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Splunk On-Call 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

Splunk On-Call
Ranking in IT Alerting and Incident Management
11th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
xMatters
Ranking in IT Alerting and Incident Management
9th
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 April 2025, in the IT Alerting and Incident Management category, the mindshare of Splunk On-Call is 5.9%, down from 10.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of xMatters is 6.0%, down from 9.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Alerting and Incident Management
 

Featured Reviews

Wojtek Witowski - PeerSpot reviewer
Allows us to create flexible schedules for on-call rotations
For alerts, we could choose to get a text message, app notification, or a phone call. The phone calls were very unusable, because it just read a bunch of numbers, like an ID of the alert. If there was a way to customize the phone call message, that would be great. Later, we would try to read the message, but it wasn't great at reading that. They had some sort of internal chat functionality where if we got an alert, we could write to somebody else and ask them for help, but that was super cumbersome. There could be improvements with communicating an incident or alert. Imagine you call the help desk and you say that your computer is broken and then they say, "Actually, the internet is broken, so let us forward your alerts to the network people." And the network people say, "Actually, the electricity is the problem, so let us forward it to the electricity people." Basically, you could send the alert between the support teams inside the company.
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

"The most valuable feature of the solution is helpdesk escalation."
"The alert calling feature is the best because notifications are delivered via phone messages."
"VictorOps has been good enough for us and it's effective for our needs in case of an on-call escalation process."
"The flexible schedule is the most valuable feature. It was very easy to set out a rotation."
"Transmogrifier and automatic solution report gives me a report with the solution and the way to solve issues when an error occurred."
"We have reduced the time it takes to resolve major incidents through xMatters’s conference bridge management solution."
"We have not noticed any scalability issues in the two years that we have used the system."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"​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."
"xMatters is helpful for getting the right on-call resources. That is a key factor. It is also very user-friendly, and just a little documentation helps you to understand things such as how on-calls are configured, how groups are configured, and how users update their on-call devices."
 

Cons

"At that stage, all our needs are fulfilled, but at the beginning, we had some feature requests and they were deployed during their roadmap."
"The third-party configuration tool could be easier to use."
"There could be improvements with communicating an incident or alert."
"Should have more YouTube webinars."
"The solution can be improved by including a wider list of permissions."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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"
"I would like to see some more user templates. There are roles — administrator, user, etc. — but it would be nice to create a user template that restricted what people assigned that role could do."
"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."
"We would like to see the integration between our ITSM solution and xMatters."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of the solution could be less expensive."
"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."
"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."
"If the licensing were cheaper, our customer might buy more."
"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."
"​I do not think it is worth the value.​"
"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."
"​Pricing is pretty straightforward and listed on their website. I recommend starting small and expanding later.​"
"I don't make the decisions on the cost aspect. We haven't had any complaints. I think it has a reasonable price."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
32%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
5%
Computer Software Company
32%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Healthcare Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Also Known As

VictorOps
xMatters IT Management
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

NVIDIA, Cisco, NBC, Rackspace, Intuit, DirectTV, NASCAR, Arrow Electronics, Alliance Health, NetApp, Edmunds, New York Times, Return Path, Sony Playstation, CA Technologies, Sphero, Symantic, HBO, Weatherford, Blackboard, Epic Games
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 Splunk On-Call vs. xMatters and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.