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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.​"
"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."
"Probably the most important one is that it persists in attempting to contact to someone until someone is engaged on the event."
"The ability to have the rota and then configure notifications that you can directly fire them into the group is most valuable. The India shift is from 2:00 AM to 9:00 AM, and then it is the UK shift from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM UK time, and then there is also a defined US shift and on-call hours. It allows us to make sure that everyone is going to get notified when they need to be about an issue. We can target specific locations or users with notifications."
"The two-way integration between ServiceNow and xMatters allows us to assign tickets to support personnel faster and respond to incidents faster."
"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."
"We're able to point all of our alerting tools at xMatters and have it route alerts to the right people at the right time. We're able to generate major instant notifications for product outages, get all of our people on the bridge at the same time, and include information from our monitoring tools with that. So everyone is speaking the same language and seeing the same information. We're able to route those notifications not only to people, but also to other tools like Slack channels, where everyone can get in and collaborate."
"The cloud solution reduces alarming to the core, which means no need to provision your server, which is great."
"We have reduced the time it takes to resolve major incidents through xMatters’s conference bridge management solution."
 

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.​"
"We would like to see a greater variety of integrations with ServiceNow. It works fine as it is, but an enhancement would be the ability to interact with the major incident module in ServiceNow... The way our major incident process works, when an incident is elevated from a P1 to a major incident, that is an extra flag in ServiceNow. It would be awesome to have xMatters get notification when something goes from a P1 to a major and then have it go through a different workflow, rather than our regular P1."
"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 has not improved our organization."
"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"
"In terms of restoration, if you delete something, or you have multiple users that have the ability to delete a group, a user profile, or a workflow, the ability to restore it within the GUI is not available. There are a whole bunch of programs that are required to allow for that to happen. A button to go back to a good point in time would be really nice. A lot of other tools have a better backup and restoration solution, but xMatters is a little bit short on that. They have about 95% solution available, but the other 5% requires manual effort. We would like to be able to just push a button and say, "I want to restore this piece back to this date," but we can't do that with the tool right now."
"What I would like it to do is tell me anytime there is a P1 incident, except when the ticket is assigned to this team or when this word is in the summary, but there is no exclusion option. I have been complaining about this for a couple years. At one point, we created a ticket for this with the developers to review. I assume that once enough people complain about it, they will bump it up in priority to work on. However, if not enough people think it is an issue, then they prioritize their work and work on other features and functionality. However, this is something that has been challenging for us because we have needed to find ways to work around it or just deal with it. So, I would love to see an exclusion option."
"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."
"​Integrations seem to be the most difficult part. Once setup though, they work well.​"
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"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 only potential concern is professional services. They are capable, but like to bill on an hourly basis."
"I know roughly what we pay per year. For what we use it for and what its purpose is, it is very valuable."
"xMatters is pricey, but you have to consider what a critical incident costs your organization."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
11%
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.
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