We performed a comparison between ServiceNow and xMatters based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, Atlassian, BMC and others in IT Service Management (ITSM)."If you stick to the out-of-the-box solution, it's an easy setup."
"It gave us professionalized, faster incident turn around times. Improved quality of information shared with our customers. Over time we build an extensive knowledge base that assists in both self-service as in services provided by the servicedesk when handling incidents."
"It enables us to meet SLAs, track issues across the environment, and report those issues."
"Change management is most valuable."
"In my experience, ServiceNow's most valuable feature is its flexibility. If you have a DevOps or development team, you can customize it to meet your specific needs. The tool's dashboard categorizes incidents, making managing it much easier."
"I like the ease of use."
"ServiceNow has also enabled our Management Consulting business to provide Digital Transformation services for our clients the world over, as we use the platform as an accelerator for doing IT Target Operating Model transformations."
"ServiceNow is a very powerful tool that can perform a lot of different functions."
"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."
"Its ease of use and self-service are important to me. It's very easy for users to go in and modify their own contact information, for managers to go in and manage their own on-call rotations and shifts."
"Support has been great. They responded very quickly to all the support cases that I have submitted."
"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."
"The ability to have the rota and then configure notifications that you can directly fire them into the group is most valuable. The India shift is from 2:00 AM to 9:00 AM, and then it is the UK shift from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM UK time, and then there is also a defined US shift and on-call hours. It allows us to make sure that everyone is going to get notified when they need to be about an issue. We can target specific locations or users with notifications."
"The UI: It is easily navigable."
"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."
"The Flow Designer is quite valuable, as you can set up integrations and flows without necessarily needing to know about code."
"I find the way you need to attach things like screenshots and stuff is a bit gimmicky. I'm a casual user. I'll use it once every two months and only when I have an incident that I need to report. You don't get a lot of experience with it when you're just using it once in a while like that. Therefore, it needs to be more intuitive so that you don't have to re-learn how to do simple tasks as the way to do certain things just isn't obvious."
"It should have more artificial intelligence for business and work capabilities. The community is not so active. There must be initiatives to make the community talk more and share more information."
"ServiceNow doesn't cater to the Middle Eastern market."
"The RPA needs improvement. That's a new area for them that they're just entering into now."
"For me, there's a real opportunity, especially within the IT Service Management suite, to give a much better overall view of the workflow that individuals have across the different applications. At the moment, a lot of information is quite siloed in the different tables in ServiceNow."
"It should include information on navigating various user interfaces for creating diverse requests directed to different teams."
"It's a great platform, but there's still room for improvement. As the solutions stands now, you do need a lot of previous experience to use it. It would be great if they could develop some use case templates. This would be beneficial for a small and medium-sized businesses."
"It's moving at a very fast pace. It is difficult for developers or engineers to keep up with it. That's the only issue."
"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."
"We have had outages with the product. We have experienced functionality (defects), such as conference bridges can only be opened for four hours at a time and people get kicked out."
"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 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."
"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"
"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."
"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."
"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."
ServiceNow is ranked 1st in IT Service Management (ITSM) with 212 reviews while xMatters is ranked 3rd in IT Alerting and Incident Management with 31 reviews. ServiceNow is rated 8.4, while xMatters is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of ServiceNow writes "A stable and scalable solution that has excellent features and is useful for collecting data and building KPIs". On the other hand, the top reviewer of xMatters writes "A versatile solution with excellent logging capabilities that reduced our time to resolve ". ServiceNow is most compared with BMC Helix ITSM, Microsoft Power Apps, Pega BPM, IBM Maximo and Appian, whereas xMatters is most compared with PagerDuty Operations Cloud, Opsgenie, Everbridge IT Alerting, OnSolve Platform for Critical Event Management and Splunk On-Call.
We monitor all IT Service Management (ITSM) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
