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 8.6, and holds a 23.9% mindshare in the category. Everbridge is ranked #10 in IMS , and holds a 6.1% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of ServiceNow users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Everbridge users who would recommend it.

ServiceNow

Read 220 ServiceNow reviews

9,779 Views
6,707 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

xMatters

Read 31 xMatters reviews

785 Views
455 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

ServiceNow

xMatters

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

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, ManageEngine and others in IT Service Management (ITSM).

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

Buyer's Guide

IT Service Management (ITSM)

May 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 852,780 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

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

220

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 23.9%, down 27.5% compared to last year.
xMatters, on the other hand, focuses on IT Alerting and Incident Management, holds 6.1% mindshare, down 9.0% 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

"For change management, I find the CAB workbench very useful. I haven't seen any other solution that has a CAB workbench or advanced automated solutions for a change advisory board. ServiceNow also has the Workflow Engine which works very well and is very intuitive."

"Consolidating multiple functionalities into a single platform reduces the need to invest in various separate solutions. ServiceNow integrates ITSM, CMDB, Discovery modules, and more into one cohesive system."

"We used ServiceNow for change management, release management, and event management."

"You can put information in or export it out quickly, which is very useful when you have weekly or monthly reports."

"HR Case Management and Customer Service Management are two of the key areas which clients are using."

"Makes ticket information easy to access."

"I have seen ROI from ServiceNow, as the client I mentioned earlier is achieving ROI for adopting this cloud-based technology."

"It's a straightforward and effective approach that minimizes the need for extensive explanations."

More ServiceNow pros

"The on-call schedule that they have for groups is amazing in terms of how it works and how it triggers. You don't need to do anything. You just upload the users, and you have the calendar of the schedules. It is amazing how it works and how easy it is to work with this feature."

"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."

"It has been easy to use and very reliable."

"The ability to notify teams and monitor those notifications in real-time is valuable. Time-based escalation of notifications helps us resolve issues much more quickly."

"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."

"The automated callouts, without a doubt, are most valuable. They have been a huge gain for our company. Previous to xMatters, there was no real management of the on-call resources or rotas. So, having that centralized and automated has been a huge gain."

"The UI: It is easily navigable."

"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."

More xMatters pros

Cons

"Creating service catalog forms could be made easier."

"We would like to have an Asset Management and/or Project Management feature enabled in this version and in the IT Service Management edition."

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

"There is a need for bug or error tracking in ServiceNow."

"The pricing structure could be more budget-friendly."

"We can't update bulk tickets using a simple query language. Jira lets us update hundreds of tickets with one command. In ServiceNow, you need to select each task separately to close them. The dashboards could also be more user-friendly. Monday.com has better dashboards."

"For healthcare, which is a pretty audited environment, there are no concrete solutions for digital signatures, apart from our license with Adobe, so it requires orchestration."

"if I consider from the IT operations management side, ServiceNow is pretty premature on some things, especially the discovery, while the other tools like Micro Focus and BMC Remedy, those that have been in the market for quite some time. ServiceNow is evolving itself in the discovery piece of the future."

More ServiceNow cons

"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."

"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."

"The data validation and verification need to be enhanced so that when data is changed, it reviews it in an automated manner and catches all of the anomalies."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

More xMatters cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"While the option exists to pay for a monthly license, we are dealing with large enterprises and these typically involve multi-year licenses of ten or five years, at a minimum."

"ServiceNow tends to be a little bit more expensive as compared to BMC Helix ITSM."

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

"ServiceNow is a leader and its pricing is quite good, quite competitive... Sometimes some plugins are not priced reasonably but, generally, the platform itself, its modules, are priced reasonably."

"The pricing is reasonable and affordable, making it suitable for businesses ranging from small to large scale."

"It is very expensive because it is a big organization. You have to pay for additional things."

"The pricing is on the high side, but if you look at the stability and option to work, it's kind of justified."

"There is an annual subscription to use this solution."

More ServiceNow pricing and cost advice

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Pricing is pretty straightforward and listed on their website. I recommend starting small and expanding later."

"xMatters is pricey, but you have to consider what a critical incident costs your organization."

"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."

"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."

"The pricing is too high... we procured 150 licenses and we have almost 1,500 users in IT. We had to come up with a few ideas for determining which users get a license and which users don't need one. Due to the limitation of the number of licenses, we were unable to integrate the user profiles with Active Directory."

More xMatters pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

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

See recommendations

852,780 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

25%

Computer Software Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

36%

Financial Services Firm

17%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

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

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

Comparisons

BMC Helix ITSM vs ServiceNow

Compared 7% of the time

Pega Platform vs ServiceNow

Compared 6% of the time

Microsoft Power Apps vs ServiceNow

Compared 6% of the time

IBM Maximo vs ServiceNow

Compared 5% of the time

Microsoft Dynamics CRM vs ServiceNow

Compared 5% of the time

More ServiceNow Competitors

Everbridge IT Alerting vs xMatters

Compared 32% of the time

PagerDuty Operations Cloud vs xMatters

Compared 30% of the time

Opsgenie vs xMatters

Compared 17% of the time

More xMatters Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ServiceNow

May 2025

Download ServiceNow product report

Buyer's Guide

xMatters

May 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)

May 2025

Download Free Report

Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, Atlassian, ManageEngine and others in IT Service Management (ITSM). Updated: May 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

852,780 professionals have used our research since 2012.

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.