# Rootly vs xMatters: An Incident Management comparison for 2026
Both of these products will do almost anything you can describe, as long as somebody builds it. Rootly's workflows can react to nearly every change in an incident's life. xMatters' Flow Designer can pull data from one system, decide who to wake based on any field in an alert, call an external API, and update a ticket somewhere else. Reviewers of both say the same thing in different words: powerful, and it takes real effort to set up well.
So before you compare features, ask who in your organization will do that work. The answer usually points to the right tool, because each one is built for a different kind of builder.
[ad-uptime]
On Rootly, the builder is usually an SRE or platform engineer. **Rootly runs incident response inside Slack and Microsoft Teams**, where chat channels hold each incident, workflows shape the process, and an AI SRE proposes likely root causes, sold by an independent, venture-backed company. On xMatters, the builder is more often an IT operations or automation specialist. **xMatters is an enterprise orchestration and notification platform** built around a low-code workflow canvas, attribute-based routing, and multilingual alerts, owned since 2021 by Everbridge.
This comparison covers what you will configure in each, how they reach people, where responders gather, service context, AI, status pages and reporting, and costs for a 25-person team.
## Quick comparison
The table covers what buyers usually ask first. The two products overlap on paging and differ on almost everything else.
| Category | Rootly | xMatters |
|---|---|---|
| **Owner** | Independent | Everbridge, owned by Thoma Bravo |
| **Typical builder** | SRE or platform engineer | IT operations or automation engineer |
| **Automation** | Lifecycle workflows | Flow Designer low-code canvas |
| **Where incidents run** | Slack or Teams channel | Adaptive Incident Console |
| **Routing on alert attributes** | Alert routing rules | ✔, Dynamic Groups and Custom Properties |
| **Multilingual notifications** | ✘ | ✔ |
| **On-call** | Separate license, $20 per user | Included in every paid plan |
| **Shadow rotations** | ✔ | ✘ |
| **Service context** | Service catalog | Service Intelligence dependency maps |
| **AI root-cause investigation** | ✔, AI SRE, priced by quote | Suggested causes from maps and changes |
| **AI assistant** | ✔, Essentials | ✔, AI Agent in the console |
| **MCP server** | ✔, GA since March 2026 | ✘ |
| **Status pages** | ✔, Essentials | Advanced only |
| **Test environment** | ✘ | ✔, non-production instances on Base and above |
| **Free plan** | ✘, trial only | Up to 10 users, no SMS or phone |
| **Entry paid price** | $20 per user for incident response | $9 per user on Starter |
| **Logs, metrics, traces** | ✘ | ✘ |
## What you will end up configuring
The configuration model is the biggest difference, so it comes first.
### Rootly: workflows around the incident
In Rootly, workflows are triggered by things that happen to an incident: it is declared, its severity rises, someone takes a role, a status update is due, it resolves. Each workflow checks conditions such as service, team, severity, or a custom field, then runs actions such as paging a team, creating a Jira ticket, posting a Slack message, calling a webhook, or updating the status page.
What you build in Rootly is your incident process: who joins, what gets created, and when people are reminded. An engineer can read a workflow and understand it, though a large set of them becomes something to maintain.
### xMatters: flows across your systems
In xMatters, Flow Designer workflows start from an alert, a schedule, or an incident event, and they can reach well beyond the incident. A flow can enrich an alert with data from a CMDB, branch on any attribute, choose recipients dynamically, call outside APIs mid-run, and close the loop by updating the system the alert came from.
Teams can publish custom steps with versions so every group uses the same logic, and Base and Advanced plans include non-production instances for testing a flow before it affects real responders.
