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Rootly vs xMatters comparison

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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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Rootly
Ranking in IT Alerting and Incident Management
11th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
xMatters
Ranking in IT Alerting and Incident Management
12th
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 October 2026, in the IT Alerting and Incident Management category, the mindshare of Rootly is 2.8%, down from 9.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of xMatters is 4.2%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Alerting and Incident Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Rootly2.8%
xMatters4.2%
Other93.0%
IT Alerting and Incident Management
 

Featured Reviews

MT
Lead Dev Ops Engineer at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees
On-call workflows have become reliable and onboarding new engineers runs smoothly
The best feature that Rootly offers, which I really appreciated when we onboarded Rootly, is the shadowing feature. I evaluated quite a few tools but Rootly was the only one at the time that had this, and this allowed us to onboard new engineers into the on-call rota smoothly, which was a really cool feature. Regarding how the shadowing feature helped with onboarding new engineers, rather than manually tweaking schedules to try to hack a way to shadow existing engineers, Rootly gave us a shadow feature which allowed us to say person X, please shadow person Y, using these times and these days, very customizable, and it allowed us to onboard people in a much more graceful manner.
Dean-Robinson - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Rootly has positively impacted our organization because, in comparison to ObsGenie, the tool we used before Rootly, it is much more user-friendly, including the user interface and the whole approach to alerting and routing these alerts."
"We were missing alerts due to our legacy tool that was unable to call out engineers effectively, but now we have achieved a 100% success rate of alert delivery, which is a massive step especially when trying to fix and identify these problems."
"Rootly has positively impacted my organization by saving time with manually adding timelines, as they are already built in when timelines are added in Slack through integration."
"With the strategic approach of putting everyone in a Slack group to resolve incidents, we have reduced the percentage of incidents created in a month by thirty percent during the first three months of using Rootly."
"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."
"It has been a good journey over the last three years, getting more details about, and insights into, the product."
"Probably the most important one is that it persists in attempting to contact to someone until someone is engaged on the event."
"We have reduced the time it takes to resolve major incidents through xMatters’s conference bridge management solution."
"The Flow Designer is quite valuable, as you can set up integrations and flows without necessarily needing to know about code."
"If you really want to reduce your mean time for restoring a service during a major incident, xMatters would definitely be the right tool."
"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."
"Overall, it's a very capable tool and if you keep working at it, it will do what you need it to do."
 

Cons

"The integration process could be easier, perhaps with the addition of AI to facilitate smoother integrations with other applications, especially since those who manage integrations often need technical knowledge about web services and single sign-on processes, which can be challenging for non-technical users."
"Regarding Rootly's AI capabilities, we had one incident when we lost alerting generally because Rootly crashed, and we did not like it."
"There are a few areas where Rootly can be improved."
"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."
"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."
"Support may take longer than desired to resolve some issues."
"I would like some minor UI changes."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"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."
"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.​"
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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
26%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Performing Arts
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise24
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Rootly?
Regarding my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing, we got a license for one year. Generally, it is great and the price is great, and that is the reason we chose Rootly. The only thing...
What needs improvement with Rootly?
There are a few areas where Rootly can be improved. More customization options for postmortem templates and reports would be helpful. Enhancing search functionality to make it easier to locate hist...
What is your primary use case for Rootly?
I use Rootly every day to manage the end-to-end incident lifecycle. When a critical incident is reported, I create or join an incident on Rootly, assign the appropriate severity, and engage the req...
Ask a question
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Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
xMatters IT Management
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

* **Atlassian** * **Cisco** * **Databricks** * **DigitalOcean** * **Google Cloud** * **IBM** * **JetBlue** * **LinkedIn** * **Lyft** * **Microsoft** * **MongoDB** * **Netflix** * **Pinterest** * **Qualcomm** * **Red Hat** * **Salesforce** * **Spotify** * **Square** * **T-Mobile** * **Twitter** * **Uber** * **VMware** * **WeWork** * **Workday** * **Xerox** * **Zoom**
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 Rootly vs. xMatters and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
916,117 professionals have used our research since 2012.