Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

PagerDuty Operations Cloud vs Splunk On-Call vs Zendesk 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 Alerting and Incident Management
CRM Customer Engagement Centers
 

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.
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.
JohanSkibdahl - PeerSpot reviewer
Automating customer support with advanced AI capabilities and seamless communication
Zendesk has been invaluable in automating communications such as email and phone calls. It allows us to handle more support cases with fewer people due to its advanced artificial intelligence capabilities. This intelligent tool can manage complex queries before users even realize they are interacting with a non-human. Additionally, we have integrated Zendesk with Datto and Klaviyo ( /products/klaviyo-reviews ), enhancing our workflows.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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's notification process is the most valuable feature."
"The product has valuable on-call scheduling, escalation, and incident workflow management features."
"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."
"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."
"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 SMS pages and the mobile application are pretty much the top two features."
"It integrates with multiple applications and is highly customizable, with policies, escalation procedures, and an event routing tool that ensures contacting the right person."
"Transmogrifier and automatic solution report gives me a report with the solution and the way to solve issues when an error occurred."
"The flexible schedule is the most valuable feature. It was very easy to set out a rotation."
"VictorOps has been good enough for us and it's effective for our needs in case of an on-call escalation process."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is helpdesk escalation."
"The alert calling feature is the best because notifications are delivered via phone messages."
"It's a very stable tool, very powerful."
"One of the most valuable features is that Zendesk gives you a lot of configurability, and a lot of leeway in terms of customizing the look and theme. Zendesk offers you the facility to design your own landing page, as well as the look and feel of the entire knowledge base. At the same time, they offer themes that you can simply purchase and implement. Either way, it can really be turned into the right look and feel of the knowledge base required by our company, which is very important—if you have a bland-looking page, most of the time, people will lose interest. Zendesk also allows you to test the customizations before you publish it. It gives you a sandbox location where you can test everything new that you're trying to create and publish, which is very interesting."
"The most valuable feature is the trackability of incoming requests. The system keeps a comprehensive history of work requests, making it a useful tool for our internal processes."
"One of the most valuable features is the ease of use. If you take the standalone product, it is so easy to use, but if you want a tailor-made Zendesk Guide, you can't do it yourself. However, you can use a template that already exists—they have a lot, and they're very cheap, around 300-400 euros—and use it on all your brands. It's a very easy product to use."
"Its agility and simplicity are the most valuable features. This tool is very user-friendly."
"I found the user experience with vendors on Zendesk to be straightforward, especially when it comes to understanding and searching for specific tickets. The search and navigation tools are easy to use, and I haven't encountered any issues with delays or communication gaps in ticket resolutions."
"Zendesk has been invaluable in automating communications such as email and phone calls."
"I love how the tickets would auto-populate very quickly in Zendesk, especially when a call comes in."
 

Cons

"Operations are somewhat limited by their integration package. For example, integrating with Jira was problematic until they updated to a better plug-in."
"Something that needs to be improved, is adding multilingual support."
"It cannot be integrated with our upgraded Jira system."
"It is difficult to send underlying trace files or statuses using PagerDuty."
"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."
"This solution works best in conjunction with a proper logging system, which can be an additional cost to organizations."
"I would like to see more content in the notification messages; although, that might be a configuration on our end."
"The solution does not code all alerts correctly so sometimes you get false positives or multiple alerts for the same issue."
"The third-party configuration tool could be easier to use."
"There could be improvements with communicating an incident or alert."
"At that stage, all our needs are fulfilled, but at the beginning, we had some feature requests and they were deployed during their roadmap."
"The solution can be improved by including a wider list of permissions."
"Should have more YouTube webinars."
"There could be improvements in integration, which can be achieved with APIs or tools like Zapier."
"It needs to improve in terms of its flexibility, price, and installation."
"Sometimes if there was a way to just flag the actual issue out of those email chains - that would be really helpful."
"Zendesk's stability on inbound calls could be improved as compared to Talkdesk."
"If I write an article, and I have a team of 30 people, and they all have a Zendesk account, when I write an article, I send them an email. "Hey guys, I just wrote this article. It's one of the most popular topics this month on which we are not covered. Please check it and make sure that you include it in your resolutions". The issue is, once I send it to those 30 people, and they open it, the next morning, that article is the most popular article."
"Zendesk Guide could be improved by allowing us to put our assets in one location. What happens now for each article, for example, is we have to upload the images for that article to that location, so the image reuse is still not something that they have perfected. If they could allow us to update all the images in one location, and then pull the image from there, it would be easier when working on Multibrand projects. There are no Multibrand updates available—we have to update each brand manually. For my company, I have come up with an API tool which allows me to push the content to multiple brands together, but if you don't have something like that, you have to manually do it."
"The price of the solution should be reduced."
"As per me, there arent much significant issues or areas for improvement with Zendesk, as my usage of it is limited. I appreciate its ability to organize tickets effectively based on tags, allowing me to easily gather and analyze customer feedback and requests."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing may be about $1,000 per user."
"If you add more people, then you have to pay more, which is always a thing with the SaaS solutions."
"Licensing costs are around $700 a month, and the only additional costs, are phone costs in some instances."
"PagerDuty has monthly and yearly licenses available, the costs of which can get quite high if you have a large number of users."
"The cost is quite high. But if you want to get a full-featured application and you have a big team..."
"The solution is paid on a monthly basis and represents about 1% of the platform's budget."
"The price is very high."
"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 of the solution could be less expensive."
"You have to pay extra for better support. So it's not only the license that you pay for, but you have to pay extra for the support as well."
"We pay for the solution on a yearly basis and my understanding is that the cost is about $30,000. That's the cost for 24 to 25 agents."
"Zendesk's licensing is not cheap. For Enterprise, we are paying $200 per agent. It's a per-month cost, so it's pretty steep. There are some services you need to pay extra for. For example, with Zendesk Guide, we had to buy the most expensive offering in order to get Multibrand and everything. We also had to pay a lot of money for themes."
"The price is very competitive."
"From what I hear, Zendesk's pricing is a little expensive."
"There are different plans that are offered. We are using the entry-level plan. The overall price of the solution should be reduced. The price is too high."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which IT Alerting and Incident Management solutions are best for your needs.
860,168 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Performing Arts
5%
Computer Software Company
34%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
24%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Educational Organization
8%
Manufacturing Company
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...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What do you like most about Zendesk Support?
I found the user experience with vendors on Zendesk to be straightforward, especially when it comes to understanding ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zendesk Support?
Zendesk's pricing is reasonable. It is not the cheapest solution nor the most expensive, but it provides value for mo...
What needs improvement with Zendesk Support?
There could be improvements in integration, which can be achieved with APIs or tools like Zapier ( /products/zapier-r...
 

Also Known As

No data available
VictorOps
Zendesk Support, Zendesk Guide, Zendesk Sell
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

40% of the Fortune 100 TrustPagerDuty. Customers include: Slack, Intuit, Zendesk, Panasonic, Pinterest, Airbnb, eHarmony, McKesson, Comcast
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
Mailchimp, Tesco, Vimeo, Instacart, Mediaocean, Slack, Uber
Find out what your peers are saying about PagerDuty, Atlassian, Splunk and others in IT Alerting and Incident Management. Updated: June 2025.
860,168 professionals have used our research since 2012.