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PagerDuty Operations Cloud 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

PagerDuty Operations Cloud
Ranking in IT Alerting and Incident Management
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
46
Ranking in other categories
Process Automation (6th), AIOps (7th), Critical Event Management (CEM) (1st)
xMatters
Ranking in IT Alerting and Incident Management
11th
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 February 2026, in the IT Alerting and Incident Management category, the mindshare of PagerDuty Operations Cloud is 13.2%, down from 22.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of xMatters is 5.9%, down from 6.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Alerting and Incident Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
PagerDuty Operations Cloud13.2%
xMatters5.9%
Other80.9%
IT Alerting and Incident Management
 

Featured Reviews

NS
Senior SRE at IBM
Automated incident workflows have transformed on-call operations and improved response times
Since I host our internal services, I want more customization relating to our specific use case. The needed improvements include the configuration process, as new team members face a steep learning curve to understand the platform. With many new members, they need training to set up runbook workflows, event orchestration, and manage complex on-call schedules across 23 services, making it a challenge for new users. Additionally, I feel the web interface requires improvements. I would rate PagerDuty Operations Cloud as eight out of ten because the cons include a complex configuration process and high costs for each add-on that I try to obtain, making subscriptions costly, along with limited customization in certain incident workflows. The primary reasons for rating it an eight include the complex configuration which makes it challenging for new users, as well as their difficulty in setting up advanced runbook workflows and managing complex on-call setups. The web user interface also requires improvement. Although I receive alerts via the mobile app, which is beneficial for handling schedule maintenance, the same features should be added to the web interface. Customization issues persist, such as the inability to clone entire schedules as part of the workflows, and I want to keep incidents open for a specified duration, neither of which I can currently customize. Thus, I raised a ticket with PagerDuty Operations Cloud to address these concerns. Furthermore, the cost is high, making it one of the more expensive incident management solutions.
reviewer1855452 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Analyst at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Helps in ensuring that everyone gets notified when needed, and provides the flexibility to integrate it and build what we want on top of it
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. Some of the workflow development work that we do for the in-house piece can be quite complicated if you don't have experience using the tool. You have to have to go through the documentation, but I suppose that's an expectation. When users first log on and they're configuring the rotas, it does take them a bit of time to get their heads around how to configure the shifts. Some of them do need guidance. We have got a support document, and xMatters also has a support page where they can go and read through the details. Our roles and access for each user are locked down, as opposed to just letting them access the xMatters portal because it can add more confusion because the support portal explains that they can do X, Y, and Z. So, we're removing that ability, but once the users get their head around how to configure the rotas, the overall intuitiveness of the UI is pretty good. It is simple and clean, and they don't have to do that many steps. There are probably one or two group supervisors that configure the rotas, and the rest of them log on. We've already pre-populated the contact details from our directory, so usually, they'll just go and add a personal device, if they do want to get called on a personal device, or they want to set up the app, which is pretty easy using the QR codes. The product looks nice and clean. The only thing is that it takes a little bit of work to get your head around the rotas, but once you do, it's pretty darn simple.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It integrates with multiple applications and is highly customizable, with policies, escalation procedures, and an event routing tool that ensures contacting the right person."
"It reduces the amount of white noise. If something comes through, then it will alert somebody. However, if it's a bit of white noise that comes through at night, then it gets dealt with the next day. Everything is visible to everybody. It's not just a single person getting an SMS, then going, "Oh, I'm not going to worry about that." The visibility to everybody on the team is one of the great things about it because it reduces the white noise."
"PagerDuty Operations Cloud is a great tool that saves time and is worth starting to use."
"PagerDuty Operations Cloud has positively impacted my organization by helping in faster incident detection and resolution with less downtime."
"Alert deduplication and noise reduction for alerts are the major features that I found useful."
"I'd rate the solution ten out of ten."
"PagerDuty Operations Cloud has positively impacted our organization by ensuring that our banking applications, which operate 24/7, remain functional and efficient, contributing to better service availability."
"The product easily integrates with other solutions."
"The cloud solution reduces alarming to the core, which means no need to provision your server, which is great."
"Having our users manage their own notification devices within xMatters is huge, since it takes the burden off our datacenter."
"For our organization, sending notifications out via subscriptions for outages."
