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PagerDuty Operations Cloud 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

PagerDuty Operations Cloud
Ranking in IT Alerting and Incident Management
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
Process Automation (13th), AIOps (9th), Critical Event Management (CEM) (1st)
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 June 2025, in the IT Alerting and Incident Management category, the mindshare of PagerDuty Operations Cloud is 20.5%, down from 29.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of xMatters is 5.5%, down from 8.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Alerting and Incident Management
 

Featured Reviews

JeremyEmmett - PeerSpot reviewer
Centralized alert management with customizable routing and superior scheduling
Everything can always be better. Operations are somewhat limited by their integration package. For example, integrating with Jira was problematic until they updated to a better plug-in. The ability to build customized modules would be advantageous, allowing organizations to define their own integration modules. It would be useful to have a way to define all configurations in code that is similar to how Terraform operates.
Dean-Robinson - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The inbound integrations that PagerDuty provides with most of the DevOps tools are valuable."
"Notification is the most valuable feature."
"The product has valuable on-call scheduling, escalation, and incident workflow management features."
"The SMS pages and the mobile application are pretty much the top two features."
"PagerDuty's best features are the dedicated application that allows me to reach my engineers immediately and the ability to directly assign specific tasks to individuals and have them report back."
"PagerDuty helps you bifurcate teams and redirect alerts to specific teams"
"It integrates with multiple applications and is highly customizable, with policies, escalation procedures, and an event routing tool that ensures contacting the right person."
"The most valuable feature is definitely the flexibility of the schedule. The mobile app is quite also good for what we do: for receiving alerts, acknowledging, assigning, adding new responders. It has rich features for our needs."
"​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."
"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."
"It has been easy to use and very reliable."
"We have not noticed any scalability issues in the two years that we have used the system."
"Having our users manage their own notification devices within xMatters is huge, since it takes the burden off our datacenter."
"Made it very easy to implement our roster of people who receive alarms with the REST API."
"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."
 

Cons

"Operations are somewhat limited by their integration package. For example, integrating with Jira was problematic until they updated to a better plug-in."
"I am not a direct end user of PagerDuty. It's hard to consider its shortcomings in that sense."
"The product can be improved by including out-of-the-box integration with other standard tools used in our fields such as Confluence, and Jira."
"Something that needs to be improved, is adding multilingual support."
"It is difficult to send underlying trace files or statuses using PagerDuty."
"They could include incident merging and alert grouping features in the product."
"I would like the UI to be more intuitive. I would like to be able to group or color-code the discoveries. When you create a system, you have a listing of all the different configurations. You can list them by teams, but some additional color coding would be helpful. I would break it down by incident controls. In other words, it should be broken down it into response teams and engineering divisions."
"There is room for improvement with the time schedule. The way the schedule currently works is you assign all the team members in one schedule and it automatically spreads them around throughout the schedule... It would be better to be able to edit the schedule and place my team members where I want, or at least to have that option in addition to the automatic process."
"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."
"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."
"​The REST API is still missing some important functionality, which we require."
"A lot of the issues that we've had have already been addressed. However, they could be clearer with the actual throughput and the costs. The throughput that we signed up for was a lot lower than what we needed, and we had to pay a lot more to get the throughput that we needed."
"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."
"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."
"In terms of restoration, if you delete something, or you have multiple users that have the ability to delete a group, a user profile, or a workflow, the ability to restore it within the GUI is not available. There are a whole bunch of programs that are required to allow for that to happen. A button to go back to a good point in time would be really nice. A lot of other tools have a better backup and restoration solution, but xMatters is a little bit short on that. They have about 95% solution available, but the other 5% requires manual effort. We would like to be able to just push a button and say, "I want to restore this piece back to this date," but we can't do that with the tool right now."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost is quite high. But if you want to get a full-featured application and you have a big team..."
"If we wanted phone calls or additional SMSs, we would have to pitch up for those. They give us so many per month per user, then we have to pay extra if it goes over that."
"The price is very high."
"They're very good in pricing compared to the competitors in the area. I would rate them a five out of five in terms of pricing."
"The cost is based on the package you select."
"The pricing may be about $1,000 per user."
"Licensing costs are around $700 a month, and the only additional costs, are phone costs in some instances."
"PagerDuty has monthly and yearly licenses available, the costs of which can get quite high if you have a large number of users."
"​Pricing is pretty straightforward and listed on their website. I recommend starting small and expanding later.​"
"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."
"xMatters is pricey, but you have to consider what a critical incident costs your organization."
"I know roughly what we pay per year. For what we use it for and what its purpose is, it is very valuable."
"The features they provide, versus the cost, are pretty good."
"Then, in pricing, you are limited on your number of SMS messages that you can send a month and the licensing cost annually."
"I don't make the decisions on the cost aspect. We haven't had any complaints. I think it has a reasonable price."
"This is a subscription-based, SaaS solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Healthcare Company
6%
Computer Software Company
35%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Healthcare Company
5%
Manufacturing Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about PagerDuty?
The product easily integrates with other solutions.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PagerDuty?
The solution was expensive, but if all its features were utilized, it was considered worth the cost. The tier-based pricing model was cumbersome, and there was a desire for a service-based catalog ...
What needs improvement with PagerDuty?
Everything can always be better. Operations are somewhat limited by their integration package. For example, integrating with Jira was problematic until they updated to a better plug-in. The ability...
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Also Known As

No data available
xMatters IT Management
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

40% of the Fortune 100 TrustPagerDuty. Customers include: Slack, Intuit, Zendesk, Panasonic, Pinterest, Airbnb, eHarmony, McKesson, Comcast
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 PagerDuty Operations Cloud vs. xMatters and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
855,347 professionals have used our research since 2012.