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BMC Helix ITSM vs PagerDuty Operations Cloud comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

BMC Helix ITSM
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
76
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (4th), IT Service Management (ITSM) (3rd)
PagerDuty Operations Cloud
Average Rating
8.8
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
Process Automation (15th), IT Alerting and Incident Management (1st), AIOps (13th), Critical Event Management (CEM) (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Systems Management solutions, they serve different purposes. BMC Helix ITSM is designed for IT Service Management (ITSM) and holds a mindshare of 13.6%, up 12.4% compared to last year.
PagerDuty Operations Cloud, on the other hand, focuses on IT Alerting and Incident Management, holds 29.5% mindshare, down 32.7% since last year.
IT Service Management (ITSM)
IT Alerting and Incident Management
 

Featured Reviews

RajkumarK - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 21, 2023
The leading service management platform for delivering intelligent, user-centric experiences
We used to support VMware applications, focusing on distributed applications such as data from ETW, Snowflake, and SAP. Our role involved processing critical data systems through internal mechanics and IT processes, primarily managed by the application support group.  We employed services to…
Ashish  Paikrao - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 8, 2023
Effectively generates alerts for incidents, making it suitable for 24/7 monitoring of infrastructure
We were exploring ManageEngine ServiceDesk. So, we need a feature where we can, like, when an alert triggers, we should alert the recipient by on-call. So, when an alert is detected, a ticket is generated in the management team, and we want to notify them on-call. Like, this ticket has been generated and stuff. So, I would like to see a similar feature in this solution. This is why we want an alternative to PagerDuty. We want an alternative to PagerDuty. So we are getting on-call notifications using PagerDuty, but now we want to replace PagerDuty with ManageEngine ServiceDesk. So whenever some incident happens in the cloud infrastructure, we get data alerts from cloud security. We want to integrate a service that will provide us with notifications on-call. That this server is down, or this website is down, or this thing is going wrong. Another area of improvement is integration. It cannot be integrated with our upgraded Jira system. That's why we are dropping PagerDuty. We won't continue using it due to integration issues.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Technical support has been fine."
"The most valuable feature for our customers using BMC Helix ITSM is change management."
"Helix is more lightweight than these tools. It's a traditional tool that was developed more than 10 years ago. Ease of use is the operative word."
"Currently, the Service Catalog has the most value to it. Mainly, because we are able to offer IT functionality to non-IT people."
"It provides a good user experience."
"BMC offers excellent customer solutions, and they're quick to address bugs or shortcomings in their product."
"The most valuable features of BMC Helix ITSM are the collaboration, integrated with the help of another solution called Entity. We can do all the integration and receive an automatic ticket with the help of email. We are able to receive SMS alerts to clients and end users. Every step of the ticket is generated and we are able to resolve and close them. It's very helpful to have the ability to inform the user with detailed information."
"It's one of the top solutions on the market for ITSM capabilities."
"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."
"It has scaled well for us."
"Alert deduplication and noise reduction for alerts are the major features that I found useful."
"The product easily integrates with other solutions."
"The most valuable feature of PagerDuty is its integration with other tools, such as Amazon AWS, to receive notifications or create automatic instances."
"PagerDuty is very stable and very reliable."
"The most valuable feature is the phone app that allows us to send notifications without the additional fees when sending by SMS or phone calls."
"The solution's most valuable features are that it adds each alert as a service, has good scheduling capabilities, and includes the ability to write logic based on texts."
 