"One of the things that really attracted me is in workflows, you can write your own custom steps in JavaScript. You are not restricted to the steps that they provide. If you can write it in JavaScript, you can pretty much do anything. It gives me flexibility in ways that other platforms don't. For example, the online dashboard system we use is not a widely used one, but they have an API. So, I'm able to write the JavaScript steps to do things like check if a system's in the maintenance window or create an instant on the dashboard or change the status of an instant. I'm not dependent on the dashboard provider or xMatters creating steps for me."
"Allows us to define scenarios that notify only the necessary people when we need to open a conference bridge."
"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.""
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"PagerDuty should be integrated with other tools, so it can import the IT roster automatically. Our other rules continue to work once they're configured, but the roster must be added manually."
"The solution does not code all alerts correctly so sometimes you get false positives or multiple alerts for the same issue."
"Operations are somewhat limited by their integration package. For example, integrating with Jira was problematic until they updated to a better plug-in."
"I am not a direct end user of PagerDuty. It's hard to consider its shortcomings in that sense."
"PagerDuty could improve the event orchestration by enhancing features, such as easier condition setup inside the orchestration."
"It’s quite hard to reach the support team."
"The biggest area for improvement with PagerDuty is noise suppression. There have been a handful of incidents through our use of PagerDuty over the years where one incident may lead to 30 to 50 pages because you're monitoring all these different things, and each thing is an individual page. There should be the ability to set up paging tiers and group correlations between some of the different pages. That is something that would be really valuable. We should be able to say this one page may have a group or a tree of effective other pages that may tier off of it. So, if you see those pages independently, go ahead and alarm, but if you see this plus that, don't do that."
"This solution works best in conjunction with a proper logging system, which can be an additional cost to organizations."
"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."
"It has not improved our organization."
"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."
"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 REST API is still missing some important functionality, which we require."
"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."
"What I would like it to do is tell me anytime there is a P1 incident, except when the ticket is assigned to this team or when this word is in the summary, but there is no exclusion option. I have been complaining about this for a couple years. At one point, we created a ticket for this with the developers to review. I assume that once enough people complain about it, they will bump it up in priority to work on. However, if not enough people think it is an issue, then they prioritize their work and work on other features and functionality. However, this is something that has been challenging for us because we have needed to find ways to work around it or just deal with it. So, I would love to see an exclusion option."
"They could make the product more customizable."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is very high."
"The pricing may be about $1,000 per user."
"PagerDuty has monthly and yearly licenses available, the costs of which can get quite high if you have a large number of users."
"If you add more people, then you have to pay more, which is always a thing with the SaaS solutions."
"Licensing costs are around $700 a month, and the only additional costs, are phone costs in some instances."
"If we wanted phone calls or additional SMSs, we would have to pitch up for those. They give us so many per month per user, then we have to pay extra if it goes over that."
"They're very good in pricing compared to the competitors in the area. I would rate them a five out of five in terms of pricing."
"There is a license needed to use PagerDuty."
"I know roughly what we pay per year. For what we use it for and what its purpose is, it is very valuable."
"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."
"xMatters is pricey, but you have to consider what a critical incident costs your organization."
"The pricing and licensing are okay. I wish that the user licenses were cheaper but the stakeholder licenses are at a reasonable cost."
"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."
"This is a subscription-based, SaaS solution."
"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 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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Performing Arts
16%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Educational Organization
7%
Performing Arts
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise26
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise24
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PagerDuty?
I purchased PagerDuty Operations Cloud through AWS Marketplace while at Intel, and my experience has been positive regarding pricing, setup costs, and licensing. I had around seven users part of it...
What needs improvement with PagerDuty?
Since I host our internal services, I want more customization relating to our specific use case. The needed improvements include the configuration process, as new team members face a steep learning...
What is your primary use case for PagerDuty?
I have been working in my current field for over seven years as a DevOps and site reliability engineer, and my primary experience involves managing the reliability of infrastructure platforms hoste...
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Also Known As

No data available
xMatters IT Management
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

40% of the Fortune 100 TrustPagerDuty. Customers include: Slack, Intuit, Zendesk, Panasonic, Pinterest, Airbnb, eHarmony, McKesson, Comcast
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 PagerDuty Operations Cloud vs. xMatters and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,665 professionals have used our research since 2012.