ServiceNow vs xMatters comparison

The compared ServiceNow and Everbridge solutions aren't in the same category. ServiceNow is ranked #1 in ISM , with an average rating of 8.5, and holds a 24.2% mindshare in the category. Everbridge is ranked #9 in IMS , and holds a 6.0% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of ServiceNow users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Everbridge users who would recommend it.

ServiceNow

Read 216 ServiceNow reviews

10,417 Views
7,111 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

xMatters

Read 31 xMatters reviews

830 Views
472 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

ServiceNow

xMatters

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between ServiceNow and xMatters based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, Atlassian, ManageEngine and others in IT Service Management (ITSM).

To learn more, read our detailed IT Service Management (ITSM) Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IT Service Management (ITSM)

March 2025

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Helped 845,040 peers since 2012

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

Ranking in other categories

IT Alerting and Incident Management (9th)

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 24.2%, down 27.4% compared to last year.
xMatters, on the other hand, focuses on IT Alerting and Incident Management, holds 6.0% mindshare, down 9.3% since last year.

IT Service Management (ITSM)

IT Alerting and Incident Management

Featured Reviews

Somnath Kand

Team Lead at LTI - Larsen & Toubro Infotech

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.

Read full review

Dean-Robinson

Sr. Developer at a media company with 10,001+ employees

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"One feature of ServiceNow that is important is the workflow engine. From my perspective [as a consultant] the power to be able to structure processes, represent workforce management for organizations, and the visibility provided by the reporting are additional top features."

"I don't have to look through a whole bunch of other incidents that aren't relevant to me. It's very useful in that sense."

"The most valuable aspect of the solution is the possibility of the application development cap so that we can digitize workflows."

"I prefer ServiceNow to the competition because of its ease of use, installation and configuration."

"I like that it's always up and running."

"ServiceNow is a cloud solution. That fact was very important for us, that it is not an on-prem solution, as it reduces our internal cost of support."

"For our work, ServiceNow's service catalogs and SDK integrations are the most valuable features."

"ServiceNow is one of the few easiest platforms you can integrate with products like Ansible to automate your workflows."

More ServiceNow pros

"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."

"By adding the ServiceNow integration, we have been able to page support groups for critical incidents and move scheduling from ServiceNow into xMatters, offering more control to our support groups."

"The most valuable features are the ability to have groups and then have an on-call rotation in the groups. Outlook lacks both these features. Outlook gives you the ability to contact an individual or groups, but you can't contact them based on an on-call rotation, and you can't have built-in timing escalations inside of that. xMatters gives you the ability to do that, which is important when you have 50 or so people in the team, but you only want to contact the person who is on-call. You don't create any unnecessary noise. xMatters allows you to page the right person who is on-call versus just creating excessive noise."

"We use xMatters for alarming infrastructure outages and failures of batch jobs (post-processing)."

"We haven't evaluated any product recently, but from what I can tell, looking around online, what xMatters has that others don't have are the custom forms. That's the big differentiator at the moment because that's something that we heavily use."

"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."

"We have not noticed any scalability issues in the two years that we have used the system."

"The two-way integration between ServiceNow and xMatters allows us to assign tickets to support personnel faster and respond to incidents faster."

More xMatters pros

Cons

"Like all other IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS subscription cloud providers, ServiceNow is constantly improving by building new capabilities to expand the breadth and depth of its offerings while increasing its activities with partners to build more capabilities."

"The solution could improve by making the CMDB integrate with a CI better to allow it to be seen across multiple platforms."

"In an upcoming release, there should be more administration tools."

"Currently, we are finding it a bit difficult to monitor the subscriptions that are being used. The reporting feature related to this can be improved. Its ITOM functionality can be improved. BMC does a better job than ServiceNow in terms of capturing utilization and other such things."

"It would be nice if we could, with some specific access rights, move histories from one squad to another, as they generate dependencies or duplicate or flag them."

"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."

"The visuals are the one area where there is opportunity for improvement."

"Very expensive."

More ServiceNow cons

"In terms of intuitiveness and flexibility of xMatters when it comes to customizing on-call schedules, rotations, and escalations, for me, as an IT professional, setting it up isn't that big of a deal, but I understand that some people struggle with it because when you get wrapped up into it. You can get lost. It's not super complex, but it's complicated enough to the point where you can say that you should have done it another way. The shift part can be confusing for some people. In that respect, one of the shortcomings my team has found is when we have to add another person, such as a new hire, to xMatters, we can't add them to a group within xMatters without having to put them on a shift. If we put them in a group, they have to be on-call. We can create their account, and then they're just out there in limbo until their team says, "You have to be on this shift." One piece of feedback for xMatters is to figure out how to have manageable groups so that they're contactable from xMatters. They do not necessarily have to be on a shift right from the start or at all for that matter."

"Reporting is the weakest point of xMatters. Since xMatters has very limited reporting and only maintains logs of events for a short period of time, we export event and conference logs to our ITSM solution."

"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."

"It has not improved our organization."

"We have to create an Excel sheet for onboarding users and then upload it. But if an employee resigns, we don't have any checkpoints to validate whether the user is still active or not. We have to do that manually every week: Check who has left the organization, and do a cross-check, whether this person had any licenses or signed in to xMatters."

"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."

"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."

