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Everbridge IT Alerting vs PagerDuty Operations Cloud 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:
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the IT Alerting and Incident Management category, the mindshare of Everbridge IT Alerting is 11.0%, up from 8.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PagerDuty Operations Cloud is 22.1%, down from 30.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of xMatters is 6.0%, down from 9.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Alerting and Incident Management
 

Featured Reviews

it_user741570 - PeerSpot reviewer
Gets the right parties to the table at the right time - our mean time to restore has diminished, saving us money
In recent weeks we've been talking to Everbridge about leveraging some new functionality that they're demploying right now around orchestration. Imagine a full, closed-loop event remediation: auto-remediation. A server throws an alert. We catch it in our monitoring tool. We page or SMS text, using Everbridge IT Alerting. A group member receives that text and responds to the text with "Option One." Option one can say, "I want to go ahead and execute an orchestration that will automatically stop and restart the services on that box or even reboot the box." That would, again, further reduce service restoration time, and significantly reducing the manual engagement of logging a ticket, logging onto the box, restarting the box or the servers or services manually. All of that can be done through automation. We're not there yet, but that's what we're talking about right now, as a part of our next wave of moving along the crawl, walk, run journey. In terms of what could be improved, almost always, there is something that could be improved. I've been in this industry long enough to know that there is no perfect system. All the good ones still offer opportunities for getting better. I think if you were to look from their point of view, they would also see themselves in a crawl, walk, run journey. They may be further along in their walk, but they're probably not in the "Olympic sprint" or "Olympic marathon" stage yet. They've got lots of potential, room for feature enhancements, improvements. A couple of key ones might include - and I think they are working towards these things - analytics. If I want to do sophisticated reporting and analysis of the data that's being captured in IT Alerting, at the moment, the reporting interface is immature. They're very helpful. They get it. They're listening to us, but it's weak. It's growing. It's getting better. Reporting and analytics would be one space. Their integration capabilities are still progressing, but not quite where we'd like to see them yet. They're moving there with that orchestration capability where they're seeing the potential of an API-first mentality. So instead of trying to build custom connections into everything, you open up APIs to allow other systems to talk to IT Alerting and allow IT Alerting to talk to other systems. There is room for improvement, but they get it. They're listening in that space, too. Sure, there are things they can be doing better, but in partnership with them, us among other customers, I think we've got their ear, and they're being very proactive about listening.
JeremyEmmett - PeerSpot reviewer
Centralized alert management with customizable routing and superior scheduling
Everything can always be better. Operations are somewhat limited by their integration package. For example, integrating with Jira was problematic until they updated to a better plug-in. The ability to build customized modules would be advantageous, allowing organizations to define their own integration modules. It would be useful to have a way to define all configurations in code that is similar to how Terraform operates.
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's mainly for mass notification and pooling of contacts. Pooling of customers is valuable."
"A robust solution with multiple modules that can be leveraged."
"Valuable features include having the Calendar built in. That allows for on-call rotation to be set once and left alone. Also, Slack Integration enables us to have all the information from an incident and discussions documented through Slack, without input."
"One key aspect of the solution is that it can send information very quickly and is connected to different nodes."
"By leveraging Everbridge, with a few clicks of a mouse, we are able to go in and request as many teams as we require to respond to an incident and bring them together to collaborate much faster."
"The most valuable feature is automated escalation, as it eliminates a manual process which is prone to errors."
"I personally love VCC because I just think there needs to be more data to support it so we can be more proactive and easily assess the impact. So, I appreciate the visual aspect, but it has to have the data to support it. It has proved very useful, particularly because we have a GSOC that's not technically 24/7. We do have an 800 number that people call 24/7. If something happens, they can easily send Everbridge a notification to activate the team off hours. It is useful in that respect too. We use it in conjunction with teams, but off-hours and for additional people outside of the core team, we use Everbridge, which is useful."
"The most valuable feature is the support calendars."
"It has scaled well for us."
"PagerDuty is very stable and very reliable."
"PagerDuty's notification process is the most valuable feature."
"It integrates with multiple applications and is highly customizable, with policies, escalation procedures, and an event routing tool that ensures contacting the right person."
"The inbound integrations that PagerDuty provides with most of the DevOps tools are valuable."
"A cool feature is that it helps us to understand the flow of the alert. If the alert was coming to the current on-call and he didn't catch the call or didn't notice it for any reason, it starts being escalated automatically, according to the escalation schedule, or to other teammates. You can see the flow very easily on your phone or via the website, if you want to do a post-mortem."
"The most valuable feature of PagerDuty is its integration with other tools, such as Amazon AWS, to receive notifications or create automatic instances."
"The most valuable features of PagerDuty are customization, access, policies, and different rules regarding the path of escalation. Additionally, it's easy to use and create overrides. For example, if you all are on a call for one week each, but somebody wants to go on PTO, the team needs to swap shifts in PagerDuty. This is easy to do by creating overrides to switch up the set schedules. It's very user-friendly in that aspect. It works well for monitoring and alerting."
"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."
"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."
"Simple features create flow sets and build APIs for integrations."
"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."
"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 has improved our time to respond. Prior to the use of xMatters, it might take hours or even a day to get someone involved on a problem. Now, it's down to minutes."
"It reduces the mean time to restore a service. Before, it would probably take an hour to get everybody settled down. With the integrations right now, if somebody flags a major incident, then everyone is on a call in the next 15 minutes."
"It helped change behavior across the organization to improve accountability."
 