What you build in xMatters is integration logic between systems. It is more powerful and harder to learn, and heavy use can consume automation credits on larger contracts.
| Configuration | Rootly | xMatters |
|---|---|---|
| **What you model** | The incident process | Integrations and routing between systems |
| **Builder interface** | Workflow editor | Visual Flow Designer canvas |
| **Calls external APIs mid-flow** | Webhooks | ✔ |
| **Versioned shared steps** | ✘ | ✔ |
| **Test instance** | ✘ | ✔, Base and above |
| **Learning curve** | Moderate | Steep |
[summary]
### Incident response that works before anyone configures it
Rootly's workflows and xMatters' Flow Designer both reward an owner who will keep building, and both get less useful when that person moves on. Better Stack ships on-call, escalations, Slack or Teams incident channels, and status pages that work out of the box, running on the same platform that monitors your services.
**The best incident process is one your team can still change after its author leaves.** [Explore Better Stack incident management](https://betterstack.com/incident-management).
[/summary]
## Reaching people
xMatters has the deeper routing. Rootly has more for the people carrying the pager.
xMatters works out who to contact by looking at people's attributes. You tag users with things like location, team, skill, or the services they support, and a single routing rule then finds whoever matches an incoming alert, which spares you from maintaining dozens of separate schedules. Rotations can hand over per alert, by date, or after a fixed run of shifts, and each person reads and answers alerts in their preferred language. Base unlocks live call routing and one-way stakeholder seats, while Advanced adds devices that ring through do-not-disturb. That routing depth is where xMatters most often wins against PagerDuty, as our [PagerDuty vs xMatters comparison](https://betterstack.com/community/comparisons/pagerduty-vs-xmatters/) shows.
Rootly On-Call, licensed separately at $20 per user, focuses on engineering rotations. Alongside schedules, escalation policies, and overrides, it offers shadow rotations for people learning the rotation, flags gaps in coverage, and routes inbound calls to whoever is on duty.
| Reaching people | Rootly | xMatters |
|---|---|---|
| **Attribute-based recipient selection** | Routing rules | ✔, Dynamic Groups |
| **Multilingual alerts** | ✘ | ✔ |
| **Shadow rotations** | ✔ | ✘ |
| **Coverage gap detection** | ✔ | ✘ |
| **Live call routing** | ✔ | Base and above |
| **One-way stakeholder seats** | Per plan | ✔, Base and above |
| **SMS and voice** | Part of On-Call | Monthly allotments, unlimited on Advanced |
## Where responders gather
Once people are engaged, the two tools put them in different places.
Rootly runs the incident in a Slack or Teams channel. Declaring an incident opens the channel, assigns roles such as incident commander, starts a timeline, and prompts the commander through next steps. For engineering teams that already live in chat, that means nobody has to learn a new screen during an outage.
xMatters brings people into its Adaptive Incident Console instead, a browser view showing who has responded, who holds which role, the playbook checklist, and a running log. It can post into chat tools, yet the console is designed for organizations where many participants, such as NOC staff, managers, and business stakeholders, are not in the engineering Slack.
| Where work happens | Rootly | xMatters |
|---|---|---|
| **Primary workspace** | Slack or Teams channel | Adaptive Incident Console |
| **Role assignment** | ✔ | ✔ |
| **Guided next steps** | ✔, prompts in chat | ✔, playbooks on Base and above |
| **Suits non-engineering participants** | Less so | ✔ |
## Service context
Both tools know how your services fit together, from different sources.
Rootly's service catalog links services to owners and feeds both its workflows and its AI SRE, so an incident on a service can page the right team and scope the impact.
On paid xMatters plans, Service Intelligence draws a map of how services depend on each other, bundles alerts that belong together, throttles notifications when an alert storm hits, and lines up recent changes against incidents to point at probable causes. It fits organizations that already maintain a CMDB, especially in ServiceNow.
| Service context | Rootly | xMatters |
|---|---|---|
| **Service ownership** | ✔, catalog | ✔, groups and properties |
| **Dependency maps** | Catalog relationships | ✔, Service Intelligence |
| **Alert flood control** | Alert grouping | ✔ |
| **Change correlation** | ✔, via AI SRE | ✔ |
## AI and MCP
Rootly is further ahead on AI, and it is the only one of the two with an MCP server.
