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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
7.1
Number of Reviews
52
Ranking in other categories
Process Automation (5th), AIOps (7th), Critical Event Management (CEM) (1st)
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 March 2026, in the IT Alerting and Incident Management category, the mindshare of PagerDuty Operations Cloud is 13.1%, down from 21.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of xMatters is 6.0%, up from 6.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Alerting and Incident Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
PagerDuty Operations Cloud13.1%
xMatters6.0%
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

"PagerDuty Operations Cloud has positively impacted my organization by providing effectiveness and efficiency in the way we work, with less alert fatigue, meaning alerts are rarely missed."
"PagerDuty Operations Cloud is one of the important aspects in our organization which we use widely for incident response and quick incident resolution."
"Its alerting capabilities, simple user interface, stability and functionality is exactly what we need."
"The inbound integrations that PagerDuty provides with most of the DevOps tools are valuable."
"Now, we don't have to think about it; we can simply set it up in PagerDuty and it works, with the escalation and everything still functioning reliably based on the configuration we set up six months to one year ago."
"PagerDuty Operations Cloud has positively impacted our organization by allowing us to be immediately paged when a system or service is down, enabling us to quickly respond and provide updates to the organization on issues and their resolution."
"The most valuable feature of PagerDuty is its integration with other tools, such as Amazon AWS, to receive notifications or create automatic instances."
"For a corporate tool – it acts as a 3rd party for a simple wake up tool."
"It reduces the amount of oversight required, and consequently, the amount of time to assign and get a response on a ticket."
"The cloud solution reduces alarming to the core, which means no need to provision your server, which is great."
"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."
"Support has been great. They responded very quickly to all the support cases that I have submitted.​"
"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 feature that I have found to be most valuable is the entire alert notification configuration, having an external system to trigger events that will process the alert to the supporting team. If a system is down, then you need to get it attention. Sometimes, it cannot wait until the next day. Therefore, how xMatters provides this type of integration is critical."
"Through one tool, we're able to generate email notifications, voice notifications, mobile push notifications, Slack channel notifications, all managed from one place, simple and easy to use. People are able to join the conference bridge directly from the phone call by pressing one button instead of having to dial into a bridge and remember a conference code."
"We have not noticed any scalability issues in the two years that we have used the system."
 

Cons

"I would suggest that the calling service could be adjusted since if a system goes down, the user receives continuous calls, which can be overwhelming."
"We used to set up alarms, but those alarms were quite frequent and did not stop at all, even after closing the alerts, and sometimes duplicate alerts were coming because of this."
"Our developers noted that integrating incident bots or chatbots created with AI tools occasionally presents challenges with PagerDuty Operations Cloud."
"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."
"PagerDuty Operations Cloud can be improved by adding more features."
"There is room for improvement with the time schedule. The way the schedule currently works is you assign all the team members in one schedule and it automatically spreads them around throughout the schedule... It would be better to be able to edit the schedule and place my team members where I want, or at least to have that option in addition to the automatic process."
"It always needs more integrated applications, especially if you are not a software developer."
"I would defiantly like to see more integration with other systems. This would really add some value for us."
"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."
"We would like to see the integration between our ITSM solution and xMatters."
"They could make the product more customizable."
"We have had outages with the product. We have experienced functionality (defects), such as conference bridges can only be opened for four hours at a time and people get kicked out."
"One of the main reasons why we don't use xMatters for monitoring and alerting is that it doesn't use the rota to call the person who's on-call. It doesn't look up the rota to find out who's on-call and then contacts that person directly. I am not sure if this has changed now, but the last time we checked, this functionality wasn't there. This is one of the main improvements. We're happy with the rest of it."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing may be about $1,000 per user."
"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."
"PagerDuty has monthly and yearly licenses available, the costs of which can get quite high if you have a large number of users."
"The cost is based on the package you select."
"The solution is paid on a monthly basis and represents about 1% of the platform's budget."
"There is a license needed to use PagerDuty."
"Licensing costs are around $700 a month, and the only additional costs, are phone costs in some instances."
"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."
"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."
"This is a subscription-based, SaaS solution."
"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."
"We're currently per license. We're paying around $44,000 per year for 80 full users and 300 standard users. For a new implementation, we also need to pay for an expert."
"If you are willing to pay for the licensing of it, it is able to scale out.​"
"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."
"​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. ​"
"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
Performing Arts
16%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Educational Organization
7%
Performing Arts
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise31
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise24
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PagerDuty?
Regarding pricing for PagerDuty Operations Cloud, I am currently a software engineer and a senior software engineer, so I do not handle the pricing aspect. However, I hear from my manager that the ...
What needs improvement with PagerDuty?
PagerDuty Operations Cloud can be improved by adding more features. Whatever manual work is there could be automated using scripting. Then it would be more efficient. When we receive a call, it has...
What is your primary use case for PagerDuty?
PagerDuty Operations Cloud is used to understand whether there are false positives or false alerts because it is integrated into a system where there would be a phone number, such as anyone from th...
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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: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.