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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
7.2
Number of Reviews
46
Ranking in other categories
Process Automation (6th), AIOps (7th), Critical Event Management (CEM) (1st)
xMatters
Ranking in IT Alerting and Incident Management
11th
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 February 2026, in the IT Alerting and Incident Management category, the mindshare of PagerDuty Operations Cloud is 13.2%, down from 22.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of xMatters is 5.9%, down from 6.1% 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 Cloud13.2%
xMatters5.9%
Other80.9%
IT Alerting and Incident Management
 

Featured Reviews

NS
Senior SRE at IBM
Automated incident workflows have transformed on-call operations and improved response times
Since I host our internal services, I want more customization relating to our specific use case. The needed improvements include the configuration process, as new team members face a steep learning curve to understand the platform. With many new members, they need training to set up runbook workflows, event orchestration, and manage complex on-call schedules across 23 services, making it a challenge for new users. Additionally, I feel the web interface requires improvements. I would rate PagerDuty Operations Cloud as eight out of ten because the cons include a complex configuration process and high costs for each add-on that I try to obtain, making subscriptions costly, along with limited customization in certain incident workflows. The primary reasons for rating it an eight include the complex configuration which makes it challenging for new users, as well as their difficulty in setting up advanced runbook workflows and managing complex on-call setups. The web user interface also requires improvement. Although I receive alerts via the mobile app, which is beneficial for handling schedule maintenance, the same features should be added to the web interface. Customization issues persist, such as the inability to clone entire schedules as part of the workflows, and I want to keep incidents open for a specified duration, neither of which I can currently customize. Thus, I raised a ticket with PagerDuty Operations Cloud to address these concerns. Furthermore, the cost is high, making it one of the more expensive incident management solutions.
reviewer1855452 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Analyst at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Helps in ensuring that everyone gets notified when needed, and provides the flexibility to integrate it and build what we want on top of it
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. Some of the workflow development work that we do for the in-house piece can be quite complicated if you don't have experience using the tool. You have to have to go through the documentation, but I suppose that's an expectation. When users first log on and they're configuring the rotas, it does take them a bit of time to get their heads around how to configure the shifts. Some of them do need guidance. We have got a support document, and xMatters also has a support page where they can go and read through the details. Our roles and access for each user are locked down, as opposed to just letting them access the xMatters portal because it can add more confusion because the support portal explains that they can do X, Y, and Z. So, we're removing that ability, but once the users get their head around how to configure the rotas, the overall intuitiveness of the UI is pretty good. It is simple and clean, and they don't have to do that many steps. There are probably one or two group supervisors that configure the rotas, and the rest of them log on. We've already pre-populated the contact details from our directory, so usually, they'll just go and add a personal device, if they do want to get called on a personal device, or they want to set up the app, which is pretty easy using the QR codes. The product looks nice and clean. The only thing is that it takes a little bit of work to get your head around the rotas, but once you do, it's pretty darn simple.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"PagerDuty Operations Cloud has positively impacted my organization by helping in faster incident detection and resolution with less downtime."
"PagerDuty helps you bifurcate teams and redirect alerts to specific teams"
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"My advice to others looking into using PagerDuty Operations Cloud is that it is one of the best tools in the market for production support and SRE engineers."
"PagerDuty Operations Cloud has positively impacted our organization by allowing us to be immediately paged when a system or service is down, enabling us to quickly respond and provide updates to the organization on issues and their resolution."
"PagerDuty Operations Cloud is a great tool that saves time and is worth starting to use."
"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."
"It integrates with multiple applications and is highly customizable, with policies, escalation procedures, and an event routing tool that ensures contacting the right person."
"Having our users manage their own notification devices within xMatters is huge, since it takes the burden off our datacenter."
"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."
"Allows us to define scenarios that notify only the necessary people when we need to open a conference bridge."
"The feature that I have found to be most valuable is the entire alert notification configuration, having an external system to trigger events that will process the alert to the supporting team. If a system is down, then you need to get it attention. Sometimes, it cannot wait until the next day. Therefore, how xMatters provides this type of integration is critical."
"It has been easy to use and very reliable."
"We use xMatters for alarming infrastructure outages and failures of batch jobs (post-processing)."
"The most valuable features are the ability to have groups and then have an on-call rotation in the groups. Outlook lacks both these features. Outlook gives you the ability to contact an individual or groups, but you can't contact them based on an on-call rotation, and you can't have built-in timing escalations inside of that. xMatters gives you the ability to do that, which is important when you have 50 or so people in the team, but you only want to contact the person who is on-call. You don't create any unnecessary noise. xMatters allows you to page the right person who is on-call versus just creating excessive noise."
"People are able to go in and update their contact information and even set things like when they're going to be on vacation and who their backup is."
 

Cons

"I would suggest that the calling service could be adjusted since if a system goes down, the user receives continuous calls, which can be overwhelming."
"This solution works best in conjunction with a proper logging system, which can be an additional cost to organizations."
"It is difficult to send underlying trace files or statuses using PagerDuty."
"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."
"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."
"Operations are somewhat limited by their integration package. For example, integrating with Jira was problematic until they updated to a better plug-in."
"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."
"I would like to see more content in the notification messages; although, that might be a configuration on our end."
"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."
"If you want to alter a custom field, you can do so via import/export. But you can't have an unlimited number of custom fields, so in a large environment with a lot of teams, team provisioning becomes more difficult."
"On-call management scheduling is difficult."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"They could make the product more customizable."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licensing costs are around $700 a month, and the only additional costs, are phone costs in some instances."
"The price is very high."
"If you add more people, then you have to pay more, which is always a thing with the SaaS solutions."
"The cost is based on the package you select."
"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."
"The cost is quite high. But if you want to get a full-featured application and you have a big team..."
"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."
"If the licensing were cheaper, our customer might buy more."
"xMatters shortens the time to resolution, so the amount saved in potential lost revenue and productivity has justified the cost for our organization.​"
"I am not really privy to how much my client is paying for this service. They just tell me the number of licenses that they have. Every time that I say, "I need extra licenses to make sure that all Level 1 and 2s have their own xMatters account," they keep telling me that it is too expensive. If the only purpose is to call people, it doesn't justify the cost of paying more than the number of licenses that they already have."
"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."
"The only potential concern is professional services. They are capable, but like to bill on an hourly basis."
"​I do not think it is worth the value.​"
"xMatters is pricey, but you have to consider what a critical incident costs your organization."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Performing Arts
16%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Educational Organization
7%
Performing Arts
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise26
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise24
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PagerDuty?
I purchased PagerDuty Operations Cloud through AWS Marketplace while at Intel, and my experience has been positive regarding pricing, setup costs, and licensing. I had around seven users part of it...
What needs improvement with PagerDuty?
Since I host our internal services, I want more customization relating to our specific use case. The needed improvements include the configuration process, as new team members face a steep learning...
What is your primary use case for PagerDuty?
I have been working in my current field for over seven years as a DevOps and site reliability engineer, and my primary experience involves managing the reliability of infrastructure platforms hoste...
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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: December 2025.
881,455 professionals have used our research since 2012.