ServiceNow vs xMatters comparison

The compared ServiceNow and Everbridge solutions aren't in the same category. ServiceNow is ranked #1 in ISM , with an average rating of 8.8, and holds a 15.8% mindshare in the category. Everbridge is ranked #10 in IMS , and holds a 6.0% mindshare. Additionally, 91% of ServiceNow users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Everbridge users who would recommend it.

ServiceNow

Read 225 ServiceNow reviews

24,579 Views
8,848 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

xMatters

Read 31 xMatters reviews

1,528 Views
1,329 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

ServiceNow

xMatters

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between ServiceNow and xMatters based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, Atlassian, ManageEngine and others in IT Service Management (ITSM).

To learn more, read our detailed IT Service Management (ITSM) Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

IT Service Management (ITSM)

March 2026

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Helped 884,873 peers since 2012

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

ServiceNow

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

225

Ranking in other categories

Help Desk Software (1st), IT Asset Management (1st), IT Service Management (ITSM) (1st), Rapid Application Development Software (2nd), No-Code Development Platforms (2nd)

xMatters

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Alerting and Incident Management (10th)

Mindshare comparison

While both are Systems Management solutions, they serve different purposes. ServiceNow is designed for IT Service Management (ITSM) and holds a mindshare of 15.8%, down 24.5% compared to last year.
xMatters, on the other hand, focuses on IT Alerting and Incident Management, holds 6.0% mindshare, up 6.0% since last year.

IT Service Management (ITSM) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
ServiceNow	15.8%
JIRA Service Management	7.3%
BMC Helix ITSM	5.7%
Other	71.2%

IT Service Management (ITSM)

IT Alerting and Incident Management Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
xMatters	6.0%
PagerDuty Operations Cloud	13.1%
Opsgenie	9.1%
Other	71.8%

IT Alerting and Incident Management

Featured Reviews

MichaelTang1

Manager of Security Engineering & Architecture at a outsourcing company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Seamless data integration and advanced automation improve service delivery efficiency

I think that nothing needs to be improved with the product; you just need the user to commit and spend appropriate time to overcome that learning curve. Once that is done, the product itself is pretty wonderful. I've seen a very nicely built interface with ServiceNow, and I've also seen the ugliest version that feels outdated. ServiceNow does allow that team to exist. They should modernize their fonts and their layout, the UI friendliness. They did introduce AI, chatbots, and AI on the back end, so that's wonderful and extremely useful if you train it. If you don't train it, it's pretty useless. Assessing the impact of ServiceNow's automation on service delivery times is complicated. The engineers who operate on ServiceNow find it isn't straightforward because the data set is accessible by everybody. The problem is that understanding how to manage that data set requires an enormous amount of engineering skill set to run the product. I would not hand the key to the customer; I would highly recommend that ServiceNow take control of that. Instead of offering support for the software, they should offer administrative support for the software. They should provide professional service or some kind of support system that allows us to use their product at a faster pace. I'm sure they offer something, but it's often outrageously expensive, or they rely on another company to resell their product and offer professional service. It makes no sense in my opinion, and they should offer the team at the front to help customize the product to fit each company's needs, as every company has different demands and forms of submitting a request that need adjustment over time.

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reviewer1855452

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"As far as deploying and developing goes within ServiceNow it's very easy, not painful at all."

"ServiceNow is a very good platform, but do not build up things too fast."

"Change management is most valuable."

"Now we have invested the time in the CMDB, we've invested the time in a portal and catalog items and now we're moving towards automation and things, and we're able to stay a lot more current a lot faster because ServiceNow is doing the work to keep the platform updated, whereas we can just continue to provide value that is specific to us and what we're trying to do."

"ServiceNow enables us to transform IT as it's a business driver."

"One of the biggest features is its flexibility."

"I find almost all the features valuable. It can do nearly everything except make your coffee, as my colleagues always say. It's got pros and cons, like every software, but the good thing about it is that it has a very structured approach."

"ServiceNow is a great product because you can do almost anything with it."

More ServiceNow pros

"Made it very easy to implement our roster of people who receive alarms with the REST API."

"We're able to communicate better with specific groups or offices. We didn't have that capability or granularity before. It has helped in that regard."

"Support has been great. They responded very quickly to all the support cases that I have submitted."

"Allows us to define scenarios that notify only the necessary people when we need to open a conference bridge."

