ServiceNow vs xMatters comparison

The compared ServiceNow and Everbridge solutions aren't in the same category. ServiceNow is ranked #1 in ISM , with an average rating of 8.7, and holds a 21.8% mindshare in the category. Everbridge is ranked #10 in IMS , and holds a 6.8% mindshare. Additionally, 91% of ServiceNow users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Everbridge users who would recommend it.

ServiceNow

Read 222 ServiceNow reviews

29,808 Views
8,048 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

xMatters

Read 31 xMatters reviews

1,032 Views
805 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

ServiceNow

xMatters

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

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).

To learn more, read our detailed IT Service Management (ITSM) Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IT Service Management (ITSM)

June 2025

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Helped 861,390 peers since 2012

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

ServiceNow

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

222

Ranking in other categories

Help Desk Software (1st), IT Asset Management (1st), IT Service Management (ITSM) (1st), Rapid Application Development Software (2nd), No-Code Development Platforms (1st)

xMatters

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Alerting and Incident Management (10th)

Mindshare comparison

While both are Systems Management solutions, they serve different purposes. ServiceNow is designed for IT Service Management (ITSM) and holds a mindshare of 21.8%, down 27.0% compared to last year.
xMatters, on the other hand, focuses on IT Alerting and Incident Management, holds 6.8% mindshare, down 8.5% since last year.

IT Service Management (ITSM)

IT Alerting and Incident Management

Featured Reviews

Nikhil Gohil

Solution Engineer - Digital Platform | Mobile at British American Tobacco

Enables effective incident management and seamless workflow automation with valuable mobile accessibility

I haven't thought deeply about improvements for ServiceNow or what might be missing right now. There are so many modules and features in ServiceNow that I haven't explored them all, so it's hard to say what might be missing or should be improved. I suggest making the cost more affordable for smaller companies.

Read full review

Dean-Robinson

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I like that in ServiceNow creating workflows is simpler than that in HP Service Manager. Also, I really like the customization feature. It allows us to customize the service portal and permits us to do a lot of customization per business needs."

"Overall, I rate ServiceNow 10 out of 10."

"The workflow capability for easy setup is powerful."

"ServiceNow is very easy to set up."

"The workflow makes things extremely efficient and it improves effectiveness."

"We have found change management and CMDB to be very useful."

"The pricing of the product is quite good. It's not too expensive."

"We always get good support."

More ServiceNow pros

"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."

"It helped change behavior across the organization to improve accountability."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"We use xMatters for alarming infrastructure outages and failures of batch jobs (post-processing)."

"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."

"It reduces the mean time to restore a service. Before, it would probably take an hour to get everybody settled down. With the integrations right now, if somebody flags a major incident, then everyone is on a call in the next 15 minutes."

More xMatters pros

Cons

"There are a few things that it needs to improve, like automation of most things out-of-the-box. For example, when it comes to cloud management, we are still going with manual intervention. Instead of that, if we had an out-of-the-box feature available, that would be great."

"Direct support from ServiceNow is not very good. Most of the support comes from partners, and customers heavily rely on them."

"An area for improvement would be the accessibility of downloaded and compressed files."

"Most people are discussing UIs, but I'm a developer. I would say 80-90% of the people would appreciate that, that's easy for them, but from a developer perspective, it's hard for me, because for me it's clunky"

"The solution could improve by being more stable."

"I would like to see a mobile version of ServiceNow."

"HR Service Management is one module that needs a lot of improvement because it's a pretty new module. It was introduced in the last two years. It's becoming more mature day by day, but there is a lot of scope for improvement in that module."

"It is annoying that ServiceNow keeps on changing back to Quebec every six months."

More ServiceNow cons

"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."

"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 only thing that has caught us out a little bit is that on certain screens, you don't have the same admin options. There should be more consistency with the admin options because not all screens provide you with the same options. As an administrator, it feels like they should always be there. For example, on some screens, there is an Export button that provides fantastic, detail-rich exports, which obviously are very handy because then you can, as an administrator, do your administration, and extract what has been done to share with or prove to others. However, the Export button is not always present, and on the screens where it isn't, you miss it. You're like, "Oh, where's the Export button?", which can be quite problematic. There should be more consistency in the UI in terms of available options for anything that is referenced data or configurable. If you can put it in, there should be a way to run an export function to essentially pull it out. That's the only improvement that I can really think of."

"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."

"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."

"Additional built-in integrations with other applications would be an area of improvement."

"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."

"We would like to see the integration between our ITSM solution and xMatters."

More xMatters cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The first impact for the customer is that it is expensive, but do not forget that it is a solution that includes infrastructure; a single cost, easy to justify."

"ServiceNow pricing is an art, not a science. The deal depends on how commercially savvy you are, which does make it something that is quite difficult to get right. It is most definitely an opportunity area for ServiceNow to improve and have more visibility around pricing of the different products within the platform."

"The licensing expenses are excessively high."

"Initially, the licensing model ServiceNow came up with was very good. But now, from a licensing perspective, they are changing their model day by day. It is becoming a bit expensive for customers."

"I am from Brazil. For Latin American markets, ServiceNow is very expensive as compared to other vendors, such as VMware."

"I have found the solution very expensive."

"We are happy with the pricing."

"The product cost is higher than that of other vendors."

More ServiceNow pricing and cost advice

"xMatters shortens the time to resolution, so the amount saved in potential lost revenue and productivity has justified the cost for our organization."

"This is a subscription-based, SaaS solution."

