We performed a comparison between BMC Helix ITSM and xMatters based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, Atlassian, BMC and others in IT Service Management (ITSM)."BMC Helix ITSM gives us email and SMS notifications, we can check the tickets, and give feedback. All the basic features that we need are available."
"The product's initial setup phase was easy."
"The most valuable feature for our customers using BMC Helix ITSM is change management."
"Helix is stable."
"Smart IT and the phone app are easily the most valuable features in reporting and tracking ongoing issues."
"MyIT is simple to use and its mobility is a big plus for our on the go users."
"This product has helped us to maintain our OLAs (Organisation level Agreements) and SLAs (Service Level Agreements) by tracking incidents, requests, problem records, and change requests, all in the form of tickets."
"It's a very integrated solution."
"The most valuable feature is getting alerts out to my user base. xMatters is the only solution that I know that has robust scheduling, calendaring for groups, and that provides very good delineation of who gets alerted and on which devices they receive their alerts."
"Allows us to define scenarios that notify only the necessary people when we need to open a conference bridge."
"We use xMatters for alarming infrastructure outages and failures of batch jobs (post-processing)."
"The Flow Designer is quite valuable, as you can set up integrations and flows without necessarily needing to know about code."
"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."
"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."
"The ability to have the rota and then configure notifications that you can directly fire them into the group is most valuable. The India shift is from 2:00 AM to 9:00 AM, and then it is the UK shift from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM UK time, and then there is also a defined US shift and on-call hours. It allows us to make sure that everyone is going to get notified when they need to be about an issue. We can target specific locations or users with notifications."
"The cloud solution reduces alarming to the core, which means no need to provision your server, which is great."
"There are plugins to the solution that have come onto the market, so the solution should also be updated in terms of administration to increase efficiency."
"Needs less infrastructure requirements."
"It has created more layers of bureaucracy."
"Some parts of the solutions are using the old interface."
"The dashboard can be better."
"The initial setup of BMC Helix ITSM is complex because it has different integrations with other tools. Additionally, it needs to be integrated with the active directory and have different databases. The environment will dictate how difficult the process is."
"I would like to see the BMC add advanced DWP features and customization to the standard package. Furthermore, BMC does not have any leverage for non-IT services, so it would be nice if BMC could integrate something like HR Change Management into ITSM itself."
"The user experience could be better."
"They could make the product more customizable."
"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."
"In terms of intuitiveness and flexibility of xMatters when it comes to customizing on-call schedules, rotations, and escalations, for me, as an IT professional, setting it up isn't that big of a deal, but I understand that some people struggle with it because when you get wrapped up into it. You can get lost. It's not super complex, but it's complicated enough to the point where you can say that you should have done it another way. The shift part can be confusing for some people. In that respect, one of the shortcomings my team has found is when we have to add another person, such as a new hire, to xMatters, we can't add them to a group within xMatters without having to put them on a shift. If we put them in a group, they have to be on-call. We can create their account, and then they're just out there in limbo until their team says, "You have to be on this shift." One piece of feedback for xMatters is to figure out how to have manageable groups so that they're contactable from xMatters. They do not necessarily have to be on a shift right from the start or at all for that matter."
"The data validation and verification need to be enhanced so that when data is changed, it reviews it in an automated manner and catches all of the anomalies."
"Beyond the typical grouping, xMatters has what is referred to as dynamic teams. Dynamic teams are criteria for setting up and targeting a group of people that meet specific criteria. The bad thing about this setup is that you cannot alter those criteria through the typical xMatters import/export process. The attributes that create the criteria for dynamic teams can only be altered via the Web UI. So, if you want to create a new dynamic team in a mature xMatters environment (one that is already populated with hundreds of users), and you want to add, say, 100 users to that dynamic team, you have to do it manually."
"In terms of restoration, if you delete something, or you have multiple users that have the ability to delete a group, a user profile, or a workflow, the ability to restore it within the GUI is not available. There are a whole bunch of programs that are required to allow for that to happen. A button to go back to a good point in time would be really nice. A lot of other tools have a better backup and restoration solution, but xMatters is a little bit short on that. They have about 95% solution available, but the other 5% requires manual effort. We would like to be able to just push a button and say, "I want to restore this piece back to this date," but we can't do that with the tool right now."
"It has not improved our organization."
"On-call management scheduling is difficult."
BMC Helix ITSM is ranked 3rd in IT Service Management (ITSM) with 75 reviews while xMatters is ranked 7th in IT Alerting and Incident Management with 31 reviews. BMC Helix ITSM is rated 8.0, while xMatters is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of BMC Helix ITSM writes "The leading service management platform for delivering intelligent, user-centric experiences". On the other hand, the top reviewer of xMatters writes "A versatile solution with excellent logging capabilities that reduced our time to resolve ". BMC Helix ITSM is most compared with ServiceNow, JIRA Service Management, ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, Freshdesk and IBM Maximo, whereas xMatters is most compared with PagerDuty Operations Cloud, Opsgenie, ServiceNow, Everbridge IT Alerting and OnSolve Platform for Critical Event Management.
We monitor all IT Service Management (ITSM) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