"It has improved our time to respond. Prior to the use of xMatters, it might take hours or even a day to get someone involved on a problem. Now, it's down to minutes."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More xMatters pros

Cons

"Right now I'm working on finding out how duplicate usernames are being created in our ServiceNow instance and that causes problems because we need to assign a ticket to somebody and then it shows two names but they don't know which one to choose so they choose the one that's not active."

"The level of complexity and the level of discovery are the two areas that can be improved. Its UI needs to evolve. They focus a lot on cool colors and other little things, which don't bring value in terms of functionality. They need to focus less on presentation and more on the functionality within the UI. Its discovery mechanism should be improved. There is a component in ServiceNow that discovers the assets, but it doesn't do an immediate discovery, and there is a lag. If I want to open a ticket for a laptop or an asset, that asset needs to exist within ServiceNow for me to be able to say that I need to have its disk space or memory increased. It is referred to as a CI or configuration item in ServiceNow. Sometimes, ServiceNow doesn't discover these items, and as a result, I cannot open a ticket and tag that system or asset. If a system was introduced to the environment last week and it is still not listed, it becomes a problem. I will either have to wait or manually enter that system or asset. So, if I have a laptop with only 8 GB of memory and I want to request 16 GB of memory, I won't be able to do that in ServiceNow because my system or asset hasn't been discovered yet. Discovery is not immediate, and there is a lag."

"This solution needs to be improved for global use. Currently, it's very oriented to the processes and needs of the US customer base, like their compliance solution or GRC (Governance, Risk, and Compliance), and not so much for customers from other parts of the world. Some users may like the things that ServiceNow is improving, but those are very oriented to users based in the United States and Europe."

"The solution’s user interface could be improved and given a better design."

"The product’s standard user experience is not the best."

"Sometimes you have to finagle their help desk to get the right answers."

"The capital expenditure neeed to get the tool up and running is extensive."

"CA didn't really know what was going on and a lot of the stuff they promised was really not working properly."

More ServiceNow cons

"When you are not using the conference bridge from xMatters and you are using an external one, it is a little bit hard to get the person whom xMatters calls to jump directly to the external bridge. They need to hang up the phone and then get to the email to get the URL so that they can jump on the bridge. There is no direct connection from xMatters to that external bridge, but I understand that part of the business."

"It took me awhile to get used to whatever was available in the interface. The interface from two years ago was a bit more confusing when looking at where you should go"

"An additional knowledge-sharing program could be helpful and part of the demo workshops (right now, these only provide partial information)."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I would like some minor UI changes. I believe I filed some enhancement requests with xMatters. For example, in one area, they have some way for you to look at a particular functionality with different sets of reporting UI. However, that same reporting UI is not yet available with some other functionalities. Essentially, in their existing functionality, the xMatters application does an excellent job, but in other functionalities within their UI, they don't have that. On the back-end, they are related. Instead of one click where you can see everything, right now you need to go to different areas to access similar information. It would be nice to have everything in one place. While they have an excellent element A, I am hoping that they could just simply make that feature also available in their element B."

"It has not improved our organization."

More xMatters cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licenses are expensive."

"The licensing expenses are excessively high."

"The setup cost is high compared to others, especially when the scope is not fixed."

"The license model is based on a number of fulfillers (active users who play some role within the ServiceNow functionality). Therefore, you can serve as many end-users as you want, without additional costs."

"While the option exists to pay for a monthly license, we are dealing with large enterprises and these typically involve multi-year licenses of ten or five years, at a minimum."

"The platform offers a free trial, by providing a free developer instance once you sign up."

"ServiceNow is an expensive solution."

"ServiceNow is a leader and its pricing is quite good, quite competitive... Sometimes some plugins are not priced reasonably but, generally, the platform itself, its modules, are priced reasonably."

More ServiceNow pricing and cost advice

"I do not think it is worth the value."

"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 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."

"xMatters shortens the time to resolution, so the amount saved in potential lost revenue and productivity has justified the cost for our organization."

"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."

"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."

"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. "

More xMatters pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Government

Performing Arts

13%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	55
Midsize Enterprise	35
Large Enterprise	168

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	24

Questions from the Community

Which solution is better for developing non-ITSM applications: OutSystems or Service Now?

The short answer is that OutSystems is far better for 2 main reasons. Firstly, with Service Now you are locked into that platform for good. The business model is to lock in and then keep pumping th...

See all answers

Would you choose ServiceNow over Microsoft PowerApps?

Hi Netanya, I will choose ServiceNow because ServiceNow is a very good tool compared to Microsoft PowerApp. Because ServiceNow has a very strong module (Performance Analysis) reporting which will ...