On every plan, Rootly includes an AI assistant in the incident channel that summarizes what has happened, answers questions, and starts the retrospective. Its separately licensed AI SRE investigates while the humans do, weighing what recently changed, which other alerts fired, and how earlier incidents played out, then shares a probable cause, how confident it is, and why.
Rootly's MCP server, generally available since March 2026, can be hosted by Rootly or run yourself, and lets assistants such as Claude read and update incidents, alerts, schedules, and workflows.
xMatters added an AI Agent to the Incident Console in November 2025. The agent recommends who should fix a problem and which runbook fits, helps the incident commander hand out tasks, and answers plain-language questions about the incident. Paired with Service Intelligence, it is aimed at keeping a big, many-team response on track. xMatters has no MCP server.
| AI and MCP | Rootly | xMatters |
|---|---|---|
| **AI assistant during incidents** | ✔ | ✔, AI Agent |
| **Suggested resolvers and runbooks** | ✘ | ✔ |
| **Root-cause hypothesis with confidence** | ✔, AI SRE | ✘ |
| **Suggested causes from changes** | ✔ | ✔ |
| **AI retrospective drafts** | ✔ | ✘ |
| **MCP server** | ✔ | ✘ |
[summary]
### An AI SRE that can read the evidence
Rootly's AI SRE reasons from alerts, changes, and past incidents, and xMatters' AI Agent suggests people and runbooks, but neither can read the logs and traces behind a failure. Better Stack's AI SRE runs on the platform that stores that telemetry, and its MCP server gives Claude or Cursor the same access.
**An AI that can query the logs can tell you what broke, not just who should look.** [See Better Stack AI SRE](https://betterstack.com/ai-sre).
[/summary]
## Status pages and reporting
Rootly includes status pages on Essentials, driven by its workflows, so a change in severity can update customers automatically.
xMatters offers status pages only on its custom-priced Advanced plan, where Flow Designer keeps them in sync with incidents. On Free, Starter, and Base, you need a separate product.
Reporting goes the other way. xMatters reports on how the organization responds: which groups answer quickly, where escalations pile up, and how evenly on-call duty is spread, with an API for feeding BI tools. How far back that history goes depends on the plan, starting at a quarter on Free. Rootly focuses on incident metrics and retrospectives, with AI-drafted write-ups and follow-ups synced to Jira, Linear, and other trackers.
| Status and reporting | Rootly | xMatters |
|---|---|---|
| **Status pages** | ✔, Essentials | Advanced only |
| **Responder and group analytics** | Incident metrics | ✔ |
| **Analytics API** | ✔, via the Rootly API | ✔ |
| **AI retrospective drafts** | ✔ | ✘ |
| **Historical data** | Plan dependent | Grows by plan, unlimited on Advanced |
[summary]
### Reports that include what the system was doing
xMatters reports on responders and Rootly on incidents, but neither can chart the errors and latency behind them. Better Stack lets you write SQL against your incidents and your telemetry in the same platform, so response times, error rates, and the services involved can sit on one dashboard.
**A response report means more when it shows what the system was doing at the time.** [Build charts with SQL](https://betterstack.com/dashboards).
[/summary]
## The telemetry neither tool holds
Rootly and xMatters both start from an alert that something else raised, and neither keeps logs, metrics, traces, or uptime results of its own. xMatters plugs into more than 400 tools and Rootly into a long list as well, yet the evidence for any incident still sits elsewhere, so responders keep a monitoring tab open throughout. Teams that want the notification layer and the telemetry in one place usually end up weighing xMatters against a combined platform, which our [Better Stack vs xMatters comparison](https://betterstack.com/community/comparisons/better-stack-vs-xmatters/) walks through.
| Observability | Rootly | xMatters |
|---|---|---|
| **Log management** | ✘ | ✘ |
| **Metrics** | ✘ | ✘ |
| **Distributed tracing** | ✘ | ✘ |
| **Uptime monitoring** | ✘ | ✘ |
[summary]
### Collect the evidence without changing code
Rootly and xMatters both depend on another product for the logs, metrics, and traces behind an alert. Better Stack's eBPF-based collector discovers your services and captures that telemetry without code changes, then runs on-call, incidents, and status pages on the same data.