Cons

"The interface isn't that great."
"We found that there was numerous issues upgrading from 8.1 to 9.1 in that all our licenses were broken for almost a year and a half. We chased down a total of 14 hotfixes, patches, and service packs before things were finally resolved. During that time, said "fixes" also broke other things, so it was quite the sore spot with management for some time."
"They could be more responsive to feedback from their community board."
"From time to time, we had issues with stability, but I think that is our fault due to extra processes that we implemented to fit our business needs."
"Smart Reporting was added, then was purchased from another vendor. We have little ability to customize and correct issues due to this."
"Compared to ServiceNow, BMC Remedy is somewhat "closed." I can go to the ServiceNow website and learn everything there is to know about the product, and training is available. That really wasn't available with BMC Remedy."
"Adding additional fields does not work very well."
"I have customers that always would like to adapt and personalize BMC Helix ITSM more."
"I would like to see more content in the notification messages; although, that might be a configuration on our end."
"The On-Call Teams feature could be better in terms of levels of conditions related to which team or member should get the responsibility of handling a matter or incident."
"It is a very non-customizable product, so you cannot add things like root cause analysis or the classification of incidents based on the area where you are getting more incidents. For example, if you're getting a lot of database issues, that may be an are you want to probe."
"It is difficult to send underlying trace files or statuses using PagerDuty."
"Something that needs to be improved, is adding multilingual support."
"The biggest area for improvement with PagerDuty is noise suppression. There have been a handful of incidents through our use of PagerDuty over the years where one incident may lead to 30 to 50 pages because you're monitoring all these different things, and each thing is an individual page. There should be the ability to set up paging tiers and group correlations between some of the different pages. That is something that would be really valuable. We should be able to say this one page may have a group or a tree of effective other pages that may tier off of it. So, if you see those pages independently, go ahead and alarm, but if you see this plus that, don't do that."
"PagerDuty could improve the event orchestration by enhancing features, such as easier condition setup inside the orchestration."
"This solution works best in conjunction with a proper logging system, which can be an additional cost to organizations."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If Customer and IT agents are happy, that is one of the greatest ROI. However, one of the major factors is Leadership, because at the end they have to justify the cost."
"While purchasing, try to negotiate on per user licensing costs, associated maintenance, and purchase 20% more then what you think you should have. Bulk is always cheaper."
"The price of BMC Helix ITSM is expensive."
"I rate the product price an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive. The solution is expensive."
"Just make sure you really sit down and look at what you will be using per user, therefore you will not be surprised with a big bill. You do not want every user having every license, it really is not needed."
"There are licenses to use this solution."
"It's a yearly subscription but there are a couple of customers who go for the monthly subscription."
"It is not very expensive and not very cheap. It is somewhere in-between. Some of the features are more expensive. There are also additional costs. If you want to use most of the features, you need to pay more."
"There is a license needed to use PagerDuty."
"The pricing may be about $1,000 per user."
"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."
"PagerDuty has monthly and yearly licenses available, the costs of which can get quite high if you have a large number of users."
"The cost is quite high. But if you want to get a full-featured application and you have a big team..."
"If you add more people, then you have to pay more, which is always a thing with the SaaS solutions."
"The solution is paid on a monthly basis and represents about 1% of the platform's budget."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Retailer
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about BMC Helix ITSM?
If we consider major players like Ford or BMW, their core focus is manufacturing products like cars. To ensure smooth operations, any arising issues, be it security concerns or issues within depart...
What needs improvement with BMC Helix ITSM?
The tool needs greater customization flexibility, particularly concerning notifications and the progressive view web page. This is significant because it encompasses various aspects like incident m...
What is your primary use case for BMC Helix ITSM?
We majorly use the solution for user ticket management, incident management, and event management.
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 price is very high. I rate the pricing a six out of ten. The license for stakeholders is very limited.
What needs improvement with PagerDuty?
It is difficult to send underlying trace files or statuses using PagerDuty. You can set up email alerts, but you cannot build any triggers using those email alerts. There are limitations; you canno...
 

Also Known As

Remedy ITSM, Remedy, Helix Remedy
No data available
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Brookfield, HealthSouth Corporation, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics, Mercator, SAP, Stanford University
40% of the Fortune 100 TrustPagerDuty. Customers include: Slack, Intuit, Zendesk, Panasonic, Pinterest, Airbnb, eHarmony, McKesson, Comcast
Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, Atlassian, BMC and others in IT Service Management (ITSM). Updated: October 2024.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.