PagerDuty Operations Cloud vs ServiceNow vs xMatters comparison

PagerDuty Operations Cloud

Read 223 ServiceNow reviews

26,973 Views
7,552 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

xMatters

Read 31 xMatters reviews

1,050 Views
840 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: August 2025).

IT Alerting and Incident Management

August 2025

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Helped 865,384 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 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

"Notification is the most valuable feature."

"The alerts are immediate in this solution, which allows us to respond to errors quickly."

"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."

"The initial setup is a simple process."

"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 helps you bifurcate teams and redirect alerts to specific teams"

"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."

"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."

More PagerDuty Operations Cloud pros

"ServiceNow was the first true enterprise to service management platform."

"It's a very low-code platform, and it's simple. The user experience is also really good."

"This solution is a single-storage for our user community to submit help desk tickets."

"It can scale well if you are managing IT assets."

"We have found the service easy to use, although, we have ended up customising a lot of parameters."

"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."

"ServiceNow is an industry leader in multiple areas and provides an excellent ROI."

"The return on investment is good when implementing for ourselves and for other clients."

More ServiceNow pros

"For us, their biggest feature is event alerting and the retention of those events. This way, if something goes wrong, we can provide a report of everything that was sent out and everything that was captured."

"For our major incident management, it has expanded what we can do in terms of the format of the communication. People can subscribe, and they can receive delivery on multiple platforms, whether it's a voice message, email, or mobile app message. It enables us to deliver the right communication to the right people in the format they want."

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

"It reduces the mean time to restore a service. Before, it would probably take an hour to get everybody settled down. With the integrations right now, if somebody flags a major incident, then everyone is on a call in the next 15 minutes."

"Simple features create flow sets and build APIs for integrations."

"Made it very easy to implement our roster of people who receive alarms with the REST API."

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

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

More xMatters pros

Cons

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

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

"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."

"It’s quite hard to reach the support team."

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

"PagerDuty's webhooks need some improvement."

"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."

More PagerDuty Operations Cloud cons

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

"It would be nice if we could, with some specific access rights, move histories from one squad to another, as they generate dependencies or duplicate or flag them."

"The capital expenditure neeed to get the tool up and running is extensive."

"The interface requires an upgrade."

"The user interface could be much improved, and the developer tools and sets can be improved greatly, they are lacking."

"I do not like the user interface."

"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 solution could improve by being more stable."

More ServiceNow cons

"In terms of restoration, if you delete something, or you have multiple users that have the ability to delete a group, a user profile, or a workflow, the ability to restore it within the GUI is not available. There are a whole bunch of programs that are required to allow for that to happen. A button to go back to a good point in time would be really nice. A lot of other tools have a better backup and restoration solution, but xMatters is a little bit short on that. They have about 95% solution available, but the other 5% requires manual effort. We would like to be able to just push a button and say, "I want to restore this piece back to this date," but we can't do that with the tool right now."

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

"They could make the product more customizable."

"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."

"We would like to see the integration between our ITSM solution and xMatters."

"We have to create an Excel sheet for onboarding users and then upload it. But if an employee resigns, we don't have any checkpoints to validate whether the user is still active or not. We have to do that manually every week: Check who has left the organization, and do a cross-check, whether this person had any licenses or signed in to xMatters."

"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."

"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."

More xMatters cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is a license needed to use PagerDuty."

"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."

"Licensing costs are around $700 a month, and the only additional costs, are phone costs in some instances."

"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."

"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."

"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

"For large-scale companies, the cost of ServiceNow is not expensive, but for small and mid-scale companies, it is higher."

"The CapEx version is great."

"The pricing is reasonable and affordable, making it suitable for businesses ranging from small to large scale."

"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."

"This is a pretty expensive product, so the licensing could be better."

"The platform offers a free trial, by providing a free developer instance once you sign up."

"The price is okay for us. It's reasonable."

"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."

More ServiceNow pricing and cost advice

"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."

"We're currently per license. We're paying around $44,000 per year for 80 full users and 300 standard users. For a new implementation, we also need to pay for an expert."

"It seemed comparable or more reasonable than some of the other solutions, at least when we evaluated it. There are no extra costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. Its cost is good, given the breadth of features provided by xMatters."

"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."

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

"xMatters is pricey, but you have to consider what a critical incident costs your organization."

"I do not think it is worth the value."

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

More xMatters pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Performing Arts

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

29%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Performing Arts

Manufacturing 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

Compared 17% of the time

JIRA Service Management vs PagerDuty Operations Cloud

Compared 13% of the time

Rootly vs PagerDuty Operations Cloud

Compared 10% of the time

Everbridge IT Alerting vs PagerDuty Operations Cloud

Compared 9% of the time

BigPanda vs PagerDuty Operations Cloud

Compared 5% of the time

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BMC Helix ITSM vs ServiceNow

Compared 6% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

Microsoft Dynamics CRM vs ServiceNow

Compared 5% of the time

IBM Maximo vs ServiceNow

Compared 5% of the time

Microsoft Power Apps vs ServiceNow

Compared 5% of the time

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Everbridge IT Alerting vs xMatters

Compared 26% of the time

Opsgenie vs xMatters

Compared 16% of the time

More xMatters Competitors

Product Reports

PagerDuty Operations Cloud

August 2025

Download PagerDuty Operations Cloud product report

Download ServiceNow product report

July 2025

Download xMatters product report

xMatters

July 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.