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)."Helix is stable."
"What I have found to be the most valuable is that it offers the radius deployment package not only to the BMC cloud but also to the public cloud such as Azure."
"With service requests, we have been able to give visibility to the business users."
"The product's initial setup phase was easy."
"Automatic orchestration is the most valuable. The feature for designating some cases or incidents to the right PM for resolution, first call resolution, and change management are also important. The self-service feature and knowledge base resolutions are helping the customers in resolving issues rather than opening tickets."
"In general, for incident management, it's okay."
"We have seen year over year customer satisfaction improvement for the last five years."
"BMC Smart IT is somewhat rigid, but they have a powerful backend that supports our complex need for extension versus customization. Between extension and customization, you can achieve complex business processes. That's one of the main advantages of BMC."
"For our organization, sending notifications out via subscriptions for outages."
"The UI: It is easily navigable."
"The automated callouts, without a doubt, are most valuable. They have been a huge gain for our company. Previous to xMatters, there was no real management of the on-call resources or rotas. So, having that centralized and automated has been a huge gain."
"Support has been great. They responded very quickly to all the support cases that I have submitted."
"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."
"Made it very easy to implement our roster of people who receive alarms with the REST API."
"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."
"The Flow Designer is quite valuable, as you can set up integrations and flows without necessarily needing to know about code."
"It needs a more organic workflow, so every field you create is labeled throughout the stack. BMC has a few products that they try to bundle together. Generally, that solution works. BMC should take a step back and think about the overall solution—not only ITSM but also CTI Integration along with chat. They have all that, but it's not an end-to-end holistic solution with the added reporting analytics."
"They could be more responsive to feedback from their community board."
"Our middleman provider limits the available functionality so we cannot even do our own analytics."
"To raise any ticket, there are too many fields to be filled and it makes generating tickets very time-consuming."
"Needs to make customizable/configurable article templates in the Knowledge Management."
"Log in process is unnecessarily complicated."
"I would also love to see consistency across all consoles."
"The search feature and the dashboard could both be improved."
"Integrations seem to be the most difficult part. Once setup though, they work well."
"A lot of the issues that we've had have already been addressed. However, they could be clearer with the actual throughput and the costs. The throughput that we signed up for was a lot lower than what we needed, and we had to pay a lot more to get the throughput that we needed."
"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."
"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."
"If you want to alter a custom field, you can do so via import/export. But you can't have an unlimited number of custom fields, so in a large environment with a lot of teams, team provisioning becomes more difficult."
"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."
"They could make the product more customizable."
"If you are not one of the big players of their customers, the chance that one of your minor wishes will granted are very small."
BMC Helix ITSM is ranked 3rd in IT Service Management (ITSM) with 75 reviews while xMatters is ranked 3rd 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.