Cons

"The integration with other solutions needs improvement... Due to issues with the libraries provided by Everbridge, we have not been able to integrate IT Alerting with our incident management tool."
"What I would like to see is vendor alerting. It's not structured to take into account that users outside of our environment, users outside of IT, may not be in the group. IBM is an outside vendor for us, and we have IBM CEs who come in on a regular basis. If there's a problem, we call those vendors in. That should be tied into the system where we can say that vendors A, B, and C have these users and we want them available to come into the office when there's an issue. We want to be able to alert them in the same way we alert internally."
"I know that we get frustrated at the capacity of SMS messages. It's not very long, and if you want to send a long message, they end up sending you a link to the rest of the message."
"Explanations are limited to 500 characters in description fields."
"They still have a limitation due to their partner, I believe it's Twilio, where, if you're on an incident call, there is a four-hour time limit. We often have calls that go over four hours in length so people have to drop and rejoin to reset their four-hour timer. It's a minor inconvenience, but it's not ideal."
"The solution's non-targeted communication with external parties could be enhanced."
"I would like to have a little bit more flexibility in the member portal."
"I swapped two people's weeks, and at least from what I saw, I had to do each day individually. It would be nice if I could swap two people's weeks without having to do it each day."
"Something that needs to be improved, is adding multilingual support."
"The solution does not code all alerts correctly so sometimes you get false positives or multiple alerts for the same issue."
"I would like the UI to be more intuitive. I would like to be able to group or color-code the discoveries. When you create a system, you have a listing of all the different configurations. You can list them by teams, but some additional color coding would be helpful. I would break it down by incident controls. In other words, it should be broken down it into response teams and engineering divisions."
"Operations are somewhat limited by their integration package. For example, integrating with Jira was problematic until they updated to a better plug-in."
"It is difficult to send underlying trace files or statuses using PagerDuty."
"PagerDuty could improve the event orchestration by enhancing features, such as easier condition setup inside the orchestration."
"Because of the way you have to structure the rosters, if an engineer has to go on leave (or something), you can't just go in and reassign/take this person out of all of the different rosters that they're in. You have to go into each of the rosters and take them out. There might be a roster for business hours, after hours rotation, and monitoring deployments. Each time we need to take an engineer out of the pool, e.g., if they're sick or on leave, then we have to go and touch all of those rosters, updating and replacing them. Whereas, if we could just take the person out and have it automatically fill in the rostering, then that would make life a lot easier for managing it."
"PagerDuty should be integrated with other tools, so it can import the IT roster automatically. Our other rules continue to work once they're configured, but the roster must be added manually."
"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"
"A lot of the issues that we've had have already been addressed. However, they could be clearer with the actual throughput and the costs. The throughput that we signed up for was a lot lower than what we needed, and we had to pay a lot more to get the throughput that we needed."
"We have had outages with the product. We have experienced functionality (defects), such as conference bridges can only be opened for four hours at a time and people get kicked out."
"It has not improved our organization."
"If you are not one of the big players of their customers, the chance that one of your minor wishes will granted are very small."
"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."
"Beyond the typical grouping, xMatters has what is referred to as dynamic teams. Dynamic teams are criteria for setting up and targeting a group of people that meet specific criteria. The bad thing about this setup is that you cannot alter those criteria through the typical xMatters import/export process. The attributes that create the criteria for dynamic teams can only be altered via the Web UI. So, if you want to create a new dynamic team in a mature xMatters environment (one that is already populated with hundreds of users), and you want to add, say, 100 users to that dynamic team, you have to do it manually."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The current pricing model is adequate. We feel that the pricing model for our IT Alerting solution is competitive with similar solutions on the market."
