PagerDuty is an IT alert and incident management application from the company of the same name in San Francisco.
$25
per month per user
xMatters
Score 8.6 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.
$9
per user/per month
Pricing
PagerDuty
xMatters
Editions & Modules
Professional
$25
per month per user
Business
$49
per month per user
Enterprise
Contact Sales
Starter
$9
per user/per month
Base
$39
per user/per month
Free
Free
Advanced
Contact for quote
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
PagerDuty
xMatters
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Discount available for annual pricing.
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
PagerDuty
xMatters
TrustRadius Insights
PagerDuty
xMatters
Highlights
Research Team Insight
Published
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.
I've used ICM in the past which has been a very Microsoft product with everything thrown into a blender. So, PD implementation is a breath of fresh air with focused pages to achieve the end goal. If the goal is to collaborate on issues across the organization, PD might not be the best solution but within specific teams, PD excels at it.
xMatters reduces incident response time by finding the right person to solve the problem when system outages require you to manage on-call schedules and escalations Avoid alert fatigue: reduce the noise with targeted notifications; alerts go only to the people that need them. Manage issues from anywhere: full-featured mobile apps allow you to stay in control wherever you are.
API calls, we can create an API ourselves to integrate with other applications. This allows more teams to be notified of a critical alert instead of waiting for someone to call them when a problem is reported.
The on-call schedule where you might need to have a replacement is fairly simple. You can easily change with someone else and still keep the rest of the schedule in place. It also sends an email to the person you are trading with so they know when they are on-call.
Their support team is really helpful and quick to respond when you open a ticket. There hasn't been an issue that hasn't been resolved in less than a day. They stay really on-top of things.
When getting a phone call, PagerDuty doesn't seem to allow acknowledgments of alerts through the phone, which it says it does. I constantly receive a message that it was updated by another person - when in reality, it wasn't.
Smarter notifications. If an alert was snoozed for a time, when it comes back, it sends out another alert. It should, I think, send a message asking if the alert is still an issue and give the option to close.
While the Workflow's are one of xMatters's strengths, the complexity can make it difficult at times to get things configured properly and get the desired result.
As I've been using this app for the last 3 years, I would like to see a few additions, like exposing the "create slack channel" option from the mobile app, rather than just from the PD website from the specific incident
xMatters giving highly rated due to its effectiveness in incident management and service reliability, as well as its strong integrations with other IT management tools. It helps teams proactively prevent outages, resolve incidents faster, and keep stakeholders informed. It's known for its ease of use, fast implementation, and good support
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.
There were more features and more ways to contact the provider. Ring Central would send out a call. I don't remember sending an email or text when I was paged. It seemed it was only an app on my phone and not located on my computer, where I could access it when I was working on the computer.
I pushed for xMatters over PagerDuty for a couple things. Their sales team showed me everything I needed to hear from how simple their integration would be to our ServiceNow instance. The process flows of what we could do compared to what we have made a world of difference. We had a list of wants we came up with and xMatters delivered on all of them. The use of their app is very user friendly. Of course the cost played a big factor as well. With PagerDuty we basically had the bare minimum so we were limited with what we could do without having to pay more. xMatters was almost half the cost of what we were paying and we got back more in return. Personally, I felt more wanted by xMatters, even by having them a year the account managers check in with us almost bi-weekly. I did not get the same comfort from PagerDuty until we tried cancelling our service with them.
![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)
