PagerDuty Operations Cloud vs xMatters comparison

PagerDuty and Everbridge are both solutions in the IT Alerting and Incident Management category. PagerDuty is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.5, while Everbridge is ranked #10. PagerDuty holds a 21.4% mindshare in IMS, compared to Everbridge’s 6.1% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of PagerDuty users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Everbridge users who would recommend it.

PagerDuty Operations Cloud

Read 37 PagerDuty Operations Cloud reviews

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1,537 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

xMatters

Read 31 xMatters reviews

785 Views
455 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

PagerDuty Operations Cloud

xMatters

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 2, 2025

PagerDuty Operations Cloud and xMatters are prominent in the incident management sector, offering competitive solutions focused on notification and escalation. PagerDuty seems to have an edge with its automatic incident escalation and versatile notification methods, while xMatters is favored for its seamless ITSM integration, reducing incident resolution times.

Features: PagerDuty offers automatic incident escalation, detailed alert customization, and diverse notification methods, which users value for reliability and flexibility across various platforms. The system's high-level notification capabilities are appreciated for ensuring critical alerts are never missed. xMatters is integrated with ITSM solutions, offering fine-tuned on-call schedule management and automation that enhance incident response efficiency. These features significantly improve communication workflows and reduce manual intervention, benefiting large-scale operations.

Room for Improvement: PagerDuty users desire better noise suppression and more extensive integrations with standard tools like Jira and Confluence. The complex interface for managing escalation policies is also a noted concern. xMatters needs a more flexible pricing model, and users report challenges with integrating custom attributes and dynamic teams. Both products could enhance reporting and logging capabilities to provide more insightful data analysis.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: PagerDuty supports diverse hosting options and is praised for smooth deployment and responsive support, covering public and private clouds, as well as on-prem solutions. xMatters, often deployed in private or hybrid clouds, also enjoys high ratings for customer service, with minimal direct support needed due to efficient internal procedures. Both platforms have reputations for delivering high-quality technical support.

Pricing and ROI: PagerDuty's structured licensing and flexible pricing offer good ROI, though the cost is seen as steep by some due to limited tiers. In contrast, xMatters provides scalable licensing, enabling cost alignment with real service needs despite being considered pricey. Both solutions contribute to measurable ROI through efficient incident management and enhanced operational continuity, depending on how their pricing models meet organizational requirements.

To learn more, read our detailed PagerDuty Operations Cloud vs. xMatters Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

PagerDuty Operations Cloud vs. xMatters

April 2025

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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

Ranking in other categories

Process Automation (14th), AIOps (9th), 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

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the IT Alerting and Incident Management category, the mindshare of PagerDuty Operations Cloud is 21.4%, down from 30.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of xMatters is 6.1%, down from 9.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

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.

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."

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

"The solution's most valuable features are that it adds each alert as a service, has good scheduling capabilities, and includes the ability to write logic based on texts."

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

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

"The initial setup is a simple process."

"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."

More PagerDuty Operations Cloud pros

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

"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."

"Support has been great. They responded very quickly to all the support cases that I have submitted."

"Being able to split the week however we want is definitely most valuable. We can create shifts and also see other teams' schedules. It is a very easy search to do these things."

"The automated callouts, without a doubt, are most valuable. They have been a huge gain for our company. Previous to xMatters, there was no real management of the on-call resources or rotas. So, having that centralized and automated has been a huge gain."

"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."

"Workflows and messaging are most valuable. Workflows are very useful. They are important for consolidating information or stopping duplication from happening. We put all the information into xMatters and then the workflow will push the same information in the correct format directly through to other applications that our end users frequently use, such as Slack, email, and Workplace."

"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."

More xMatters pros

Cons

"It is difficult to send underlying trace files or statuses using PagerDuty."

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

"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."

"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."

"I would like to see more content in the notification messages; although, that might be a configuration on our end."

"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."

"PagerDuty's webhooks need some improvement."

"I am not a direct end user of PagerDuty. It's hard to consider its shortcomings in that sense."

More PagerDuty Operations Cloud cons

"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 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."

"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."

"When you are not using the conference bridge from xMatters and you are using an external one, it is a little bit hard to get the person whom xMatters calls to jump directly to the external bridge. They need to hang up the phone and then get to the email to get the URL so that they can jump on the bridge. There is no direct connection from xMatters to that external bridge, but I understand that part of the business."

"On-call management scheduling is difficult."

"One of the main reasons why we don't use xMatters for monitoring and alerting is that it doesn't use the rota to call the person who's on-call. It doesn't look up the rota to find out who's on-call and then contacts that person directly. I am not sure if this has changed now, but the last time we checked, this functionality wasn't there. This is one of the main improvements. We're happy with the rest of it."

"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 would like to see the ability to support custom devices. We have a lot of users who use Slack, which is another tool for communication. xMatters currently does not support Slack as a communication method. It can't send events to Slack and respond to them."

More xMatters cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost is based on the package you select."

"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 quite high. But if you want to get a full-featured application and you have a big team..."

"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."

"There is a license needed to use PagerDuty."

"PagerDuty has monthly and yearly licenses available, the costs of which can get quite high if you have a large number of users."

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

More PagerDuty Operations Cloud pricing and cost advice

"Then, in pricing, you are limited on your number of SMS messages that you can send a month and the licensing cost annually."

"I know roughly what we pay per year. For what we use it for and what its purpose is, it is very valuable."

"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."

"It is worth the cost. You need to know the number of users that are going to use it, which is usually pretty easy to calculate. It's on a per-user license."

"It feels like good value in the sense that the service is excellent. The people above me who look at such things have renewed it a couple of times, and I think they would have thought whether it was good value, whether it was wildly overpriced, or whether there were better and cheaper alternatives. So, from that perspective, the pricing is fair and proper."

"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."

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

"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."

More xMatters pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

21%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

35%

Financial Services Firm

18%

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.

See all answers

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 ...

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What needs improvement with PagerDuty?

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JIRA Service Management vs PagerDuty Operations Cloud

Compared 10% of the time

IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus vs PagerDuty Operations Cloud

Compared 5% of the time

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Everbridge IT Alerting vs xMatters

Compared 32% of the time

ServiceNow vs xMatters

Compared 22% of the time

Opsgenie vs xMatters

Compared 17% of the time

More xMatters Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

PagerDuty Operations Cloud

April 2025

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Buyer's Guide

xMatters

April 2025

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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

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

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.

Buyer's Guide

PagerDuty Operations Cloud vs. xMatters

April 2025

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