Freshservice is a cloud-based service desk and IT service management (ITSM) solution that currently serves more than 10,000 SMB, mid-market, and enterprise customers worldwide.
$29
per month per agent
OpsGenie
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
OpsGenie is an IT monitoring and incident response platform for development and operations teams, providing alerts and schedule management escalations. OpsGenie is now part of Atlassian since the late 2018 acquisition.
$0
up to 5 users
xMatters
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
xMatters is an IT alert management solution for enterprises. It is cloud-based incident management software that enables business processes or applications to trigger two-way communications (text, voice, email, SMS, etc.) during time-sensitive events.
Freshservice is well suited for companies looking to implement ticketing / case management across the organization, but only if IT will be using it. Otherwise, I'd recommend Freshdesk. IT departments that don't function in the ITIL style of incident, request, change, and project management may find it overkill if they are only looking for a simple Help Desk solution.
Incident response is well suited to OpsGenie, and this is where it really shines—whether it's an outage, a security incident, or similar. My experience is mostly with security, and it offers a great audit trail. It minimises the need to cut and paste from different platforms when creating reports and ensures that what was said and what was done (along with any evidence) is persisted and reflected in the incident detail.
We use xMatters for our alerting on critical matters. ServiceNow is our incident management system and it ties into xMatters. When a critical alert is generated it will notify the appropriate party. I'm trying to see if two other departments can use it. We are looking for a refrigeration system and for weather alerts when bad storms are coming
To have more options on what to do with the emails that arrive in the support mailbox (which goes to Freshservice), Setting some special rules or detailed filtering is not possible.
Non 3rd party tools to connect to Intune are missing. Additionally, the third-party tool available in the store is not satisfactory. It would be nice to have native support for importing devices from our Azure cloud.
The contract requires you to prolong your contract end-date by two years instead of just one year, which to us is a bit aggressive.
OpsGenie New Jira design has made it difficult for those not familiar with that style.
OpsGenie could benefit from nested escalation flows for team schedules. Creating a product alert that uses and Tech Schedule as well as an Incident Manager Schedule that already exists would create less overhead and ease management.
We are pretty invested in Freshservice right now and have integrated it pretty heavily into our environment, so it would be hard to move away from it. For the most part, we are happy with Freshservice and the ease of use it gives us in managing tickets through the system. The only complaint we've had is customer service.
The UI design of Freshservice is simple and intuitive. You don't have to be a technical expert to navigate your way into the different pages/modules available. There are no buttons that are hidden in plain sight. Even our HR team required little to no help when they started using Freshservice.
In general terms OpsGenie is a well done tool for solving the alert incident management, the usability is super ok during the configuration and during the alert. The main opportunity I found is the reporting and analytics section which is a little difficult to understand at a first sight and the refresh is not automatic, some little frictions but frictions at all
xMatters has a pretty good UI. However, its versatility does get in the way a little as the number of options can be overwhelming, and it sometimes takes a while to find the place you want, or get the result you want. I don't have any suggestions on how to fix this, it's just a side effect of the complexity that xMatters offers.
In our 3 years of using Freshservice, we've experienced several outages in the first 2 years. There were times where it only took minutes or hours but there are also times where it took a few days. Each time, Freshservice remained transparent and constantly communicated their progress. We haven't had one in the past year which indicates Freshservice have improved their servers.
Pages load quickly but internet connectivity can also play a big role. Integrations doesn't affect the performance but internet connectivity may be a big factor. As a company with most employees working from home, different network providers from different areas/countries can have different experiences. Search load time needs improvement.
Support from OEM is decent but needs improvement. Sometimes OEM also needs to understand the criticality of the customer and help as an Ad-hoc, which is somewhat lacking at Feshservice. Although the normal support team is well-equipped and helps according to the matrix, if something critical for the partner or customer requires immediate attention, it still goes through the L1-L2-L3 levels, which wastes a lot of time.
Working with xMatters support has been fantastic! Our support rep is very friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable. We get quick response times when asking questions, and when we have more complex problems, it's easy to schedule a call and spend some time working through our issues together. Every time we've had a problem we've been able to get the info we need and get a resolution easily.
Their documentation is pretty good, but only available in English. This makes it difficult for some of our users to understand. There are also some basic video courses available.
Creating the correct groups for the stakeholders and enabling the right notifications are one of the most important aspect of the implementation. Creating Change templates will also help in the long run and it's a good practice to create one, if applicable.
Easy setup and a lot of customization which can be made. They offer the full ITSM tool for 75$ per agent and all the PRO are included in the package, which makes it easy to calculate and use. There are only a few add-ins that you need to pay for, based on the number of agents or the number of executions.
We also looked at PagerDuty but decided to go with OpsGenie as it had more features on the plan we needed compared to PagerDuty which would have required us to spend a lot more for what we felt were non-premium features. Everything felt like an add-on - automation for an additional $20 a user per month seemed like a lot on top of the base plan
xMatters is a market leader among many new burgeoning products in the stakeholder notification space. They are historically one of two original enterprise products in this space. Great client base of large companies and good reputation. xMatters offers flexible licensing models, depending on functional needs. It's easy to learn and use but slightly more difficult to administer.
Freshservice allows flexibility with contract terms and pricing model. Monthly and annual payments are allowed. The unit pricing needs a bit of improvement. It would be great if they offer unit pricing per capability instead of one pricing for all the capabilities. Small businesses have different use cases and not every agent needs all the modules available.
We were able to scale easily across multiple departments. As our company keeps growing, we have not needed to change anything in terms of scaling since we started using Freshservice. There were no changes to the admin and end-user experience from when we were a 1,000-employee company vs to our current head count of 2,000+.
Helped us track bugs and issues that came up during product launch periods which reduced overhead that normally came with needing to manually contact the right team members
Prevented last minute breaking issues from falling through the cracks, decreased time to fix by automatically alerting the team members and allowing the product and project teams to easily see what active alerts are in progress
Managers are able to pull reports faster for any incidents escalated to their team.
When needing to contact another on-call associate from another team, xMatters provides conference bridge lines. You don't have to set up meetings through Outlook or Skype.
