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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
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
216
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 (9th)
 

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 24.2%, down 27.4% compared to last year.
xMatters, on the other hand, focuses on IT Alerting and Incident Management, holds 6.0% mindshare, down 9.3% since last year.
IT Service Management (ITSM)
IT Alerting and Incident Management
 

Featured Reviews

Somnath Kand - PeerSpot reviewer
Custom integration and reporting lead to efficient ticket management
There is a need for bug or error tracking in ServiceNow. Although there are child incidents or tickets, tracking primary issues or bugs within enhancements is not present. The reporting features in the new portal could be more user-friendly. While it provides options to minimize chart and image sizes, actual implementation doesn't always reflect these changes.
Dean-Robinson - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"ServiceNow has been implemented to streamline team workflows across different departments in our company. Users, including traveling leaders, were able to approve requests and authorize additional rights through the mobile platform."
"There are many expansions available."
"ServiceNow is a very powerful tool that can perform a lot of different functions."
"There are features included in the new release for intelligent software, like the chatbot. For HR services, the HR agent which is in that chatbot has been fantastic."
"I think ServiceNow is highly stable. These kinds of tools are used in a big company, and I haven't seen any issues in terms of the core platform."
"Within our organization, we're not finding really any major issues with scalability and things of that nature."
"I find the incident management part to be the most valuable. That's how the service desk tracks tickets."
"I have found that sorting and grouping functions are particularly useful."
"The on-call schedule that they have for groups is amazing in terms of how it works and how it triggers. You don't need to do anything. You just upload the users, and you have the calendar of the schedules. It is amazing how it works and how easy it is to work with this feature."
"People are able to go in and update their contact information and even set things like when they're going to be on vacation and who their backup is."
"Workflows and messaging are most valuable. Workflows are very useful. They are important for consolidating information or stopping duplication from happening. We put all the information into xMatters and then the workflow will push the same information in the correct format directly through to other applications that our end users frequently use, such as Slack, email, and Workplace."
"We use xMatters for alarming infrastructure outages and failures of batch jobs (post-processing)."
"xMatters stood out to us during our research because of the versatility of its rotas, how we could set up various group rotas, different shift patterns, the ability to order devices and add personal devices etc. It's a much more flexible solution than ServiceNow, the in-house tool we also evaluated."
"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."
"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."
"The cloud solution reduces alarming to the core, which means no need to provision your server, which is great."
 

Cons

"The customer service of the product right now isn't very good. It's an aspect they really need to improve."
"It's moving at a very fast pace. It is difficult for developers or engineers to keep up with it. That's the only issue."
"It's a little expensive compared to other tools."
"There are sometimes challenges with the portal being a bit confusing for new users. The implementation of the portal and workspaces is quite different, and improvements in this area would be beneficial."
"Like all other IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS subscription cloud providers, ServiceNow is constantly improving by building new capabilities to expand the breadth and depth of its offerings while increasing its activities with partners to build more capabilities."
"The solution could be made cheaper. Machine learning and artificial intelligence should be introduced in the next release."
"Change Management is the area I have found that this tool can be improved because there are so many fields which are missing, such as urgency of the customer request and how the priority is defined. These are some of the areas in which I found that BMC Remedy is much better than ServiceNow."
"The solution’s pricing is expensive and could be improved."
"On-call management scheduling is difficult."
"Additional built-in integrations with other applications would be an area of improvement."
"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."
"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."
"Support may take longer than desired to resolve some issues."
"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."
"A lot of the issues that we've had have already been addressed. However, they could be clearer with the actual throughput and the costs. The throughput that we signed up for was a lot lower than what we needed, and we had to pay a lot more to get the throughput that we needed."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Certainly, from a product-platform perspective, the price is not too bad."
"We know that ServiceNow is not cheap, it's more expensive than other solutions. But we are trying to increase our ability to handle tickets so that the cost per ticket is less."
"I rate the solution's pricing a six out of ten. The pricing for ServiceNow is based on a SaaS platform with annual contracts. However, it may not offer much flexibility for adjusting usage in the short term."
"I am from Brazil. For Latin American markets, ServiceNow is very expensive as compared to other vendors, such as VMware."
"The first impact for the customer is that it is expensive, but do not forget that it is a solution that includes infrastructure; a single cost, easy to justify."
"The price is okay for us. It's reasonable."
"The pricing is reasonable and affordable, making it suitable for businesses ranging from small to large scale."
"Isn't pricing always too much? We really do chafe at the ITIL licensing. ITOM is also pretty expensive."
"​I do not think it is worth the value.​"
"Then, in pricing, you are limited on your number of SMS messages that you can send a month and the licensing cost annually."
"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."
"The features they provide, versus the cost, are pretty good."
"xMatters shortens the time to resolution, so the amount saved in potential lost revenue and productivity has justified the cost for our organization.​"
"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."
"xMatters is pricey, but you have to consider what a critical incident costs your organization."
"​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. ​"
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
28%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
32%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Healthcare Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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.
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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: March 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.