference bridges can only be opened for four hours at a time and people get kicked out."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"A lot of the issues that we've had have already been addressed. However, they could be clearer with the actual throughput and the costs. The throughput that we signed up for was a lot lower than what we needed, and we had to pay a lot more to get the throughput that we needed."

More xMatters cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If you add more people, then you have to pay more, which is always a thing with the SaaS solutions."

"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 cost is based on the package you select."

"There is a license needed to use PagerDuty."

"The pricing may be about $1,000 per user."

"The solution is paid on a monthly basis and represents about 1% of the platform's budget."

"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 price is very high."

More PagerDuty Operations Cloud pricing and cost advice

"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."

"The solution is expensive."

"Getting the solution up and running is expensive."

"I would say it is moderately expensive, ranging from six to seven on a scale of ten."

"There is an annual subscription to use this solution."

"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."

"While the option exists to pay for a monthly license, we are dealing with large enterprises and these typically involve multi-year licenses of ten or five years, at a minimum."

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

More ServiceNow pricing and cost advice

"This is our biggest issue: licensing. Our customer has only purchased a set number of full licensed users, and we are constantly running up against our license limit. To mitigate licensing concerns, we completely control at the admin level user additions and removals, and do a monthly cleanup process driven by security contractor removal reports."

"I don't make the decisions on the cost aspect. We haven't had any complaints. I think it has a reasonable price."

"xMatters shortens the time to resolution, so the amount saved in potential lost revenue and productivity has justified the cost for our organization."

"Pricing is pretty straightforward and listed on their website. I recommend starting small and expanding later."

"The features they provide, versus the cost, are pretty good."

"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."

"Licensing varies widely, depending on usage. It can be cheap or quite expensive, depending on volume and features."

"I would definitely say it's worth the value. I wouldn't say it's expensive, but most people who pick xMatters are not going to select xMatters based on price. There are other lower-priced competitors that are out there. But I would say for what we're getting, it's worth the money."

More xMatters pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

20%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Educational Organization

21%

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

34%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

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.

Opsgenie vs PagerDuty Operations Cloud

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Comparisons

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Rootly vs PagerDuty Operations Cloud

Compared 14% of the time

JIRA Service Management vs PagerDuty Operations Cloud

Compared 11% of the time

Everbridge IT Alerting vs PagerDuty Operations Cloud

Compared 11% of the time

Splunk On-Call vs PagerDuty Operations Cloud

Compared 5% of the time

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BMC Helix ITSM vs ServiceNow

Compared 7% of the time

Pega Platform vs ServiceNow

Compared 6% of the time

Microsoft Power Apps vs ServiceNow

Compared 6% of the time

IBM Maximo vs ServiceNow

Compared 5% of the time

Microsoft Dynamics CRM vs ServiceNow

Compared 5% of the time

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Everbridge IT Alerting vs xMatters

Compared 28% of the time

Opsgenie vs xMatters

Compared 17% of the time

OnSolve Platform for Critical Event Management vs xMatters

Compared 7% of the time

More xMatters Competitors

Product Reports

PagerDuty Operations Cloud

June 2025

Download PagerDuty Operations Cloud product report

Download ServiceNow product report

May 2025

Download xMatters product report

xMatters

May 2025

Also Known As

No data available

xMatters IT Management

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.”

PagerDuty

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

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

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.