**An incident platform that collects the evidence saves the first ten minutes of every investigation.** [See Better Stack tracing](https://betterstack.com/tracing).
[/summary]
## Pricing
### Rootly
Rootly sells its products separately, with discounts for bundling. Incident Response Essentials costs $20 per user per month and covers chat-based response, workflows, the AI assistant, status pages, and SSO. On-Call Essentials adds $20 per user per month. The AI SRE and Enterprise tiers, which bring private incidents, audit logs, and SCIM, are priced by quote. There is no free plan.
### xMatters
xMatters has four tiers, with annual billing required on paid plans:
1. **Free:** up to 10 users, without SMS or phone alerts.
2. **Starter:** $9 per user per month, for up to 100 users, with SMS and voice allotments.
3. **Base:** $39 per user per month, which is where playbooks, test instances, live call routing, and stakeholder seats begin.
4. **Advanced:** quoted individually, and the only tier with status pages, do-not-disturb override, uncapped notifications, and full history.
Flow Designer automation credits can appear on bigger contracts, and large customers rarely pay list price.
### What a 25-person team pays
Take 25 engineers who all have accounts and join incidents, 10 of them on rotation, at list prices.
| Cost component | Rootly Essentials | xMatters Starter | xMatters Base |
|---|---|---|---|
| **Seats** | 25 at $20, so $500 | 25 at $9, so $225 | 25 at $39, so $975 |
| **On-call for 10** | 10 at $20, so $200 | Included | Included |
| **Monthly total** | About $700 | About $225 | About $975 |
| **Status pages** | Included | Requires Advanced | Requires Advanced |
| **Live call routing** | ✔ | ✘ | ✔ |
| **AI root-cause investigation** | AI SRE quote on top | ✘ | ✘ |
xMatters Starter is the cheapest, but it lacks playbooks, stakeholder licenses, and live call routing, which are much of the reason to choose xMatters. Against Base, Rootly costs less and includes status pages, though its AI SRE adds a quote on top.
## Which one fits your team
Choose xMatters if your incidents reach well beyond engineering, your organization runs ServiceNow or a similar CMDB, and you need to reach people across regions, languages, and channels with complex routing rules. It suits large IT operations teams, NOCs, and enterprises already buying from Everbridge. Plan for an owner who will build and maintain flows, and for a separate status page tool below Advanced.
Choose Rootly if engineers handle most of your incidents from Slack or Teams, and you want the process to run in chat with AI help along the way. It suits SRE and platform teams who want a customizable workflow, an AI assistant on the base plan, an AI SRE on top, and an MCP server for their own tools. Anyone who both responds and takes pages needs two Rootly licenses, so price that in.
## Final thoughts
Both tools turn into whatever you build with them, so the decision comes down to the builder. **Rootly gives an SRE team a way to encode how engineers respond**, while xMatters gives an operations team a way to connect systems and reach people across a whole enterprise.
Look at who will own the configuration a year from now. If it is an engineer who would rather write a workflow than learn a canvas, Rootly will be kept up to date. **If it is an automation team that already builds integrations for ServiceNow, xMatters is the tool they will actually maintain.**
[summary]
### One MCP endpoint for incidents and telemetry
Rootly's MCP server exposes incident data, and xMatters has no MCP server at all, but neither can give an AI assistant your logs or traces, because neither stores them. Better Stack's MCP server covers the whole platform, so Claude or Cursor can query your logs with SQL, check who is on call, acknowledge an incident, and build a dashboard chart in one conversation.
**With incidents and telemetry behind one MCP endpoint, your assistant can investigate and respond without switching tools.** [Try Better Stack](https://betterstack.com).
[/summary]