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BigPanda vs xMatters comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 2, 2025

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

BigPanda
Ranking in IT Alerting and Incident Management
8th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (25th), AIOps (8th)
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 BigPanda is 4.5%, down from 5.1% 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 (%)
BigPanda4.5%
xMatters6.8%
Other88.7%
IT Alerting and Incident Management
 

Featured Reviews

Michael Wenn - PeerSpot reviewer
Experience boosts operational efficiency while requiring smoother setup and cost adjustments
I am a customer and end user of the BigPanda solution. My role is CEO/co-founder at AI Ops Limited, and I can be reached at mike.van@aiops.co.uk. I have opted to receive email notifications relevant to my review, which I can opt out of at any time. If I don't already have an account on peerspot.com, PeerSpot will create an account and email me login credentials.
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

"The solution is user-friendly and has good performance and certification."
"Easy integration - We've had challenges in the past integrating all of our various monitoring sources and tools into one central system. BigPanda, with the integrations that it already has, as well as offering webhook/REST API, has made it very easy for us to plug everything in."
"I rate BigPanda nine out of ten."
"BigPanda integrates well with other solutions, such as WatchGuard,"
"Alert aggregation was the primary requirement. BigPanda pulls all this together into a single UI for us, allowing us to see related alerts grouped together into an incident, and enables us to easily create a JIRA ticket and Slack channel to manage an issue."
"The program is very stable."
"One of the most valuable features of BigPanda is its user-friendly interface."
"Overall, I rate BigPanda as a nine out of ten."
"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."
"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."
"It helped change behavior across the organization to improve accountability."
"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."
"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."
"Support has been great. They responded very quickly to all the support cases that I have submitted.​"
"That automation is the critical aspect of xMatters. Without those workflows, then we would have a system that maintains an on-call schedule in Excel. So xMatters provides the notification workflow and ensures you're notifying the right person at the right time."
"Probably the most important one is that it persists in attempting to contact to someone until someone is engaged on the event."
 

Cons

"Our infrastructure is quite large - tens of thousands of servers, often with 30-plus checks running on each host with one minute intervals. This generates a lot of data often in bursts (when we have a large scale failure). This has caused some delay in the ingestion pipeline."
"It would be beneficial for BigPanda to offer detailed error descriptions similar to what AppDynamics and ThousandEyes provide."
"BigPanda can improve the correlations. We didn't see any big value. It is still good at the same event deduplication, event processing, and ticket creation, but I was more looking at event analysis and event correlation. In that area, it is still no big difference between the other solutions on the market. All of them, are in the same immature stage."
"Lacks sufficient dashboard features."
"BigPanda attempts a little of everything and fails at most."
"We had to use a partner for the deployment."
"I am not sure if we can pull reports of bulk incidents in different formats like PDF, Excel, or CSV. This feature would allow us to extract monthly incident reports similar to ServiceNow."
"The solution could improve by having better integration."
"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."
"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."
"The only thing that has caught us out a little bit is that on certain screens, you don't have the same admin options. There should be more consistency with the admin options because not all screens provide you with the same options. As an administrator, it feels like they should always be there. For example, on some screens, there is an Export button that provides fantastic, detail-rich exports, which obviously are very handy because then you can, as an administrator, do your administration, and extract what has been done to share with or prove to others. However, the Export button is not always present, and on the screens where it isn't, you miss it. You're like, "Oh, where's the Export button?", which can be quite problematic. There should be more consistency in the UI in terms of available options for anything that is referenced data or configurable. If you can put it in, there should be a way to run an export function to essentially pull it out. That's the only improvement that I can really think of."
"On-call management scheduling is difficult."
"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."
"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."
"They could make the product more customizable."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We pay $200,000 USD per year."
"The price of BigPanda is in the middle compared to other solutions."
"BigPanda is cheaper than the competitors."
"They were great to work with on pricing/licensing. Given we are a high-growth company, we needed a flexible site license."
"I am not really privy to how much my client is paying for this service. They just tell me the number of licenses that they have. Every time that I say, "I need extra licenses to make sure that all Level 1 and 2s have their own xMatters account," they keep telling me that it is too expensive. If the only purpose is to call people, it doesn't justify the cost of paying more than the number of licenses that they already have."
"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."
"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."
"This is a subscription-based, SaaS solution."
"xMatters shortens the time to resolution, so the amount saved in potential lost revenue and productivity has justified the cost for our organization.​"
"The features they provide, versus the cost, are pretty good."
"​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. ​"
"This is our biggest issue: licensing. Our customer has only purchased a set number of full licensed users, and we are constantly running up against our license limit. To mitigate licensing concerns, we completely control at the admin level user additions and removals, and do a monthly cleanup process driven by security contractor removal reports."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
24%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
6%
Computer Software Company
29%
Performing Arts
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise24
 

Questions from the Community

Any advice about APM solutions?
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...
What do you like most about BigPanda?
One of the most valuable features of BigPanda is its user-friendly interface.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BigPanda?
The pricing of BigPanda includes considerations for pricing, licensing, and setup costs of the solution.
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
xMatters IT Management
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nagios, ServiceNow, ITSM, NOC, CMDB Evolved, RemedyIncident Management Process
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 BigPanda vs. xMatters and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
868,787 professionals have used our research since 2012.