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Rootly vs xMatters comparison

 

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
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.6
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
xMatters
Ranking in IT Alerting and Incident Management
13th
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 August 2026, in the IT Alerting and Incident Management category, the mindshare of Rootly is 3.1%, down from 10.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of xMatters is 4.4%, down from 7.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Alerting and Incident Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Rootly3.1%
xMatters4.4%
Other92.5%
IT Alerting and Incident Management
 

Featured Reviews

HJ
Manager at teshama
Seamless Slack incidents have standardized my workflows and have streamlined post mortems
Slack-based workflow in Rootly helps my team during incidents by simplifying incident management and workflows, easing writing post-mortems, supporting planned maintenance, and offering valuable team support for migration and training. It's streamlining our incident management process overall, and having everything automated and flexible is extremely valuable through automations. The best features Rootly offers are all-in-one incident management and an intuitive user-friendly GUI. I find the user interface highly intuitive because it's very easy to customize and navigate, even for new users, hence making the learning curve very comfortable and smooth. Rootly is very valuable, especially because it's very cost-effective. It's also very easy to use, and it has a very proactive and supportive customer support team. I have seen a return on investment as Rootly has made interactions smoother and more efficient. The speed of Rootly makes my work more productive.
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 my organization by allowing us to receive the on-call alerts successfully, whereas before Rootly, we had issues missing alerts."
"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."
"Rootly is very valuable, especially because it's very cost-effective, very easy to use, and it has a very proactive and supportive customer support team."
"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."
"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."
"We have not noticed any scalability issues in the two years that we have used the system."
"We can have a critical incident bridge spun up within 10 minutes, and all of the necessary teams join within 15 minutes, so it's cut our response time by 75%."
"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."
"The Flow Designer is quite valuable, as you can set up integrations and flows without necessarily needing to know about code."
"The UI: It is easily navigable."
"The automatic logging that's built into xMatters, especially the timeline of events, is very helpful because we can figure out why a particular person got a call... Having that level of detail built-in makes it really easy for me or the managers to prove that's what happened, and we can self-serve that information. It gives people the autonomy to know why they got a call."
"The support is probably my favorite thing about xMatters."
"Support has been great. They responded very quickly to all the support cases that I have submitted.​"
 

Cons

"There are a few areas where Rootly can be improved."
"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."
"Rootly can be improved as it's slightly buggy for new features."
"Regarding Rootly's AI capabilities, we had one incident when we lost alerting generally because Rootly crashed, and we did not like it."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"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."
"The user interface could be more intuitive. When you are not familiar with integrations and you're starting fresh, looking for where to begin, it is a bit daunting and not as clear as it could be."
"As an agent, as someone who is on call, I can mark an absence time and I can optionally put somebody in my place, but once you've done that, you can't edit it. You have to delete it and create a new absence, which is annoying, but it's not a massive issue. It's a minor annoyance. That's probably about the only thing I can come up with because I absolutely love the product. It's met our needs so well."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"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 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."
"If you are willing to pay for the licensing of it, it is able to scale out.​"
"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."
"​You pay for the user, not the number of alerts. Therefore, xMatters provides a better ROI, if you can leverage it for notifications based on alerts from other monitoring tools. ​"
"The pricing is tiered so we took that into account. If we were to license 10 or 20 people, that would be a certain price. And if we were to license 50 or 100, there would be a little bit of discounting. But the per-user license was right in line with what we were expecting."
"This is our biggest issue: licensing. Our customer has only purchased a set number of full licensed users, and we are constantly running up against our license limit. To mitigate licensing concerns, we completely control at the admin level user additions and removals, and do a monthly cleanup process driven by security contractor removal reports."
"This is a subscription-based, SaaS solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Performing Arts
28%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Transportation Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
10%
Performing Arts
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
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?
Regarding improvements for Rootly, first of all, it would be great to make comfortable maintenance mode, as it does not let me silence alerting comfortably. This is one of a very small list of poin...
What is your primary use case for Rootly?
Rootly is our central system for on-call and alert management. We route alerts from Alertmanager to Rootly, and after that, we route alerts from Rootly to different teams that are in charge of the ...
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: June 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.