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PagerDuty Operations Cloud vs ServiceNow comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

PagerDuty Operations Cloud
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
Process Automation (15th), IT Alerting and Incident Management (1st), AIOps (13th), Critical Event Management (CEM) (2nd)
ServiceNow
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
214
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (1st), IT Asset Management (1st), IT Service Management (ITSM) (1st), Rapid Application Development Software (4th), No-Code Development Platforms (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Process, Business Automation, and Digital Transformation solutions, they serve different purposes. PagerDuty Operations Cloud is designed for IT Alerting and Incident Management and holds a mindshare of 29.5%, down 32.7% compared to last year.
ServiceNow, on the other hand, focuses on IT Service Management (ITSM), holds 26.1% mindshare, down 27.4% since last year.
IT Alerting and Incident Management
IT Service Management (ITSM)
 

Q&A Highlights

XY
Apr 04, 2023
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Fabio QUINTANILHA - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 29, 2024
A stable and scalable solution that has excellent features and is useful for collecting data and building KPIs
I use the solution to collect data to build KPIs. We promote and foster the usage of workflows in the company We use the data to compare and review situations, propose improvements, and promote action items. SPM and ITSM features are the most helpful. The product’s standard user experience is…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product easily integrates with other solutions."
"The alerts are immediate in this solution, which allows us to respond to errors quickly."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"It integrates with multiple applications and is highly customizable, with policies, escalation procedures, and an event routing tool that ensures contacting the right person."
"PagerDuty is very stable and very reliable."
"It reduces the amount of white noise. If something comes through, then it will alert somebody. However, if it's a bit of white noise that comes through at night, then it gets dealt with the next day. Everything is visible to everybody. It's not just a single person getting an SMS, then going, "Oh, I'm not going to worry about that." The visibility to everybody on the team is one of the great things about it because it reduces the white noise."
"Alert deduplication and noise reduction for alerts are the major features that I found useful."
"The SMS pages and the mobile application are pretty much the top two features."
"It is user-friendly and simple to use."
"It has an excellent capability to integrate different access points."
"Will give us better control over asset management and technical debt once we can centralize all contract information."
"What I like the most is that it's a common service data model and the fact that everything is available on one platform."
"It's a very low-code platform, and it's simple. The user experience is also really good."
"The analytics - we like to keep track of how much work everyone is doing."
"Easy to integrate with third-party applications."
"Great that it's knowledge-based and you can use the flows in ServiceNow."
 

Cons

"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."
"There is room for improvement with the time schedule. The way the schedule currently works is you assign all the team members in one schedule and it automatically spreads them around throughout the schedule... It would be better to be able to edit the schedule and place my team members where I want, or at least to have that option in addition to the automatic process."
"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."
"It cannot be integrated with our upgraded Jira system."
"I am not a direct end user of PagerDuty. It's hard to consider its shortcomings in that sense."
"PagerDuty's webhooks need some improvement."
"Something that needs to be improved, is adding multilingual support."
"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."
"System deployment and automation capabilities could be within the platform, similar to competitors."
"An area for improvement would be the accessibility of downloaded and compressed files."
"Performance could be improved."
"I know that discovery tools are not meant to be simple, but somehow, if they could make it more simple and robust, that would be great."
"We do a lot of relatively advanced stuff for the size that we are, but ServiceNow itself is so big and to some extent, there is a significant amount of complexity that you have, a big learning curve I would say, in order to really get on board."
"Service mapping could be less complicated."
"Change Management is the area I have found that this tool can be improved because there are so many fields which are missing, such as urgency of the customer request and how the priority is defined. These are some of the areas in which I found that BMC Remedy is much better than ServiceNow."
"There are Virtual Task Boards in the tool in the latest releases. There are many of them in the Scaled Agile Framework. There is some room there for improvement. It's really quite promising but, at the same time, it could be improved and I believe it will be improved soon."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"They're very good in pricing compared to the competitors in the area. I would rate them a five out of five in terms of pricing."
"If you add more people, then you have to pay more, which is always a thing with the SaaS solutions."
"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."
"There is a license needed to use PagerDuty."
"The cost is quite high. But if you want to get a full-featured application and you have a big team..."
"The price is very high."
"The pricing may be about $1,000 per user."
"Licensing costs are around $700 a month, and the only additional costs, are phone costs in some instances."
"For the modules we use, we found it competitive. I can't think of any costs in addition to the licensing fees."
"The licensing cost is based on your partnership with ServiceNow and what you have selected for implementation. There is an annual license cost which is calculated based on your number of devices."
"I have found the solution very expensive."
"In Tunisia, the companies find the licensing costs to be expensive."
"$230 per user."
"The solution is expensive."
"The license model is based on a number of fulfillers (active users who play some role within the ServiceNow functionality). Therefore, you can serve as many end-users as you want, without additional costs."
"They could be more competitive with their licensing."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Retailer
6%
Educational Organization
25%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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...
Which solution is better for developing non-ITSM applications: OutSystems or Service Now?
The short answer is that OutSystems is far better for 2 main reasons. Firstly, with Service Now you are locked into that platform for good. The business model is to lock in and then keep pumping th...
Would you choose ServiceNow over Microsoft PowerApps?
Hi Netanya, I will choose ServiceNow because ServiceNow is a very good tool compared to Microsoft PowerApp. Because ServiceNow has a very strong module (Performance Analysis) reporting which will ...
What do you like most about ServiceNow?
The solution has a user-friendly interface.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

40% of the Fortune 100 TrustPagerDuty. Customers include: Slack, Intuit, Zendesk, Panasonic, Pinterest, Airbnb, eHarmony, McKesson, Comcast
AAA, AstraZeneca, Becton, Dickinson and Company, Broadcom, Christus Health, Epicor, Equinix, GE Capital, Intuit, KPMG, Loyola Marymount University, OshKosh, Quantas, RedHat, Royal Bank of Scotland, Swiss Re, U.S. Department of Energy, Safeway, Yale University, and Zillow    
Find out what your peers are saying about PagerDuty, Atlassian, Splunk and others in IT Alerting and Incident Management. Updated: October 2024.
815,854 professionals have used our research since 2012.