No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

FortiMonitor 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

FortiMonitor
Ranking in IT Alerting and Incident Management
17th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (37th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (40th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (11th)
xMatters
Ranking in IT Alerting and Incident Management
13th
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 August 2026, in the IT Alerting and Incident Management category, the mindshare of FortiMonitor is 2.1%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of xMatters is 4.4%, down from 7.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Alerting and Incident Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
xMatters4.4%
FortiMonitor2.1%
Other93.5%
IT Alerting and Incident Management
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2677554 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer III at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Managing diverse networks with detailed alerts enhances device oversight
FortiManager is very helpful in managing our networks. We use it to manage 20 farms and various networks with hundreds of devices. The version we are using provides more detail than the older dashboard. We appreciate the alerting capabilities, which are integrated with SolarWinds to notify our team via SMS.
Dean-Robinson - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution helps to see client infrastructure. It has many boxes and blinks green or red when the station goes up or down. We have different domains for the device groups that we monitor."
"The tool continuously improves, adapting to support new vendors and technologies. Importantly, it automates the process, triggering alerts when devices require attention, and eliminating the need for manual intervention."
"FortiMonitor offers comprehensive monitoring capabilities, allowing me to track network traffic in and out effectively."
"FortiMonitor is 100% stable."
"The most valuable feature of FortiMonitor is the overall ability to monitor the health of the environment."
"Overall, I would recommend FortiMonitor to others."
"FortiMonitor is really easy to use for monitoring the logs on FortiGate...It is a stable product."
"It provides the best firewall features."
"The most valuable feature is getting alerts out to my user base. xMatters is the only solution that I know that has robust scheduling, calendaring for groups, and that provides very good delineation of who gets alerted and on which devices they receive their alerts."
"Overall, it's a very capable tool and if you keep working at it, it will do what you need it to do."
"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."
"It reduces the mean time to restore a service. Before, it would probably take an hour to get everybody settled down. With the integrations right now, if somebody flags a major incident, then everyone is on a call in the next 15 minutes."
"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."
"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."
"Having our users manage their own notification devices within xMatters is huge, since it takes the burden off our datacenter."
"It brought efficiency in terms of how quickly we resolve matters and how quickly we can get in touch with the person who is actually on-call."
 

Cons

"Sometimes, we get corruption when upgrading from firmware to the new generation, causing a lot of issues."
"Additionally, there are no AI features in FortiMonitor, which might be an area for enhancement."
"FortiMonitor needs to improve its alert system."
"The solution's initial setup process is time-consuming."
"There are areas for improvement that FortiManager is addressing."
"FortiMonitor could be improved by making it more convenient for smaller workloads, such as when configuring a few branches."
"FortiMonitor could improve by having compatibility with other operating systems, such as Linux."
"FortiMonitor's monitoring could be much better. It should be like, in Palo Alto."
"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."
"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."
"A lot of other tools have a better backup and restoration solution, but xMatters is a little bit short on that."
"Additional built-in integrations with other applications would be an area of improvement."
"​Integrations seem to be the most difficult part. Once setup though, they work well.​"
"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."
"The user interface could be more intuitive. When you are not familiar with integrations and you're starting fresh, looking for where to begin, it is a bit daunting and not as clear as it could be."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's pricing model in Vietnam is a bit high. I rate the product price as an eight out of ten."
"FortiMonitor's price is very high."
"Compared to other solutions, FortiMonitor is a very expensive solution."
"On a scale from one to ten, I rate the pricing a nine since it is a good solution that is available at a cheap price."
"We have a large customer base for Fortinet, and the additional buying power got us really great discounts."
"There are additional costs needed for certain functionality, such as scalability."
"The price of FortiMonitor is approximately $200 annually for 225 users. The price is competitive."
"In terms of licensing, while it may not be the most expensive option on the market, it's relatively cost-effective. You can obtain licenses at a lower cost, with the calculation being straightforward. For example, if you onboard around 5,000 devices, you'll need approximately 5,000 licenses, as each device typically counts as one license."
"This is a subscription-based, SaaS solution."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"If the licensing were cheaper, our customer might buy more."
"The pricing and licensing are okay. I wish that the user licenses were cheaper but the stakeholder licenses are at a reasonable cost."
"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."
"xMatters is pricey, but you have to consider what a critical incident costs your organization."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which IT Alerting and Incident Management solutions are best for your needs.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
10%
Performing Arts
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise24
 

Questions from the Community

What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
I have a clear bias because I work for Panopta. We aren't a fit for everyone, but I can confirm that Panopta is a lot less work to stand up and maintain. It's also a lot easier to use and onboard n...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for FortiMonitor?
FortiMonitor does save time but not significantly on costs, as there are still expenses related to procurement, installation, and licensing.
What needs improvement with FortiMonitor?
There are areas for improvement that FortiManager is addressing. We have not yet upgraded to the latest software versions, being a full revision behind, but we plan to update soon since the current...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

Panopta
xMatters IT Management
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

SONY, GoDaddy, HCL, ING, ARMOR, billboard
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 FortiMonitor vs. xMatters and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.