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Splunk Security Essentials vs xMatters comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 2, 2025

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

Splunk Security Essentials
Ranking in IT Alerting and Incident Management
16th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (15th), Security Incident Response (11th)
xMatters
Ranking in IT Alerting and Incident Management
10th
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 March 2026, in the IT Alerting and Incident Management category, the mindshare of Splunk Security Essentials is 1.5%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of xMatters is 6.0%, up from 6.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Alerting and Incident Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
xMatters6.0%
Splunk Security Essentials1.5%
Other92.5%
IT Alerting and Incident Management
 

Featured Reviews

BM
Information Security Architect at UMMS
Offers a wide range of advanced detection capabilities for identifying suspicious activities
We already talked about Enterprise Security on May 28th.I'm using Splunk Enterprise. We do use SOAR Mission Control, but not AppDynamics or Phantom. We have another freemium app for infrastructure monitoring called ITSI, IT Essentials Work. We also have the ITSI module for virtualization. I would have to rate Splunk Security Essentials a 10 out of 10 because it's free and there's tons of usable content.
reviewer1855452 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Analyst at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Helps in ensuring that everyone gets notified when needed, and provides the flexibility to integrate it and build what we want on top of it
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. 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. You have to have to go through the documentation, but I suppose that's an expectation. When users first log on and they're configuring the rotas, it does take them a bit of time to get their heads around how to configure the shifts. Some of them do need guidance. We have got a support document, and xMatters also has a support page where they can go and read through the details. Our roles and access for each user are locked down, as opposed to just letting them access the xMatters portal because it can add more confusion because the support portal explains that they can do X, Y, and Z. So, we're removing that ability, but once the users get their head around how to configure the rotas, the overall intuitiveness of the UI is pretty good. It is simple and clean, and they don't have to do that many steps. There are probably one or two group supervisors that configure the rotas, and the rest of them log on. We've already pre-populated the contact details from our directory, so usually, they'll just go and add a personal device, if they do want to get called on a personal device, or they want to set up the app, which is pretty easy using the QR codes. The product looks nice and clean. The only thing is that it takes a little bit of work to get your head around the rotas, but once you do, it's pretty darn simple.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We are focusing on security to ensure incidents are reported efficiently. In addition to that, for reporting purposes, we are utilizing our dashboards or creating new ones. We will be using free visualization tools for this purpose."
"The network monitoring feature is particularly valuable for gathering information about users, login times, and other statistics."
"They have a good catalog of plans to use to resist the attacks."
"I would have to rate Splunk Security Essentials a 10 out of 10 because it's free and there's tons of usable content."
"The feature that I have found to be most valuable is the entire alert notification configuration, having an external system to trigger events that will process the alert to the supporting team. If a system is down, then you need to get it attention. Sometimes, it cannot wait until the next day. Therefore, how xMatters provides this type of integration is critical."
"By using this tool, it's a one-stop shop; through one tool, we're able to generate email notifications, voice notifications, mobile push notifications, Slack channel notifications, all managed from one place, simple and easy to use."
"The customer service is quite responsive, they are quick to answer your calls or emails, and they do provide good support."
"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."
"​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."
"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."
"The two-way integration between ServiceNow and xMatters allows us to assign tickets to support personnel faster and respond to incidents faster."
"For our major incident management, it has expanded what we can do in terms of the format of the communication. People can subscribe, and they can receive delivery on multiple platforms, whether it's a voice message, email, or mobile app message. It enables us to deliver the right communication to the right people in the format they want."
 

Cons

"The price could be improved."
"They could add more AI content or AI and machine learning."
"The reporting feature needs to be more user-friendly."
"Every customer would like a free ride, of course, and being a customer, I definitely feel the pricing is too high."
"Additional built-in integrations with other applications would be an area of improvement."
"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."
"Reporting is the weakest point of xMatters. Since xMatters has very limited reporting and only maintains logs of events for a short period of time, we export event and conference logs to our ITSM solution."
"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."
"We cannot go back in time to check out the previous schedules that we had. We can only see them moving forward."
"One of the shortcomings or room for improvement is that their mobile application seems subpar. They could really revamp it and make it function a lot better."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"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."
"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."
"​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. ​"
"If the licensing were cheaper, our customer might buy more."
"The features they provide, versus the cost, are pretty good."
"​Pricing is pretty straightforward and listed on their website. I recommend starting small and expanding later.​"
"Licensing varies widely, depending on usage. It can be cheap or quite expensive, depending on volume and features."
"xMatters shortens the time to resolution, so the amount saved in potential lost revenue and productivity has justified the cost for our organization.​"
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
19%
Marketing Services Firm
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Healthcare Company
9%
Performing Arts
12%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
6%
 

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 Splunk Security Essentials?
Our SecOps manager and CISO were more familiar with Splunk, and the price was right. That was probably the primary driver, and we did evaluation as well with strict criteria and Gartner ratings.
What needs improvement with Splunk Security Essentials?
I have not used Splunk Security Essentials' customizable dashboards. I have not taken advantage of the pre-built security use cases in Splunk.
What is your primary use case for Splunk Security Essentials?
We use Splunk Security Essentials. We have projects, though not many projects per year. The solution is used to resist cyber attacks. They have a good catalog of plans to use to resist the attacks.
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Also Known As

No data available
xMatters IT Management
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
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 Splunk Security Essentials vs. xMatters and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,311 professionals have used our research since 2012.