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 8.5, and holds a 16.6% mindshare in the category. Everbridge is ranked #11 in IMS , and holds a 5.8% mindshare. Additionally, 91% of ServiceNow users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Everbridge users who would recommend it.

ServiceNow

Read 224 ServiceNow reviews

22,688 Views
7,487 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

xMatters

Read 31 xMatters reviews

1,177 Views
989 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: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IT Service Management (ITSM)

December 2025

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Helped 881,082 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

224

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

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 16.6%, down 24.9% compared to last year.
xMatters, on the other hand, focuses on IT Alerting and Incident Management, holds 5.8% mindshare, down 6.5% since last year.

IT Service Management (ITSM) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
ServiceNow	16.6%
JIRA Service Management	7.6%
BMC Helix ITSM	6.0%
Other	69.8%

IT Service Management (ITSM)

IT Alerting and Incident Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
xMatters	5.8%
PagerDuty Operations Cloud	14.8%
Opsgenie	9.4%
Other	70.0%

IT Alerting and Incident Management

Featured Reviews

Shafqat Paracha

General Manager at sPerception IT

Adopting flexible workflows with customized automation delivers measurable benefits

There are things that I would like to see improved in ServiceNow, such as the pricing, as it is a very costly solution compared to other tools. Additionally, its presence in the local market is very limited; in Pakistan, for example, I don't see any vendor or distributor of ServiceNow available. They need to increase their sales spectrum globally so people can easily access them and engage them for client meetings and more. From a functionality perspective, the features in ServiceNow are acceptable as, at the moment, the ITSM modules rank highly, being 13 plus Pink Elephant certified, which is a good aspect to have. When providing advice to users, I would suggest they consider making strategic decisions about their per user pricing since it is very high. In our region, people normally start with 5 to 10 users, but the per user price is quite steep. Moreover, ServiceNow does not charge based on data uploaded or downloaded, so they should reconsider their pricing and data policies to align better with the financial capabilities of the region.

Read full review

Dean-Robinson

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The pricing of the product is quite good. It's not too expensive."

"Great that it's knowledge-based and you can use the flows in ServiceNow."

"ServiceNow is an industry leader in multiple areas and provides an excellent ROI."

"I think the technical support is pretty good. They can be a little bit slow sometimes, but overall I think they're good."

"I find the incident management part to be the most valuable. That's how the service desk tracks tickets."

"ServiceNow offers a range of ITSM, IT incident management, and PRCPs."

"The look and feel is a valuable benefit for adoption."

"There are a lot of features within ServiceNow. There are plenty of add-ons that go beyond the typical core helpdesk operations, such as HR facilities, BRM functionality, and various compliance and governance capabilities."

More ServiceNow pros

"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."

"That automation is the critical aspect of xMatters. Without those workflows, then we would have a system that maintains an on-call schedule in Excel. So xMatters provides the notification workflow and ensures you're notifying the right person at the right time."

"We're able to point all of our alerting tools at xMatters and have it route alerts to the right people at the right time. We're able to generate major instant notifications for product outages, get all of our people on the bridge at the same time, and include information from our monitoring tools with that. So everyone is speaking the same language and seeing the same information. We're able to route those notifications not only to people, but also to other tools like Slack channels, where everyone can get in and collaborate."

"Having our users manage their own notification devices within xMatters is huge, since it takes the burden off our datacenter."

"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."

"The customer service is quite responsive. They are quick to answer your calls or emails."

"The ability to notify teams and monitor those notifications in real-time is valuable. Time-based escalation of notifications helps us resolve issues much more quickly."

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

More xMatters pros

Cons

"Its setup is tough. It takes a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience."

"The user interface for accessing assistance sometimes disconnects."

"Creating service catalog forms could be made easier."

"Data access is a bit difficult, where you sometimes wish you had a relational database for some queries. The flexibility of data access in general is a bit on the low end. Of course, there is flexibility in some ways, but when I need a certain combination of data for some report, it can become a challenge."

"Once a change request has been created once it's been approved and been submitted, there is no way to go in on that particular change request and submit an additional task."

"The pricing of the solution could be better. It's a bit high."

"There are a few things that it needs to improve, like automation of most things out-of-the-box. For example, when it comes to cloud management, we are still going with manual intervention. Instead of that, if we had an out-of-the-box feature available, that would be great."

"Complexities in the organization made the initial deployment complex."

More ServiceNow cons

"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."

"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"

"We would like to see the integration between our ITSM solution and xMatters."

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

"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."

"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."

"We would like to see the ability to support custom devices. We have a lot of users who use Slack, which is another tool for communication. xMatters currently does not support Slack as a communication method. It can't send events to Slack and respond to them."

"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."

More xMatters cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"ServiceNow pricing is an art, not a science. The deal depends on how commercially savvy you are, which does make it something that is quite difficult to get right. It is most definitely an opportunity area for ServiceNow to improve and have more visibility around pricing of the different products within the platform."

"The licensing expenses are excessively high."

"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."

"The solution is expensive."

"It has a higher cost compared to local/regional solutions."

"The solution is priced for medium to enterprises sized businesses. However, it is expensive compared to competitors."

"There are licensing fees."

"Some time ago it was expensive, but large companies have special contracts. It's enterprise prices, and we're talking about millions per year."

More ServiceNow pricing and cost advice

"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 do not think it is worth the value."

"It seemed comparable or more reasonable than some of the other solutions, at least when we evaluated it. There are no extra costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. Its cost is good, given the breadth of features provided by xMatters."

"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."

"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 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. "

"The features they provide, versus the cost, are pretty good."

"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."

More xMatters pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions are best for your needs.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Government

Performing Arts

13%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	55
Midsize Enterprise	35
Large Enterprise	166

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 4% of the time

JIRA Service Management vs ServiceNow

Compared 4% of the time

Pega Platform vs ServiceNow

Compared 4% of the time

Microsoft Dynamics CRM vs ServiceNow

Compared 4% of the time

More ServiceNow Competitors

PagerDuty Operations Cloud vs xMatters

Compared 42% of the time

Opsgenie vs xMatters

Compared 21% of the time

Everbridge IT Alerting vs xMatters

Compared 19% of the time

Rootly vs xMatters

Compared 6% of the time

Splunk On-Call vs xMatters

Compared 4% of the time

More xMatters Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ServiceNow

January 2026

Download ServiceNow product report

Buyer's Guide

xMatters

January 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)

December 2025

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