"We would like to see the ability to support custom devices. We have a lot of users who use Slack, which is another tool for communication. xMatters currently does not support Slack as a communication method. It can't send events to Slack and respond to them."

More xMatters cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Getting the solution up and running is expensive."

"The pricing is reasonable and affordable, making it suitable for businesses ranging from small to large scale."

"I am from Brazil. For Latin American markets, ServiceNow is very expensive as compared to other vendors, such as VMware."

"The price could be a little lower for the solution. Many of my customers have issues with the licensing process, they have to make it easier and straightforward."

"The licenses are expensive."

"Certainly, from a product-platform perspective, the price is not too bad."

"The platform offers a free trial, by providing a free developer instance once you sign up."

"Some time ago it was expensive, but large companies have special contracts. It's enterprise prices, and we're talking about millions per year."

More ServiceNow pricing and cost advice

"The pricing and licensing are okay. I wish that the user licenses were cheaper but the stakeholder licenses are at a reasonable cost."

"It is worth the cost. You need to know the number of users that are going to use it, which is usually pretty easy to calculate. It's on a per-user license."

"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."

"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."

"This is a subscription-based, SaaS solution."

"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. "

"If you are willing to pay for the licensing of it, it is able to scale out."

"If the licensing were cheaper, our customer might buy more."

More xMatters pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions are best for your needs.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

28%

Computer Software Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

32%

Financial Services Firm

21%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

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...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

What do you like most about ServiceNow?

The solution has a user-friendly interface.

See all answers

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Comparisons

BMC Helix ITSM vs ServiceNow

Compared 8% of the time

Microsoft Power Apps vs ServiceNow

Compared 7% of the time

Pega Platform vs ServiceNow

Compared 6% of the time

IBM Maximo vs ServiceNow

Compared 5% of the time

Microsoft Dynamics CRM vs ServiceNow

Compared 5% of the time

More ServiceNow Competitors

Everbridge IT Alerting vs xMatters

Compared 36% of the time

PagerDuty Operations Cloud vs xMatters

Compared 28% of the time

Opsgenie vs xMatters

Compared 14% of the time

More xMatters Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ServiceNow

March 2025

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Buyer's Guide

xMatters

March 2025

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Also Known As

No data available

xMatters IT Management

Overview

ServiceNow is a cloud-based task-management platform that specializes in IT operations management (ITOM), IT services management (ITSM), and IT business management (ITBM). ServiceNow allows users to manage their teams, projects, and customer interactions using a variety of different plugins and apps with which it easily integrates.

ServiceNow offers prebuilt applications to support any process, as well as a framework and tools that allow you to build your own.

ServiceNow’s service management solutions include change, request, incident, problem, and cost management, as well as HR, IT, field service, and facilities management solutions. They also cover business management solutions such as vendor performance management, financial management, performance analytics and project portfolio suite, as well as governance, risk, and compliance.

“The Smarter Way to Workflow”

ServiceNow’s activities, processes, and tasks are overseen as part of a comprehensive managed workflow that supports such features as real-time collaboration, communication, and resource sharing. ServiceNow’s suite of products allow for operation using serverless computing, and include the categories of Business Apps, Customer Service, HR, IT, and Security.

ServiceNow can be used to support most workflows because of the wide range of tools it offers. These include on-suite ticketing tools, predictive modeling to manage workflows, and benchmarking for the tracking of progress. ServiceNow can assist with artificial intelligence and machine learning processes and can be used to organize the cases of a help/service desk as well as for instance management and problem management. It also smoothly integrates with many legacy systems.

ServiceNow offers service management software for industries including:

Cloud services
Education
Financial services
Government
Healthcare
Manufacturing
Telecommunications

Reviews from Real Users

PeerSpot users prefer ServiceNow to its competitors because of its scalability, stability, and ease of use. It helps everyone in the company to be on the same page by creating a single source of record across all departments. One user stated that “I’ve definitely used over 20 project management solutions, but they can't be compared with ServiceNow.” Another said that “ServiceNow is an industry leader in multiple areas and provides an excellent ROI.”

ServiceNow

xMatters, an Everbridge company, is a service reliability platform that helps DevOps, SREs, and operations teams rapidly deliver products at scale by automating workflows and ensuring infrastructure and applications are always working. The xMatters code-free workflow builder, adaptive approach to incident management, and real-time performance analytics all support a single goal: deliver customer happiness.

To learn more, request a demo.

Reliable services, rapid innovation: Automate operations workflows, ensure applications are always working, and deliver remarkable products at scale with the xMatters service reliability platform.

Automate on the xMatters service reliability platform: Move faster with confidence. Our no-code and low-code integrations let you build flexible workflows to address issues proactively—even during deployments.

Frictionless on-call: Manage on-call seamlessly. Automatically escalate to the right people, schedule with ease, and act on detailed alerts from anywhere.

Adaptive Incident Management: Stay resilient in any scenario with our adaptive approach to incident management. Automate resolution, protect customers from disruptions, and learn from each event.

Signal Intelligence: Put situations in context and cut through the noise of multiple monitoring tools with filtering and suppression, alert correlation, enriched notifications, and routing based on role or function.

Actionable Analytics: Get quick insights into key metrics to understand inefficiencies, boosting collaboration and productivity across engineering and operations teams.

Everbridge

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.

Buyer's Guide

IT Service Management (ITSM)

March 2025

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