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ServiceNow vs xMatters comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
228
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 (1st)
xMatters
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
IT Alerting and Incident Management (11th)
 

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 14.2%, down 23.9% compared to last year.
xMatters, on the other hand, focuses on IT Alerting and Incident Management, holds 5.5% mindshare, down 5.8% since last year.
IT Service Management (ITSM) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
ServiceNow14.2%
JIRA Service Management6.9%
BMC Helix ITSM5.5%
Other73.4%
IT Service Management (ITSM)
IT Alerting and Incident Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
xMatters5.5%
PagerDuty Operations Cloud11.0%
Opsgenie7.5%
Other76.0%
IT Alerting and Incident Management
 

Featured Reviews

Hemanthreddy Vakiti - PeerSpot reviewer
Data engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Structured workflows have improved SLA compliance and now support prioritized incident handling
I think the licensing and pricing of ServiceNow is quite expensive compared to other tools. For large organizations, it is acceptable, but specifically for small and medium organizations to track incidents or change requests, ServiceNow is quite expensive. Sometimes performance can be slow when workflows and integrations are configured for complex tasks. For advanced customizations or advanced features which we rarely use, the documentation is not up to standard. The documentation needs to be improved for advanced customization features. However, the platform is stable overall and the features are quite good. The user experience and performance concerns I mentioned are areas I want to be improved. When many workflows and interactions are configured, performance is slow. For the features it is providing, it is quite expensive. If these performance features are improved, we can easily pay that price and get the return on investment.
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

"ServiceNow helps to improve IT incident handling in a more comprehensive way, and the latest version provides extensive information, including AI that allows us to program it in such a way that our L1 support can be eliminated."
"I like the workflow functions that are available in ServiceNow and the ability to actually integrate all of the information that you have such as travel tickets or assignment tickets for your team, onto your dashboard, depending on your setup, or if you create a ticket and a dashboard for your team."
"From my standpoint, it's the process flexibility."
"Operations and maintenance costs have been reduced using this solution. We have been able to deliver faster solutions to our customers and track progress using live data."
"The new developer tools with Geneva have been the most valuable so far."
"ServiceNow has a much bigger offering in the sense that you've got new changes, you've got your problem ticket findings, you've got tracking for CIs and the CMDB database, and sitting on the backend trying to provide all that data for those tickets throughout the company, making it a lot easier as a one-stop shop for being able to actually come in and help your users while also helping your full infrastructure and backend."
"It has the ability to consolidate different areas of the service desk into one solution."
"Primarily, we use it for incident management and change across the landscape; it is the virtual repository for our incident management processes and gives us visibility about what's happening from the change management perspective across our CABs, including our enterprise CABs."
"We definitely saved money because of time to react and minimized downtime."
"Being able to split the week however we want is definitely most valuable. We can create shifts and also see other teams' schedules. It is a very easy search to do these things."
"The UI: It is easily navigable."
"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."
"This has made it much easier to send notifications to a group or individual, as you just need to know the name and the message to send."
"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 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 support is probably my favorite thing about xMatters."
 

Cons

"I would like to see Advanced Intelligent Automation."
"The interface is not user-friendly."
"The technical support SLA can be improved because sometimes they take a long time to answer our queries."
"There were performance issues, minor ones, with one customer."
"We don't have a huge amount of password reset requests, but the minimum package of resets that ServiceNow offers is much more than we need."
"Everything is really good, but I believe ServiceNow should improve the pricing. If they are costing that much, they should not have any server crashes because we occasionally face server kind of issues when we are moving from one environment to another."
"The setup was time-consuming and required a lot of internal resources."
"I would say that for the things that I like to do, which is muck around in the underlying, I would say that it's going downhill."
"The only thing that has caught us out a little bit is that on certain screens, you don't have the same admin options."
"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."
"The REST API is still missing some important functionality, which we require."
"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 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."
"I would like xMatters to provide users with the capability of administering it on their own. I do a lot of hand-holding with them."
"We cannot go back in time to check out the previous schedules that we had. We can only see them moving forward. I wish we were able to go back and see the previous schedules that we had. That's the biggest thing."
"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

"There is an annual subscription to use this solution."
"The cost is quite high."
"Getting the solution up and running is expensive."
"Some time ago it was expensive, but large companies have special contracts. It's enterprise prices, and we're talking about millions per year."
"There are licensing fees."
"This is a pretty expensive product, so the licensing could be better."
"The licensing cost is based on your partnership with ServiceNow and what you have selected for implementation. There is an annual license cost which is calculated based on your number of devices."
"The mandatory minimum is US$ 20,000 for licensing."
"The features they provide, versus the cost, are pretty good."
"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."
"xMatters shortens the time to resolution, so the amount saved in potential lost revenue and productivity has justified the cost for our organization.​"
"If you are willing to pay for the licensing of it, it is able to scale out.​"
"This is a subscription-based, SaaS solution."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Performing Arts
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business55
Midsize Enterprise35
Large Enterprise171
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise24
 

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...
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 ...
What do you like most about ServiceNow?
The solution has a user-friendly interface.
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
xMatters IT Management
 

Overview

 

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.
Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, Atlassian, ManageEngine and others in IT Service Management (ITSM). Updated: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.