Similar on the surface, but Rootly pulls ahead on platform maturity, deeper agentic AI, and defaults that hold as you scale, no workarounds required.
Leading companies that evaluated incident.io and chose Rootly.
When you start, opinionated defaults come out of the box. As you grow, your reliability needs do to, which means workflows change, but smart defaults remain. Rootly is built to be easy to maintain, you don’t feel stuck in a one-size fits all like incident.io users, Rootly disappears into the background even at scale.
AI agents in production across the entire incident lifecycle, not just marketing: AI SRE investigates and surfaces root causes; live summaries on mobile; proactive intelligence on Slack so you’re never stuck; MCP server; AI retrospectives; meeting scribe keeps you focused; and AI to measure on-call health.
Rootly is built to last: profitable, sustainably run and hyper-focused on incident management—we index on longevity. That means transparent pricing on day one, no surprise tax on features you assumed were included, no silly add-on charges, and no discount-now-shock-later renewals.
So good that even security departments at customers using incident.io still chose Rootly. Designed for the strictest security, governance, and compliance requirements. That's why the most security-conscious companies in the world—Okta, SailPoint, ZScaler, SoFi—trust and chose Rootly.
Every vendor has a migration script. That's the easy part. The hard part is what self-serve misses—the unknown unknowns you only spot after thousands of migrations. Our team of ex-PagerDuty employees handles everything from validating data to training your users. And yes, it's available to all sized customers.
We understand incident management inside and out. We talk to every customer; no self-serve credit cards by design. Every team gets a shared Slack channel with us. Many previous incident.io users switched because they felt like a number, unless they purchased a higher tier with premium support. We don’t do that.
"incident.io got us started, but the moment I tried to mature us past survival mode, it became a ceiling."
"As a regulated financial institution, our access-control and governance requirements are the starting line, not a wishlist. The more we scaled, the more incident.io leaned on workarounds to fit how we operate. Rootly met the governance and RBAC bar natively, so we standardized on it."
"Enterprise readiness decided it. As we pressure-tested incident.io against our governance and scale requirements, it became clear how much it would take to operate at our size, and it didn't make our final round. Rootly met those requirements out of the gate."
"Security and identity are our business, so we evaluate incident tooling the way our customers evaluate us. What we kept finding with incident.io was that scaling it meant stacking workarounds, and the access-control and governance model still didn't meet. Rootly's RBAC and enterprise readiness were built in from day one."
"We hit a wall with incident.io the second we wanted to customize anything. And the worst part was there was nobody to talk to about it. Just a higher price and a credit card field. That's a hard way to plan how you're going to grow."
"At our scale, enterprise readiness is the first filter. incident.io was ruled out early. To keep it working at our scale would have meant custom development. Rootly cleared that bar from the start, so the decision was straightforward."
"Our security team had already put Rootly through its enterprise and access-control review and recommended it. On incident.io, the pattern we saw was complexity growing with scale and a steady need for development to make it fit. Standardizing engineering on the platform security had already vetted was the obvious, lower-risk call."
"Our whole product is about being adaptable. We needed an incident system with that same philosophy, one that fits the team we are now and the one we're becoming, without making us rebuild it along the way. incident.io couldn't offer us that. That's a strategic bet on a platform like Rootly."
A team of 1 or 10,000+ gets direct access to Rootly experts from day one. That's a real partnership, not a hands-off tool.
Startups
You don't have a defined incident process, that’s ok, you don't need to build one from scratch. Smart defaults and opinionated best practices are on out of the box.
What you get with Rootly?
On-call rotations, Slack-native collaboration, beautiful status pages, AI SRE for debugging, and a dedicated CSM at no charge. Set it and forget it.
What about incident.io?
incident.io can also be a good fit for startups just starting out—platform differences are smaller at that stage. But many users end up feeling like a number unless they buy premium support, or left out of AI features.
Growth
You have more services, more dependencies, more on-call rotations—and requirements start changing team by team. Consistency and learning from incidents gets harder.
What you get with Rootly?
