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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
6.8
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (27th), AIOps (7th)
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 July 2025, in the IT Alerting and Incident Management category, the mindshare of BigPanda is 4.5%, down from 4.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of xMatters is 6.8%, down from 8.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Alerting and Incident Management
 

Featured Reviews

Ankit-Mathur - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers comprehensive alert monitoring and a user-friendly interface but requires manual validation to provide accurate alerts
For new users, I would advise using BigPanda for its comprehensive alert monitoring and integration with ServiceNow. Its mapping capabilities and user-friendly interface make it valuable for incident analysis and prioritization. As users become more familiar with the tool, its full potential will become apparent, enhancing efficiency and effectiveness over time. It is easy for someone to learn to use BigPanda for the first time. We start with basic examples that everyone can understand, then provide verbal introductions followed by hands-on training over two weeks. We encourage making mistakes and asking questions to ensure understanding. It depends on the trainer's approach, but with proper guidance, anyone can learn effectively. Overall, I would rate BigPanda as a five out of ten. For it to be a perfect ten, it would need to consistently provide accurate alerts without requiring manual validation. This means it should effectively suppress similar incidents, eliminating the need for constant monitoring. Once it reaches this level of reliability, BigPanda would be exceptional.
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

"A user-friendly solution."
"The event correlation is really good and it is able to reduce the noise. It is a good tool for anomaly detection."
"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."
"The most valuable features of BigPanda include event deduplication, correlations, and enrichment, which reduce the noise in the environment."
"We have also made extensive use of the outbound integrations to ticketing systems (JIRA) and collaboration tools (Slack). The main driver for us has been getting all alerting into a single UI and enabling us to streamline our incident management process."
"Alert deduplication and correlation - In an environment like the NOC where you're ingesting hundreds and thousands of alerts from various monitoring sources, it's time consuming and difficult to go through individual alerts and also difficult to spot critical issues. It's been great to have BigPanda not only deduplicate alerts but also correlate alerts that are seemingly unrelated, to create a clearer picture."
"BigPanda simplifies the process by consolidating multiple monitoring platforms into a single console where I can view all issues."
"The best of a bad lot was the error message deduping."
"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."
"We have reduced the time it takes to resolve major incidents through xMatters’s conference bridge management solution."
"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."
"The UI: It is easily navigable."
"The Flow Designer is quite valuable, as you can set up integrations and flows without necessarily needing to know about code."
"We have not noticed any scalability issues in the two years that we have used the system."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"It would be beneficial for BigPanda to offer detailed error descriptions similar to what AppDynamics and ThousandEyes provide."
"When handling critical traffic, the BigPanda site can slow down, which we manage with a load balancer."
"The solutions were quite useful but not completely stable."
"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 usability needs to improve, because it is a pure code environment."
"The planned maintenance feature in BigPanda needs enhancements due to its limited scheduling options."
"Lacks sufficient dashboard features."
"The solution could improve by having better integration."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to see some more user templates. There are roles — administrator, user, etc. — but it would be nice to create a user template that restricted what people assigned that role could do."
"As an agent, as someone who is on call, I can mark an absence time and I can optionally put somebody in my place, but once you've done that, you can't edit it. You have to delete it and create a new absence, which is annoying, but it's not a massive issue. It's a minor annoyance. That's probably about the only thing I can come up with because I absolutely love the product. It's met our needs so well."
"If you want to alter a custom field, you can do so via import/export. But you can't have an unlimited number of custom fields, so in a large environment with a lot of teams, team provisioning becomes more difficult."
"Support may take longer than desired to resolve some issues."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"We pay $200,000 USD per year."
"The pricing is tiered so we took that into account. If we were to license 10 or 20 people, that would be a certain price. And if we were to license 50 or 100, there would be a little bit of discounting. But the per-user license was right in line with what we were expecting."
"Then, in pricing, you are limited on your number of SMS messages that you can send a month and the licensing cost annually."
"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."
"It feels like good value in the sense that the service is excellent. The people above me who look at such things have renewed it a couple of times, and I think they would have thought whether it was good value, whether it was wildly overpriced, or whether there were better and cheaper alternatives. So, from that perspective, the pricing is fair and proper."
"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 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."
"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."
"Cost is probably my biggest concern. I know the solution was recently acquired by Everbridge, and Everbridge was one of the competitors that was included in our RFP five years ago. Everbridge's costs were astronomical compared to where every other solution was, not just xMatters."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
24%
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
6%
Computer Software Company
32%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Insurance Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 for BigPanda is reasonable compared to other event management tools, given its advantages.
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

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: June 2025.
860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.