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OnSolve Platform for Critical Event Management vs xMatters comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

OnSolve Platform for Critic...
Ranking in IT Alerting and Incident Management
16th
Average Rating
6.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Mass Notification Software (2nd), Critical Event Management (CEM) (9th)
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 October 2025, in the IT Alerting and Incident Management category, the mindshare of OnSolve Platform for Critical Event Management is 2.1%, down from 3.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of xMatters is 6.8%, down from 7.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Alerting and Incident Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
xMatters6.8%
OnSolve Platform for Critical Event Management2.1%
Other91.1%
IT Alerting and Incident Management
 

Featured Reviews

it_user826692 - PeerSpot reviewer
Allows for a systematic and uniform method of alerting personnel in every location, but the user interface is too complicated
Emergency alerting for a global company in 14 countries It allows for a systematic and uniform method of alerting personnel in every location. It has the same general functions as most emergency alerting systems. The placeholder dropdowns for message templates are useful. The user interface is…
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

"It allows for a systematic and uniform method of alerting personnel in every location.​"
"The placeholder dropdowns for message templates are useful.​"
"The UI: It is easily navigable."
"We have reduced the time it takes to resolve major incidents through xMatters’s conference bridge management solution."
"It helped change behavior across the organization to improve accountability."
"Being SaaS-based is a plus. Regardless of the state of our network or infrastructure, xMatters will still be available via a mobile device."
"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."
"For our organization, sending notifications out via subscriptions for outages."
"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 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."
 

Cons

"The user interface is too complicated and aspects that should be offered, such as email subject line editing, are not."
"Conference calling requires a complicated syntax formula.​"
"While they do have an extensive library of integrations, sometimes those integrations or custom integrations, require a more technical level of expertise in products outside of xMatters, such as Java."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"They could make the product more customizable."
"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."
"When you are not using the conference bridge from xMatters and you are using an external one, it is a little bit hard to get the person whom xMatters calls to jump directly to the external bridge. They need to hang up the phone and then get to the email to get the URL so that they can jump on the bridge. There is no direct connection from xMatters to that external bridge, but I understand that part of the business."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The pricing is tiered so we took that into account. If we were to license 10 or 20 people, that would be a certain price. And if we were to license 50 or 100, there would be a little bit of discounting. But the per-user license was right in line with what we were expecting."
"xMatters shortens the time to resolution, so the amount saved in potential lost revenue and productivity has justified the cost for our organization.​"
"The pricing and licensing are okay. I wish that the user licenses were cheaper but the stakeholder licenses are at a reasonable cost."
"I know roughly what we pay per year. For what we use it for and what its purpose is, it is very valuable."
"Then, in pricing, you are limited on your number of SMS messages that you can send a month and the licensing cost annually."
"This is a subscription-based, SaaS solution."
"The features they provide, versus the cost, are pretty good."
"xMatters is pricey, but you have to consider what a critical incident costs your organization."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Healthcare Company
9%
Computer Software Company
30%
Performing Arts
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Insurance 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
 

Also Known As

Send Word Now, OnSolve MIR3, OnSolve CodeRED, OnSolve SmartNotice, OnSolve TelAlert
xMatters IT Management
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Gift of Life Michigan, The Salvation Army Greater New York Division, PR Newswire, Carnival Group, The United Network for Organ Sharing, Virgin Atlantic, University of Delaware, NetApp, CME Group
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, Splunk, Atlassian and others in IT Alerting and Incident Management. Updated: October 2025.
871,469 professionals have used our research since 2012.