We performed a comparison between xMatters and Zendesk based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about PagerDuty, Atlassian, Everbridge and others in IT Alerting and Incident Management."That automation is the critical aspect of xMatters. Without those workflows, then we would have a system that maintains an on-call schedule in Excel. So xMatters provides the notification workflow and ensures you're notifying the right person at the right time."
"The UI: It is easily navigable."
"Through one tool, we're able to generate email notifications, voice notifications, mobile push notifications, Slack channel notifications, all managed from one place, simple and easy to use. People are able to join the conference bridge directly from the phone call by pressing one button instead of having to dial into a bridge and remember a conference code."
"We haven't evaluated any product recently, but from what I can tell, looking around online, what xMatters has that others don't have are the custom forms. That's the big differentiator at the moment because that's something that we heavily use."
"We have not noticed any scalability issues in the two years that we have used the system."
"For our organization, sending notifications out via subscriptions for outages."
"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."
"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 stability has been very good."
"The initial setup is simple and straightforward."
"The product offers very good management. It has a great ability to assign tickets based on content."
"It's a very stable tool, very powerful."
"One of the most valuable features is that Zendesk gives you a lot of configurability, and a lot of leeway in terms of customizing the look and theme. Zendesk offers you the facility to design your own landing page, as well as the look and feel of the entire knowledge base. At the same time, they offer themes that you can simply purchase and implement. Either way, it can really be turned into the right look and feel of the knowledge base required by our company, which is very important—if you have a bland-looking page, most of the time, people will lose interest. Zendesk also allows you to test the customizations before you publish it. It gives you a sandbox location where you can test everything new that you're trying to create and publish, which is very interesting."
"The most valuable features of Zendesk Support are collaboration, reports, and a self-service portal. The customer and team can see all the information needed from the portal."
"Its agility and simplicity are the most valuable features. This tool is very user-friendly."
"We rarely had issues with Zendesk."
"We would like to see the ability to support custom devices. We have a lot of users who use Slack, which is another tool for communication. xMatters currently does not support Slack as a communication method. It can't send events to Slack and respond to them."
"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."
"I would like xMatters to provide users with the capability of administering it on their own. I do a lot of hand-holding with them."
"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 REST API is still missing some important functionality, which we require."
"We have to create an Excel sheet for onboarding users and then upload it. But if an employee resigns, we don't have any checkpoints to validate whether the user is still active or not. We have to do that manually every week: Check who has left the organization, and do a cross-check, whether this person had any licenses or signed in to xMatters."
"While they do have an extensive library of integrations, sometimes those integrations or custom integrations, require a more technical level of expertise in products outside of xMatters, such as Java."
"Integrations seem to be the most difficult part. Once setup though, they work well."
"The support team is time-consuming, and they don't find the answer to our problem."
"You couldn't give administrative access to new hires."
"It wasn't easy to set up so we're only using a third of all of the features,"
"The solution could integrate better with QR codes from some websites such as Facebook."
"One of the drawbacks of Zendesk is that it doesn't provide a secure way for us to send data. So, we usually use a secure SharePoint folder link. We put that in the Zendesk ticket so that the requester has a secure way of getting to their data."
"The data you get when logged in to Zendesk Support differs from the data you get when you programmatically query Zendesk Support through its API because of a sync time delay."
"It needs to improve in terms of its flexibility, price, and installation."
"The price of the solution should be reduced."
xMatters is ranked 3rd in IT Alerting and Incident Management with 31 reviews while Zendesk is ranked 4th in CRM Customer Engagement Centers with 57 reviews. xMatters is rated 8.8, while Zendesk is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of xMatters writes "Enabled us to meet our "lights out" goal and repurpose staff to do work of greater value". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zendesk writes "Straightforward, very transparent, and very well organized". xMatters is most compared with PagerDuty Operations Cloud, Opsgenie, ServiceNow, Everbridge IT Alerting and OnSolve Platform for Critical Event Management, whereas Zendesk is most compared with ServiceNow, JIRA Service Management, Atlassian Confluence, Freshservice and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
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