We performed a comparison between Samanage and xMatters based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, Atlassian, BMC and others in Help Desk Software."The best part is the ability to keep records, especially incident records. It's easy to use the tool to store data and monitor it."
"The solution has a great filtering feature."
"We're able to point all of our alerting tools at xMatters and have it route alerts to the right people at the right time. We're able to generate major instant notifications for product outages, get all of our people on the bridge at the same time, and include information from our monitoring tools with that. So everyone is speaking the same language and seeing the same information. We're able to route those notifications not only to people, but also to other tools like Slack channels, where everyone can get in and collaborate."
"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."
"Having our users manage their own notification devices within xMatters is huge, since it takes the burden off our datacenter."
"The most valuable feature is getting alerts out to my user base. xMatters is the only solution that I know that has robust scheduling, calendaring for groups, and that provides very good delineation of who gets alerted and on which devices they receive their alerts."
"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."
"Probably the most important one is that it persists in attempting to contact to someone until someone is engaged on the event."
"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."
"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 setting up process is not quite easy. It's quite difficult."
"The system shuts down about once a month which is frustrating."
"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."
"We would like to see the integration between our ITSM solution and xMatters."
"It took me awhile to get used to whatever was available in the interface. The interface from two years ago was a bit more confusing when looking at where you should go"
"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."
"I've asked for the ability to have tags on groups, and for dynamic lists, meaning the ability to pull data from another location and use it in xMatters dynamically. Right now, for example, if I have a form and want to populate a list, it's a manual process. I have to copy and paste the list items."
"Support may take longer than desired to resolve some issues."
"While the documentation is good, the knowledge base - the collection of user supported community forums - is a little weak compared to some of the other products I've used. If I have a problem that I can't find the answer to in the documentation, there are very few places to go after that, because the user base, the community forums, are not strong for me to find someone who's had the same issue as me, and find out what the answer to their problem was. That's somewhat of a weak point."
"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."
Samanage is ranked 25th in Help Desk Software with 3 reviews while xMatters is ranked 3rd in IT Alerting and Incident Management with 31 reviews. Samanage is rated 7.6, while xMatters is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Samanage writes "Detects incidents quickly, improves our SLA performance and solves issues faster". On the other hand, the top reviewer of xMatters writes "A versatile solution with excellent logging capabilities that reduced our time to resolve ". Samanage is most compared with ServiceNow, SolarWinds Service Desk and Freshservice, whereas xMatters is most compared with PagerDuty Operations Cloud, Opsgenie, ServiceNow, Everbridge IT Alerting and OnSolve Platform for Critical Event Management.
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