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PagerDuty Operations Cloud vs xMatters comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 2, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

PagerDuty Operations Cloud
Ranking in IT Alerting and Incident Management
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
Process Automation (12th), AIOps (12th), Critical Event Management (CEM) (1st)
xMatters
Ranking in IT Alerting and Incident Management
10th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the IT Alerting and Incident Management category, the mindshare of PagerDuty Operations Cloud is 22.5%, down from 28.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of xMatters is 7.1%, down from 8.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Alerting and Incident Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
PagerDuty Operations Cloud22.5%
xMatters7.1%
Other70.4%
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.
Dean-Robinson - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The alerts are immediate in this solution, which allows us to respond to errors quickly."
"The most valuable feature of PagerDuty is its integration with other tools, such as Amazon AWS, to receive notifications or create automatic instances."
"I'd rate the solution ten out of ten."
"The SMS pages and the mobile application are pretty much the top two features."
"The inbound integrations that PagerDuty provides with most of the DevOps tools are valuable."
"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 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 initial setup is straightforward."
"Simple features create flow sets and build APIs for integrations."
"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."
"We use xMatters for alarming infrastructure outages and failures of batch jobs (post-processing)."
"It has improved our time to respond. Prior to the use of xMatters, it might take hours or even a day to get someone involved on a problem. Now, it's down to minutes."
"Allows us to define scenarios that notify only the necessary people when we need to open a conference bridge."
"Probably the most important one is that it persists in attempting to contact to someone until someone is engaged on the event."
"Support has been great. They responded very quickly to all the support cases that I have submitted.​"
"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."
 

Cons

"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's webhooks need some improvement."
"The solution does not code all alerts correctly so sometimes you get false positives or multiple alerts for the same issue."
"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."
"Something that needs to be improved, is adding multilingual support."
"I am not a direct end user of PagerDuty. It's hard to consider its shortcomings in that sense."
"The solution's analytics are okay. I don't think the features, at this point, give you a lot of insights. We have actually been trying to get insights from it but it hasn't really given us a lot of extra points to explore. We were looking at the number of alerts to see where many of the alerts were coming from. We never managed to get many insights on this."
"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."
"What I would like it to do is tell me anytime there is a P1 incident, except when the ticket is assigned to this team or when this word is in the summary, but there is no exclusion option. I have been complaining about this for a couple years. At one point, we created a ticket for this with the developers to review. I assume that once enough people complain about it, they will bump it up in priority to work on. However, if not enough people think it is an issue, then they prioritize their work and work on other features and functionality. However, this is something that has been challenging for us because we have needed to find ways to work around it or just deal with it. So, I would love to see an exclusion option."
"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."
"Support may take longer than desired to resolve some issues."
"We would like to see a greater variety of integrations with ServiceNow. It works fine as it is, but an enhancement would be the ability to interact with the major incident module in ServiceNow... The way our major incident process works, when an incident is elevated from a P1 to a major incident, that is an extra flag in ServiceNow. It would be awesome to have xMatters get notification when something goes from a P1 to a major and then have it go through a different workflow, rather than our regular P1."
"We cannot go back in time to check out the previous schedules that we had. We can only see them moving forward. I wish we were able to go back and see the previous schedules that we had. That's the biggest thing."
"In terms of intuitiveness and flexibility of xMatters when it comes to customizing on-call schedules, rotations, and escalations, for me, as an IT professional, setting it up isn't that big of a deal, but I understand that some people struggle with it because when you get wrapped up into it. You can get lost. It's not super complex, but it's complicated enough to the point where you can say that you should have done it another way. The shift part can be confusing for some people. In that respect, one of the shortcomings my team has found is when we have to add another person, such as a new hire, to xMatters, we can't add them to a group within xMatters without having to put them on a shift. If we put them in a group, they have to be on-call. We can create their account, and then they're just out there in limbo until their team says, "You have to be on this shift." One piece of feedback for xMatters is to figure out how to have manageable groups so that they're contactable from xMatters. They do not necessarily have to be on a shift right from the start or at all for that matter."
"We would like to see the integration between our ITSM solution and xMatters."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"The cost is based on the package you select."
"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."
"The price is very high."
"The cost is quite high. But if you want to get a full-featured application and you have a big team..."
"Licensing varies widely, depending on usage. It can be cheap or quite expensive, depending on volume and features."
"Then, in pricing, you are limited on your number of SMS messages that you can send a month and the licensing cost annually."
"​Pricing is pretty straightforward and listed on their website. I recommend starting small and expanding later.​"
"If you are willing to pay for the licensing of it, it is able to scale out.​"
"I'm not really involved with the cost standpoint. I've only heard rumors of how much it costs, and if it costs what I think it costs, its cost is very high as compared to a lot of other tools that we're using here. It seems on the higher end from a cost standpoint."
"Cost is probably my biggest concern. I know the solution was recently acquired by Everbridge, and Everbridge was one of the competitors that was included in our RFP five years ago. Everbridge's costs were astronomical compared to where every other solution was, not just xMatters."
"xMatters is pricey, but you have to consider what a critical incident costs your organization."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Performing Arts
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
29%
Performing Arts
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Insurance Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise19
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise24
 

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 pricing model was cumbersome, and there was a desire for a service-based catalog ...
What needs improvement with PagerDuty?
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...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

No data available
xMatters IT Management
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

40% of the Fortune 100 TrustPagerDuty. Customers include: Slack, Intuit, Zendesk, Panasonic, Pinterest, Airbnb, eHarmony, McKesson, Comcast
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.
Find out what your peers are saying about PagerDuty Operations Cloud vs. xMatters and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
867,370 professionals have used our research since 2012.