"This product has helped us save $200,000 from being able to get rid of vendors and consolidate functionalities to doing incident reporting."
"I do not know about the licensing costs, but I know they're in groups, and there are permission caps. For example, you can have five admin accounts, and anyone can receive a notification. There's a mobile component too, which I find particularly useful, but it has to be a part of the contract."
"It saves us a lot of time."
"Everbridge IT Alerting is a cost-efficient solution."
"Pricing is reasonable."
"When we did our contract, we did a three year contract with fixed pricing. We locked in the pricing for three years. As we have grown, we locked in pricing for additional units of employees."
"As far as I'm aware, there are no costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"There is a license needed to use PagerDuty."
"The solution is paid on a monthly basis and represents about 1% of the platform's budget."
"If you add more people, then you have to pay more, which is always a thing with the SaaS solutions."
"The cost is quite high. But if you want to get a full-featured application and you have a big team..."
"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 cost is based on the package you select."
"Licensing costs are around $700 a month, and the only additional costs, are phone costs in some instances."
"PagerDuty has monthly and yearly licenses available, the costs of which can get quite high if you have a large number of users."
"It feels like good value in the sense that the service is excellent. The people above me who look at such things have renewed it a couple of times, and I think they would have thought whether it was good value, whether it was wildly overpriced, or whether there were better and cheaper alternatives. So, from that perspective, the pricing is fair and proper."
"​I do not think it is worth the value.​"
"I don't make the decisions on the cost aspect. We haven't had any complaints. I think it has a reasonable price."
"It seemed comparable or more reasonable than some of the other solutions, at least when we evaluated it. There are no extra costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. Its cost is good, given the breadth of features provided by xMatters."
"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."
"We're currently per license. We're paying around $44,000 per year for 80 full users and 300 standard users. For a new implementation, we also need to pay for an expert."
"You should perhaps arrange an evaluation or trial to just test it out. Get your feet wet. That is so important. If you don't try it, then you won't know."
"Cost is probably my biggest concern. I know the solution was recently acquired by Everbridge, and Everbridge was one of the competitors that was included in our RFP five years ago. Everbridge's costs were astronomical compared to where every other solution was, not just xMatters."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Healthcare Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Computer Software Company
33%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Healthcare Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Everbridge IT Alerting?
The solution's non-targeted communication with external parties could be enhanced.
What advice do you have for others considering Everbridge IT Alerting?
We are using Everbridge IT Alerting for incident and crisis modules. The tool is powerful in itself, but as with any ...
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 solution was expensive, but if all its features were utilized, it was considered worth the cost. The tier-based p...
What needs improvement with PagerDuty?
Everything can always be better. Operations are somewhat limited by their integration package. For example, integrati...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

No data available
No data available
xMatters IT Management
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Choice Hotels, Alexion, Navy Federal Credit Union, EastWest Bank, IBM, Core Logic, Paypal, Charter Communications, Lowes, Express Scripts, Finastra, Worldpay
40% of the Fortune 100 TrustPagerDuty. Customers include: Slack, Intuit, Zendesk, Panasonic, Pinterest, Airbnb, eHarmony, McKesson, Comcast
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, Atlassian, Splunk and others in IT Alerting and Incident Management. Updated: April 2025.
849,335 professionals have used our research since 2012.