PagerDuty, Inc. (NYSE:PD) provides digital operations management. Serving organizations of all sizes, PagerDuty aims to help them deliver a perfect digital experience to their customers, every time.
$25
per month per user
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.
PagerDuty is very similar to xMatters, with only slight differences. The integration with network monitoring tools and the ticketing system is more involved. Instead of simply forwarding an alert from the monitoring tool to the paging service, xMatters requires the creation of …
PagerDuty provides better cost to value, and also includes AI based recommendations. Overall automatons possibilities are also great with this and since we have multiple integrations as well as we cannot easily to existing systems. For us the responsive and helpful sales team …
Through our evaluation, we selected PagerDuty, mainly because of its user interface and the ability for support managers to configure it without additional support.
Senior Director, Technology - Enterprise Operations Center
Chose xMatters
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 …
PagerDuty and xMatters are both IT alert and incident response management tools. Like many alert management products, they both provide on-call scheduling and resource management.
PagerDuty and xMatters cater to distinct market segments and needs. PagerDuty is used primarily by midsize businesses and enterprises, with a focus on alert aggregation and prioritization. In contrast, xMatters is more focused specifically on enterprises with a need for heavy business process automation and custom-build integrations.
Features
PagerDuty and xMatters each have a range of advantages to each tool worth evaluating.
PagerDuty excels at helping organizations manage alert and escalation policies. Reviewers highlight PagerDuty’s flexible escalation rules across communication channels. This flexibility allows organizations to ensure alerts are addressed without overwhelming IT staff. PagerDuty’s customer support is also highly praised by users.
xMatters provides tools designed to meet enterprises’ unique needs around incident alerts and responses. For instance, it facilitates excellent stakeholder communication in order to keep all parties in the loop as an incident is identified and addressed. This visibility is both more challenging and more crucial to maintain in an enterprise environment. It also has the capacity for in-house customization and integration via open APIs, which enterprises are better able to take advantage of.
Limitations
There are also some drawbacks to each platform worth considering.
PagerDuty’s mobile application is not on par with its desktop application. It has comparatively little mobile customization, and the administrative functionalities are much more limited than expected.
On the other hand, xMatters is more limited in its alert escalation. Specifically, its group customization is less mature, which makes the platform more challenging to adapt to enterprises’s individual escalation processes. This can lead to overcommunication via mass notifications, which is a less ideal user experience.
Pricing
PagerDuty offers 5 different plans, each tier adding functionalities on the lower-tier plan:
The Free plan provides on-call scheduling, unlimited API calls, and always-up service for up to 5 users.
The Starter plan, at $10/user/month for up to 6 users, ads unlimited domestic text notifications and escalation policies, as well as 1 year of data access and email/chat support.
The Team plan, at $29/user/month, adds unlimited global phone/text notifications, more integrates, response orchestration, and a status dashboard.
The Business plan, at $39/user/month, adds SSO and advanced permissions, advanced integrations, unlimited data access, and phone support.
The Digital Operations plan, priced by quote from the vendor, provides a suite of add-on products, more automation, event management, analytics, and a visibility console.
xMatters has 4 different plans:
The free plan provides on-call management and a mobile application for alert management and routing.
The Starter plan, at $16/user/month, adds one year of historical data access, longer-term reporting, and a 99.9% SLA.
The Base plan, at $39/user/month, provides additional vendor support, data syncing, multilingual support, and live status updates, as well as one non-production instance.
The Advanced plan, at $59/user/month, adds best practice templates for incident management, workflows, change requests, and unlimited historical reporting, as well as 2 non-production instances.
It's the most effective when you need to alert someone specifically or a team. It sends notifications everywhere, like email, phone, and SMS, ensuring critical issues are never missed. The feature, like the event orchestrator, allows us to set logic-based rules that automatically suppress non-emergency alerts.
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
The UI is more complex than I would like. Part of the challenge is that most users use PagerDuty infrequently; I don't remember how I changed a policy last time. Another part of the challenge is that some users expect alerting to be a trivial feature, and are reluctant to invest any time in reading the documentation.
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.
PagerDuty is reliable and easy to set up. It gives an effective way to notify the team about critical incidents which results in a faster turnaround time on issues. users can customize their alerts rules based on their preferences. Overall it's effective and easy to use which adds great business value.
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.
I have not use the 2 technologies for as long as I have used PagerDuty but in my opinion PagerDuty makes things a lot easier. The other tools got the job done and got alerts out but PagerDuty just seemed to make the setup for on-call alert schedules and integrations easier than the others. This isn't to say the others are difficult, just that PagerDuty was slightly better. I also have noticed that more tools have options to integrate to PagerDuty over the other tools.
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.
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.
![Screenshot of Similar Incidents [Apple iPad], Open Incidents [iPhone 8], On-Call Schedule Menu [Apple Watch])](https://media.trustradius.com/product-screenshots/kf/M5/L6SIK3HGD31M.png)
