We performed a comparison between BMC Helix ITSM 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)."Initial setup is straightforward, and if you follow best practices, then future enhancements will be smoother."
"The versatility and customizability of the product is what I like most."
"It has the power to automatize several different tasks in the ITSM world."
"Initial, out-the-box setup was easy with no problems."
"We reduced many paper processes to electronic driven forms. It helps us a lot in tracking and managing."
"With service requests, we have been able to give visibility to the business users."
"The most valuable features of BMC Helix ITSM are the service level management, configuration, and reporting tool."
"In BMC, you can do absolutely anything. You can customize, you can configure, and you can customize and develop pretty much anything."
"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."
"Having our users manage their own notification devices within xMatters is huge, since it takes the burden off our datacenter."
"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."
"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."
"For us, their biggest feature is event alerting and the retention of those events. This way, if something goes wrong, we can provide a report of everything that was sent out and everything that was captured."
"We have not noticed any scalability issues in the two years that we have used the system."
"The customer service is quite responsive. They are quick to answer your calls or emails."
"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."
"It would also be beneficial if there was a text-based editor for the workflow rules instead of using the developer studio, which adds a lot of time when developing quick solutions to problems."
"There are some limitations or restrictions to using BMC Helix. For example, when we do some reporting, the reporting interface should be more user-friendly from my point of view."
"It takes a long-time to plan and deploy the on-premise solution."
"Regarding reporting, when sharing information with leadership, we utilize BI support and data or more analytical tools. These tools provide accurate and comprehensive reports, covering various aspects. Reports are either sent directly through email or automated using scripts. It would be beneficial to integrate similar capabilities into BMC for future use. Many applications we work with already have a centralized virtual automation tool, such as Control M, but manual effort is still required. Improvements in automation for accurate and efficient reporting in BMC would be valuable."
"Adding additional fields does not work very well."
"They could be more responsive to feedback from their community board."
"The amount of software issues are still too big, even considering the complexity of the tool."
"BMC Helix ITSM should have an easy-to-use user interface."
"In terms of intuitiveness and flexibility of xMatters when it comes to customizing on-call schedules, rotations, and escalations, for me, as an IT professional, setting it up isn't that big of a deal, but I understand that some people struggle with it because when you get wrapped up into it. You can get lost. It's not super complex, but it's complicated enough to the point where you can say that you should have done it another way. The shift part can be confusing for some people. In that respect, one of the shortcomings my team has found is when we have to add another person, such as a new hire, to xMatters, we can't add them to a group within xMatters without having to put them on a shift. If we put them in a group, they have to be on-call. We can create their account, and then they're just out there in limbo until their team says, "You have to be on this shift." One piece of feedback for xMatters is to figure out how to have manageable groups so that they're contactable from xMatters. They do not necessarily have to be on a shift right from the start or at all for that matter."
"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 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."
"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."
"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."
"Support may take longer than desired to resolve some issues."
"We would like to see the ability to support custom devices. We have a lot of users who use Slack, which is another tool for communication. xMatters currently does not support Slack as a communication method. It can't send events to Slack and respond to them."
"An additional knowledge-sharing program could be helpful and part of the demo workshops (right now, these only provide partial information)."
BMC Helix ITSM is ranked 3rd in IT Service Management (ITSM) with 75 reviews while xMatters is ranked 3rd in IT Alerting and Incident Management with 31 reviews. BMC Helix ITSM is rated 8.0, while xMatters is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of BMC Helix ITSM writes "The leading service management platform for delivering intelligent, user-centric experiences". On the other hand, the top reviewer of xMatters writes "A versatile solution with excellent logging capabilities that reduced our time to resolve ". BMC Helix ITSM is most compared with ServiceNow, JIRA Service Management, ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, Freshdesk and IBM Maximo, whereas xMatters is most compared with PagerDuty Operations Cloud, Opsgenie, ServiceNow, Everbridge IT Alerting and OnSolve Platform for Critical Event Management.
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.
