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BigPanda vs xMatters comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

BigPanda
Ranking in IT Alerting and Incident Management
12th
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (53rd), AIOps (18th)
xMatters
Ranking in IT Alerting and Incident Management
10th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the IT Alerting and Incident Management category, the mindshare of BigPanda is 3.8%, down from 4.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of xMatters is 8.2%, down from 9.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Alerting and Incident Management
 

Featured Reviews

Ankit-Mathur - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers comprehensive alert monitoring and a user-friendly interface but requires manual validation to provide accurate alerts
For new users, I would advise using BigPanda for its comprehensive alert monitoring and integration with ServiceNow. Its mapping capabilities and user-friendly interface make it valuable for incident analysis and prioritization. As users become more familiar with the tool, its full potential will become apparent, enhancing efficiency and effectiveness over time. It is easy for someone to learn to use BigPanda for the first time. We start with basic examples that everyone can understand, then provide verbal introductions followed by hands-on training over two weeks. We encourage making mistakes and asking questions to ensure understanding. It depends on the trainer's approach, but with proper guidance, anyone can learn effectively. Overall, I would rate BigPanda as a five out of ten. For it to be a perfect ten, it would need to consistently provide accurate alerts without requiring manual validation. This means it should effectively suppress similar incidents, eliminating the need for constant monitoring. Once it reaches this level of reliability, BigPanda would be exceptional.
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 main thing that we like about BigPanda is the user interface."
"The most useful feature has been the AI/ML. The way BigPanda uses the AI/ML is good compared to other SRE tools."
"Alert deduplication and correlation - In an environment like the NOC where you're ingesting hundreds and thousands of alerts from various monitoring sources, it's time consuming and difficult to go through individual alerts and also difficult to spot critical issues. It's been great to have BigPanda not only deduplicate alerts but also correlate alerts that are seemingly unrelated, to create a clearer picture."
"We have also made extensive use of the outbound integrations to ticketing systems (JIRA) and collaboration tools (Slack). The main driver for us has been getting all alerting into a single UI and enabling us to streamline our incident management process."
"Easy integration - We've had challenges in the past integrating all of our various monitoring sources and tools into one central system. BigPanda, with the integrations that it already has, as well as offering webhook/REST API, has made it very easy for us to plug everything in."
"BigPanda integrates well with other solutions, such as WatchGuard,"
"One of the most valuable features of BigPanda is its user-friendly interface."
"The event correlation is really good and it is able to reduce the noise. It is a good tool for anomaly detection."
"It helped change behavior across the organization to improve accountability."
"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."
"Allows us to define scenarios that notify only the necessary people when we need to open a conference bridge."
"We have reduced the time it takes to resolve major incidents through xMatters’s conference bridge management solution."
"Support has been great. They responded very quickly to all the support cases that I have submitted.​"
"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. People are able to join the conference bridge directly from the phone call by pressing one button instead of having to dial into a bridge and remember a conference code."
"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 saw the value by being able to import everyone's schedule into one common central repository and have one tool for all the operational teams, or any team for that matter. It gave us the technology to find out who is on call. The incident management of xMatters' integration was another key aspect, where we could say, "You can configure this when a high ticket fires.""
 

Cons

"The observability can be enriched with regards to infrastructure and the application-integrated environment. The dashboard and reports could be improved."
"BigPanda could improve by syncing its threshold settings with Dynatrace to align with users' familiarity."
"The UI for this solution could be improved. It is very hard to find what you are looking for."
"The usability needs to improve, because it is a pure code environment."
"The cost of this product is too high compared to New Relic."
"We had to use a partner for the deployment."
"BigPanda can improve the correlations. We didn't see any big value. It is still good at the same event deduplication, event processing, and ticket creation, but I was more looking at event analysis and event correlation. In that area, it is still no big difference between the other solutions on the market. All of them, are in the same immature stage."
"Analytics is an area for improvement, being able to break down the actions that are being taken by users of BigPanda, as well as the auto-magical work that is being done by BigPanda."
"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."
"It took me awhile to get used to whatever was available in the interface. The interface from two years ago was a bit more confusing when looking at where you should go"
"Additional built-in integrations with other applications would be an area of improvement."
"An additional knowledge-sharing program could be helpful and part of the demo workshops (right now, these only provide partial information)."
"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."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of BigPanda is in the middle compared to other solutions."
"They were great to work with on pricing/licensing. Given we are a high-growth company, we needed a flexible site license."
"We pay $200,000 USD per year."
"BigPanda is cheaper than the competitors."
"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."
"The pricing and licensing are okay. I wish that the user licenses were cheaper but the stakeholder licenses are at a reasonable cost."
"The only potential concern is professional services. They are capable, but like to bill on an hourly basis."
"I would definitely say it's worth the value. I wouldn't say it's expensive, but most people who pick xMatters are not going to select xMatters based on price. There are other lower-priced competitors that are out there. But I would say for what we're getting, it's worth the money."
"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."
"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.​"
"I don't make the decisions on the cost aspect. We haven't had any complaints. I think it has a reasonable price."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
19%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
Computer Software Company
30%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Retailer
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Any advice about APM solutions?
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...
What do you like most about BigPanda?
One of the most valuable features of BigPanda is its user-friendly interface.
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

No data available
xMatters IT Management
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nagios, ServiceNow, ITSM, NOC, CMDB Evolved, RemedyIncident Management Process
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 BigPanda vs. xMatters and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.