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BigPanda 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

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 (52nd), AIOps (18th)
xMatters
Ranking in IT Alerting and Incident Management
9th
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 2025, in the IT Alerting and Incident Management category, the mindshare of BigPanda is 6.2%, up from 4.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of xMatters is 6.3%, 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 most valuable features of BigPanda are the API integration was good. It enables us to do faster onboarding."
"One of the most valuable features of BigPanda is its user-friendly interface."
"BigPanda integrates well with other solutions, such as WatchGuard,"
"The program is very stable."
"A user-friendly solution."
"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."
"The best of a bad lot was the error message deduping."
"The solution is user-friendly and has good performance and certification."
"xMatters is helpful for getting the right on-call resources. That is a key factor. It is also very user-friendly, and just a little documentation helps you to understand things such as how on-calls are configured, how groups are configured, and how users update their on-call devices."
"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."
"The cloud solution reduces alarming to the core, which means no need to provision your server, which is great."
"The automatic logging that's built into xMatters, especially the timeline of events, is very helpful because we can figure out why a particular person got a call... Having that level of detail built-in makes it really easy for me or the managers to prove that's what happened, and we can self-serve that information. It gives people the autonomy to know why they got a call."
"xMatters stood out to us during our research because of the versatility of its rotas, how we could set up various group rotas, different shift patterns, the ability to order devices and add personal devices etc. It's a much more flexible solution than ServiceNow, the in-house tool we also evaluated."
"For our organization, sending notifications out via subscriptions for outages."
"We're able to communicate better with specific groups or offices. We didn't have that capability or granularity before. It has helped in that regard."
"The Flow Designer is quite valuable, as you can set up integrations and flows without necessarily needing to know about code."
 

Cons

"BigPanda could improve by syncing its threshold settings with Dynatrace to align with users' familiarity."
"BigPanda attempts a little of everything and fails at most."
"We had to use a partner for the deployment."
"The cost of this product is too high compared to New Relic."
"The observability can be enriched with regards to infrastructure and the application-integrated environment. The dashboard and reports could be improved."
"The solution could improve by having better integration."
"Lacks sufficient dashboard features."
"Our infrastructure is quite large - tens of thousands of servers, often with 30-plus checks running on each host with one minute intervals. This generates a lot of data often in bursts (when we have a large scale failure). This has caused some delay in the ingestion pipeline."
"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. I wish we were able to go back and see the previous schedules that we had. That's the biggest thing."
"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 would like some minor UI changes. I believe I filed some enhancement requests with xMatters. For example, in one area, they have some way for you to look at a particular functionality with different sets of reporting UI. However, that same reporting UI is not yet available with some other functionalities. Essentially, in their existing functionality, the xMatters application does an excellent job, but in other functionalities within their UI, they don't have that. On the back-end, they are related. Instead of one click where you can see everything, right now you need to go to different areas to access similar information. It would be nice to have everything in one place. While they have an excellent element A, I am hoping that they could just simply make that feature also available in their element B."
"Support may take longer than desired to resolve some issues."
"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 REST API is still missing some important functionality, which we require."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 price of BigPanda is in the middle compared to other solutions."
"The features they provide, versus the cost, are pretty good."
"​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. ​"
"The only potential concern is professional services. They are capable, but like to bill on an hourly basis."
"There's a significant difference between a full license, which allows people to respond to and acknowledge receipt of messages, and a more scaled-down license, which just allows people to see the notification. So we need to evaluate what license they need when onboarding new users because the full license is significantly more expensive."
"The pricing and licensing are okay. I wish that the user licenses were cheaper but the stakeholder licenses are at a reasonable cost."
"I don't make the decisions on the cost aspect. We haven't had any complaints. I think it has a reasonable price."
"If you are willing to pay for the licensing of it, it is able to scale out.​"
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
18%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
6%
Computer Software Company
32%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Healthcare Company
5%
 

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
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Comparisons

 

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: March 2025.
842,388 professionals have used our research since 2012.