See all answers

What do you like most about ServiceNow?

The solution has a user-friendly interface.

See all answers

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Comparisons

BMC Helix ITSM vs ServiceNow

Compared 6% of the time

IBM Maximo vs ServiceNow

Compared 5% of the time

Zendesk vs ServiceNow

Compared 4% of the time

JIRA Service Management vs ServiceNow

Compared 4% of the time

Freshservice vs ServiceNow

Compared 3% of the time

More ServiceNow Competitors

PagerDuty Operations Cloud vs xMatters

Compared 35% of the time

Opsgenie vs xMatters

Compared 21% of the time

Everbridge IT Alerting vs xMatters

Compared 17% of the time

FireHydrant vs xMatters

Compared 10% of the time

OnSolve Platform for Critical Event Management vs xMatters

Compared 3% of the time

More xMatters Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ServiceNow

February 2026

Download ServiceNow product report

Buyer's Guide

xMatters

February 2026

Download xMatters product report

Also Known As

No data available

xMatters IT Management

Overview

ServiceNow is a cloud-based task-management platform that specializes in IT operations management (ITOM), IT services management (ITSM), and IT business management (ITBM). ServiceNow allows users to manage their teams, projects, and customer interactions using a variety of different plugins and apps with which it easily integrates.

ServiceNow offers prebuilt applications to support any process, as well as a framework and tools that allow you to build your own.

ServiceNow’s service management solutions include change, request, incident, problem, and cost management, as well as HR, IT, field service, and facilities management solutions. They also cover business management solutions such as vendor performance management, financial management, performance analytics and project portfolio suite, as well as governance, risk, and compliance.

“The Smarter Way to Workflow”

ServiceNow’s activities, processes, and tasks are overseen as part of a comprehensive managed workflow that supports such features as real-time collaboration, communication, and resource sharing. ServiceNow’s suite of products allow for operation using serverless computing, and include the categories of Business Apps, Customer Service, HR, IT, and Security.

ServiceNow can be used to support most workflows because of the wide range of tools it offers. These include on-suite ticketing tools, predictive modeling to manage workflows, and benchmarking for the tracking of progress. ServiceNow can assist with artificial intelligence and machine learning processes and can be used to organize the cases of a help/service desk as well as for instance management and problem management. It also smoothly integrates with many legacy systems.

ServiceNow offers service management software for industries including:

Cloud services
Education
Financial services
Government
Healthcare
Manufacturing
Telecommunications

Reviews from Real Users

PeerSpot users prefer ServiceNow to its competitors because of its scalability, stability, and ease of use. It helps everyone in the company to be on the same page by creating a single source of record across all departments. One user stated that “I’ve definitely used over 20 project management solutions, but they can't be compared with ServiceNow.” Another said that “ServiceNow is an industry leader in multiple areas and provides an excellent ROI.”

ServiceNow

xMatters, an Everbridge company, is a service reliability platform that helps DevOps, SREs, and operations teams rapidly deliver products at scale by automating workflows and ensuring infrastructure and applications are always working. The xMatters code-free workflow builder, adaptive approach to incident management, and real-time performance analytics all support a single goal: deliver customer happiness.

To learn more, request a demo.

Reliable services, rapid innovation: Automate operations workflows, ensure applications are always working, and deliver remarkable products at scale with the xMatters service reliability platform.

Automate on the xMatters service reliability platform: Move faster with confidence. Our no-code and low-code integrations let you build flexible workflows to address issues proactively—even during deployments.

Frictionless on-call: Manage on-call seamlessly. Automatically escalate to the right people, schedule with ease, and act on detailed alerts from anywhere.

Adaptive Incident Management: Stay resilient in any scenario with our adaptive approach to incident management. Automate resolution, protect customers from disruptions, and learn from each event.

Signal Intelligence: Put situations in context and cut through the noise of multiple monitoring tools with filtering and suppression, alert correlation, enriched notifications, and routing based on role or function.

Actionable Analytics: Get quick insights into key metrics to understand inefficiencies, boosting collaboration and productivity across engineering and operations teams.

Everbridge

Sample Customers

AAA, AstraZeneca, Becton, Dickinson and Company, Broadcom, Christus Health, Epicor, Equinix, GE Capital, Intuit, KPMG, Loyola Marymount University, OshKosh, Quantas, RedHat, Royal Bank of Scotland, Swiss Re, U.S. Department of Energy, Safeway, Yale University, and Zillow

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.

Buyer's Guide

IT Service Management (ITSM)

March 2026

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