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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 is very stable and very reliable."
"After implementing PagerDuty Operations Cloud's runbook automation, I have reduced the response time from over 20 minutes to less than two minutes, saving approximately 80 to 90 percent of the time and making mean time to resolve significantly faster."
"Now, we don't have to think about it; we can simply set it up in PagerDuty and it works, with the escalation and everything still functioning reliably based on the configuration we set up six months to one year ago."
"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."
"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."
"The product easily integrates with other solutions."
"It integrates with multiple applications and is highly customizable, with policies, escalation procedures, and an event routing tool that ensures contacting the right person."
"Simple features create flow sets and build APIs for integrations."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The cloud solution reduces alarming to the core, which means no need to provision your server, which is great."
"That automation is the critical aspect of xMatters. Without those workflows, then we would have a system that maintains an on-call schedule in Excel. So xMatters provides the notification workflow and ensures you're notifying the right person at the right time."
"This has made it much easier to send notifications to a group or individual, as you just need to know the name and the message to send."
"The customer service is quite responsive. They are quick to answer your calls or emails."
 

Cons

"PagerDuty's webhooks need some improvement."
"I would like to see more content in the notification messages; although, that might be a configuration on our end."
"The product can be improved by including out-of-the-box integration with other standard tools used in our fields such as Confluence, and Jira."
"Operations are somewhat limited by their integration package. For example, integrating with Jira was problematic until they updated to a better plug-in."
"It cannot be integrated with our upgraded Jira system."
"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."
"The biggest area for improvement with PagerDuty is noise suppression. There have been a handful of incidents through our use of PagerDuty over the years where one incident may lead to 30 to 50 pages because you're monitoring all these different things, and each thing is an individual page. There should be the ability to set up paging tiers and group correlations between some of the different pages. That is something that would be really valuable. We should be able to say this one page may have a group or a tree of effective other pages that may tier off of it. So, if you see those pages independently, go ahead and alarm, but if you see this plus that, don't do that."
"They could include incident merging and alert grouping features in the product."
"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."
"I would like xMatters to provide users with the capability of administering it on their own. I do a lot of hand-holding with them."
"While they do have an extensive library of integrations, sometimes those integrations or custom integrations, require a more technical level of expertise in products outside of xMatters, such as Java."
"I would like some minor UI changes. I believe I filed some enhancement requests with xMatters. For example, in one area, they have some way for you to look at a particular functionality with different sets of reporting UI. However, that same reporting UI is not yet available with some other functionalities. Essentially, in their existing functionality, the xMatters application does an excellent job, but in other functionalities within their UI, they don't have that. On the back-end, they are related. Instead of one click where you can see everything, right now you need to go to different areas to access similar information. It would be nice to have everything in one place. While they have an excellent element A, I am hoping that they could just simply make that feature also available in their element B."
"An additional knowledge-sharing program could be helpful and part of the demo workshops (right now, these only provide partial information)."
"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."
"The user interface could be more intuitive. Once you know what you're doing, you're fine. However, if you don't know where to start then it can be a bit difficult to figure out how to make it work and how it will function together with different tools in the Flow Designer."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost is based on the package you select."
"The price is very high."
"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."
"There is a license needed to use PagerDuty."
"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."
"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 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."
"I don't make the decisions on the cost aspect. We haven't had any complaints. I think it has a reasonable price."
"xMatters shortens the time to resolution, so the amount saved in potential lost revenue and productivity has justified the cost for our organization.​"
"If the licensing were cheaper, our customer might buy more."
"Then, in pricing, you are limited on your number of SMS messages that you can send a month and the licensing cost annually."
"You should perhaps arrange an evaluation or trial to just test it out. Get your feet wet. That is so important. If you don't try it, then you won't know."
"The pricing is too high... we procured 150 licenses and we have almost 1,500 users in IT. We had to come up with a few ideas for determining which users get a license and which users don't need one. Due to the limitation of the number of licenses, we were unable to integrate the user profiles with Active Directory."
"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."
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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
7%
 

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.
881,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.