"It feels like good value in the sense that the service is excellent. The people above me who look at such things have renewed it a couple of times, and I think they would have thought whether it was good value, whether it was wildly overpriced, or whether there were better and cheaper alternatives. So, from that perspective, the pricing is fair and proper."

"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."

"I would definitely say it's worth the value. I wouldn't say it's expensive, but most people who pick xMatters are not going to select xMatters based on price. There are other lower-priced competitors that are out there. But I would say for what we're getting, it's worth the money."

"I do not think it is worth the value."

"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."

"Licensing varies widely, depending on usage. It can be cheap or quite expensive, depending on volume and features."

More xMatters pricing and cost advice

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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions are best for your needs.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

14%

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

30%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Performing Arts

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Which solution is better for developing non-ITSM applications: OutSystems or Service Now?

The short answer is that OutSystems is far better for 2 main reasons. Firstly, with Service Now you are locked into that platform for good. The business model is to lock in and then keep pumping th...

See all answers

Would you choose ServiceNow over Microsoft PowerApps?

Hi Netanya, I will choose ServiceNow because ServiceNow is a very good tool compared to Microsoft PowerApp. Because ServiceNow has a very strong module (Performance Analysis) reporting which will ...

See all answers

What do you like most about ServiceNow?

The solution has a user-friendly interface.

See all answers

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Comparisons

BMC Helix ITSM vs ServiceNow

Compared 7% of the time

Pega Platform vs ServiceNow

Compared 6% of the time

Microsoft Dynamics CRM vs ServiceNow

Compared 6% of the time

IBM Maximo vs ServiceNow

Compared 5% of the time

Microsoft Power Apps vs ServiceNow

Compared 5% of the time

More ServiceNow Competitors

PagerDuty Operations Cloud vs xMatters

Compared 46% of the time

Everbridge IT Alerting vs xMatters

Compared 23% of the time

Opsgenie vs xMatters

Compared 16% of the time

OnSolve Platform for Critical Event Management vs xMatters

Compared 5% of the time

More xMatters Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ServiceNow

June 2025

Download ServiceNow product report

Buyer's Guide

xMatters

June 2025

Download xMatters product report

Also Known As

No data available

xMatters IT Management

Overview

ServiceNow is a cloud-based task-management platform that specializes in IT operations management (ITOM), IT services management (ITSM), and IT business management (ITBM). ServiceNow allows users to manage their teams, projects, and customer interactions using a variety of different plugins and apps with which it easily integrates.

ServiceNow offers prebuilt applications to support any process, as well as a framework and tools that allow you to build your own.

ServiceNow’s service management solutions include change, request, incident, problem, and cost management, as well as HR, IT, field service, and facilities management solutions. They also cover business management solutions such as vendor performance management, financial management, performance analytics and project portfolio suite, as well as governance, risk, and compliance.

“The Smarter Way to Workflow”

ServiceNow’s activities, processes, and tasks are overseen as part of a comprehensive managed workflow that supports such features as real-time collaboration, communication, and resource sharing. ServiceNow’s suite of products allow for operation using serverless computing, and include the categories of Business Apps, Customer Service, HR, IT, and Security.

ServiceNow can be used to support most workflows because of the wide range of tools it offers. These include on-suite ticketing tools, predictive modeling to manage workflows, and benchmarking for the tracking of progress. ServiceNow can assist with artificial intelligence and machine learning processes and can be used to organize the cases of a help/service desk as well as for instance management and problem management. It also smoothly integrates with many legacy systems.

ServiceNow offers service management software for industries including:

Cloud services
Education
Financial services
Government
Healthcare
Manufacturing
Telecommunications

Reviews from Real Users

PeerSpot users prefer ServiceNow to its competitors because of its scalability, stability, and ease of use. It helps everyone in the company to be on the same page by creating a single source of record across all departments. One user stated that “I’ve definitely used over 20 project management solutions, but they can't be compared with ServiceNow.” Another said that “ServiceNow is an industry leader in multiple areas and provides an excellent ROI.”

ServiceNow

xMatters, an Everbridge company, is a service reliability platform that helps DevOps, SREs, and operations teams rapidly deliver products at scale by automating workflows and ensuring infrastructure and applications are always working. The xMatters code-free workflow builder, adaptive approach to incident management, and real-time performance analytics all support a single goal: deliver customer happiness.

To learn more, request a demo.

Reliable services, rapid innovation: Automate operations workflows, ensure applications are always working, and deliver remarkable products at scale with the xMatters service reliability platform.

Automate on the xMatters service reliability platform: Move faster with confidence. Our no-code and low-code integrations let you build flexible workflows to address issues proactively—even during deployments.

Frictionless on-call: Manage on-call seamlessly. Automatically escalate to the right people, schedule with ease, and act on detailed alerts from anywhere.

Adaptive Incident Management: Stay resilient in any scenario with our adaptive approach to incident management. Automate resolution, protect customers from disruptions, and learn from each event.

Signal Intelligence: Put situations in context and cut through the noise of multiple monitoring tools with filtering and suppression, alert correlation, enriched notifications, and routing based on role or function.

Actionable Analytics: Get quick insights into key metrics to understand inefficiencies, boosting collaboration and productivity across engineering and operations teams.

Everbridge

Sample Customers

AAA, AstraZeneca, Becton, Dickinson and Company, Broadcom, Christus Health, Epicor, Equinix, GE Capital, Intuit, KPMG, Loyola Marymount University, OshKosh, Quantas, RedHat, Royal Bank of Scotland, Swiss Re, U.S. Department of Energy, Safeway, Yale University, and Zillow

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.

Buyer's Guide

IT Service Management (ITSM)

June 2025

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