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ServiceNow 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

ServiceNow
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
216
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (1st), IT Asset Management (1st), IT Service Management (ITSM) (1st), Rapid Application Development Software (2nd), No-Code Development Platforms (1st)
xMatters
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
IT Alerting and Incident Management (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Systems Management solutions, they serve different purposes. ServiceNow is designed for IT Service Management (ITSM) and holds a mindshare of 24.8%, down 27.5% compared to last year.
xMatters, on the other hand, focuses on IT Alerting and Incident Management, holds 6.2% mindshare, down 9.7% since last year.
IT Service Management (ITSM)
IT Alerting and Incident Management
 

Featured Reviews

Somnath Kand - PeerSpot reviewer
Custom integration and reporting lead to efficient ticket management
There is a need for bug or error tracking in ServiceNow. Although there are child incidents or tickets, tracking primary issues or bugs within enhancements is not present. The reporting features in the new portal could be more user-friendly. While it provides options to minimize chart and image sizes, actual implementation doesn't always reflect these changes.
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

"There are features included in the new release for intelligent software, like the chatbot. For HR services, the HR agent which is in that chatbot has been fantastic."
"SPM and ITSM features are the most helpful."
"The most valuable features of ServiceNow for me are its ticketing and reporting capabilities."
"It uses a common base of data and allows different types of records to pull from that same base of data."
"I think the technical support is pretty good. They can be a little bit slow sometimes, but overall I think they're good."
"You can scale the solution."
"Good stable and scalable solution."
"I really like what they've done with their common service data model because now I can make a connection between the business process and technology."
"The two-way integration between ServiceNow and xMatters allows us to assign tickets to support personnel faster and respond to incidents faster."
"We have not noticed any scalability issues in the two years that we have used the system."
"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."
"We saw the value by being able to import everyone's schedule into one common central repository and have one tool for all the operational teams, or any team for that matter. It gave us the technology to find out who is on call. The incident management of xMatters' integration was another key aspect, where we could say, "You can configure this when a high ticket fires.""
"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."
"The on-call schedule that they have for groups is amazing in terms of how it works and how it triggers. You don't need to do anything. You just upload the users, and you have the calendar of the schedules. It is amazing how it works and how easy it is to work with this feature."
"Being SaaS-based is a plus. Regardless of the state of our network or infrastructure, xMatters will still be available via a mobile device."
"For our major incident management, it has expanded what we can do in terms of the format of the communication. People can subscribe, and they can receive delivery on multiple platforms, whether it's a voice message, email, or mobile app message. It enables us to deliver the right communication to the right people in the format they want."
 

Cons

"It's not very secure, it's web-based, and I prefer Remedy. Both the security and the web interface could be improved."
"The solution could be made cheaper. Machine learning and artificial intelligence should be introduced in the next release."
"Once a change request has been created once it's been approved and been submitted, there is no way to go in on that particular change request and submit an additional task."
"There is room for improvement in price."
"The interface is not user-friendly."
"The interface requires an upgrade."
"We don't have a huge amount of password reset requests, but the minimum package of resets that ServiceNow offers is much more than we need."
"The standard UI is very restricted. It doesn't look as good, compared to Remedy. Building your own UI requires some additional coding..."
"While they do have an extensive library of integrations, sometimes those integrations or custom integrations, require a more technical level of expertise in products outside of xMatters, such as Java."
"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."
"The user interface could be more intuitive. Once you know what you're doing, you're fine. However, if you don't know where to start then it can be a bit difficult to figure out how to make it work and how it will function together with different tools in the Flow Designer."
"While the documentation is good, the knowledge base - the collection of user supported community forums - is a little weak compared to some of the other products I've used. If I have a problem that I can't find the answer to in the documentation, there are very few places to go after that, because the user base, the community forums, are not strong for me to find someone who's had the same issue as me, and find out what the answer to their problem was. That's somewhat of a weak point."
"Additional built-in integrations with other applications would be an area of improvement."
"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."
"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."
"The data validation and verification need to be enhanced so that when data is changed, it reviews it in an automated manner and catches all of the anomalies."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"While the option exists to pay for a monthly license, we are dealing with large enterprises and these typically involve multi-year licenses of ten or five years, at a minimum."
"The solution is expensive."
"There are licensing fees."
"The pricing is reasonable and affordable, making it suitable for businesses ranging from small to large scale."
"The price is okay for us. It's reasonable."
"It is fairly expensive."
"ServiceNow pricing is an art, not a science. The deal depends on how commercially savvy you are, which does make it something that is quite difficult to get right. It is most definitely an opportunity area for ServiceNow to improve and have more visibility around pricing of the different products within the platform."
"The first impact for the customer is that it is expensive, but do not forget that it is a solution that includes infrastructure; a single cost, easy to justify."
"I don't make the decisions on the cost aspect. We haven't had any complaints. I think it has a reasonable price."
"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."
"​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. ​"
"I would definitely say it's worth the value. I wouldn't say it's expensive, but most people who pick xMatters are not going to select xMatters based on price. There are other lower-priced competitors that are out there. But I would say for what we're getting, it's worth the money."
"xMatters shortens the time to resolution, so the amount saved in potential lost revenue and productivity has justified the cost for our organization.​"
"I'm not really involved with the cost standpoint. I've only heard rumors of how much it costs, and if it costs what I think it costs, its cost is very high as compared to a lot of other tools that we're using here. It seems on the higher end from a cost standpoint."
"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."
"This is a subscription-based, SaaS solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
28%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
32%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Healthcare Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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.
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Also Known As

No data available
xMatters IT Management
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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    
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 ServiceNow, Atlassian, ManageEngine and others in IT Service Management (ITSM). Updated: February 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.