Powerful defaults remain but customize what you care about. AI retrospectives, Rootly Academy, service catalog, advanced workflows, communication module, and more.
What about incident.io?
As you scale, the friction shows: your org outgrows their opinion, you build workarounds, and the features you actually need sit behind a paywall. We don't do that.
Enterprises
You're audited now. You have a security team, a procurement process, an on-call pay program wired into payroll. Change management is heavy, requirements keep shifting, and the instinct is to build, not buy.
What you get with Rootly?
Easy to maintain at scale, with standardized best practices and enterprise controls like advanced RBAC so everyone can adopt it safely. Predictable pricing.
What about incident.io?
One-size-fits-all only works for a few teams. The rest build workarounds, and teams like security often get left out. Managing incident.io becomes a full-time job.
Any team, at any stage, any AI comfort level.
We cut our resolution times in half and reduced repeat incidents. Rootly has been our best investment in terms of ROl.
Geoff Powell, Sr. Technical Manager, SRE
“Rootly doesn’t have a native catalog.” ❌ incorrect
Rootly does in fact have a native catalog and the only two-way integration with Cortex and the deepest integration with Backstage.
“Rootly isn’t opinionated.” ❌ incorrect
Rootly is shaped by thousands of SRE teams and backed by Google, the pioneer of SRE. We curate every default so even a first-time responder finds it intuitive, with no custom workflows or configuration required, at any scale.
“Rootly is complex to manage at scale.” ❌ incorrect
Rootly is designed to drive consistency and naturally guide responders. Even the largest enterprises just set it and forget it after initial setup. Unlike others, getting everyone onboarded has never been easier.
Rapid incident response and resolution
incident.io
Rootly
Opinionated defaults
Smart defaults and best practices to get you started.
Predictable pricing
Pre-negotiated year one, two, and three; no surprise increases on features you thought were included.
Native service catalog
Teams, services, and ownership modelled once.
Mobile AI
Native AI to ask questions about live and historical incidents while on the go.
Flexible workflows
Smart defaults out of the box, adjustable to your process without code.
Dedicated customer success
Named CS partner for onboarding and ongoing support.
Paid higher tier
Every single customer
On-call scheduling
Create and manage rotation schedules.
Native shadow rotations
No extra rota, no manual cleanup when shadowing ends.
Simultaneous paging
Page a Team level and Slack channel in one step.
Mobile app
Native mobile app for paging and response.
Slack-native incident management
Run incidents end-to-end without leaving Slack.
Single responder status updates
Ack, resolve, etc. when any responder acknowledges.
All responders must ack
Automatic role assignment
Assign incident commander, comms lead, etc. automatically.
Automated stakeholder updates
Structure communications sent automatically.
MS Teams-native incident management
Run incidents end-to-end without leaving MS Teams.
Status Pages
Customer-facing status updates tied to the incident.
Delayed workflow execution
Fire a workflow, wait, fire again logic.
Conditional branching and cross-tool triggers
Workflows can branch on conditions and reach across tools.
Config maintenance overhead
How much effort to maintain as your org scales.
Low at first, workarounds at scale
Low - abstracted logic, flexible workflows
AI summaries
Auto-generate incident summaries.
AI agent on the web app
Ask questions about live and historical incidents.
AI Retrospectives with transparent blocks
Auto-generate retrospectives with transparent AI building blocks.
AI retros, no transparent blocks
AI agent in Slack
Ask questions about live and historical incidents.
MCP Server (generally available)
Generally available MCP server to connect AI IDEs.
as of 2026-05
AI SRE (generally available)
AI that automates root cause analysis and suggests fixes.
as of 2026-05
Native alert integrations
Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, Honeycomb, etc.
SSO / SAML
Single sign-on via SAML.
SCIM provisioning
Automatic user provisioning and de-provisioning.
Edge connector
Outbound agent for internal systems that cannot accept inbound internet connections.
Audit logging
Track changes and actions across the platform.
Contractual SLA
Guaranteed uptime commitment.
up to 99.99%
up to 99.99%
Everything you need to know about Rootly vs. incident.io.
What is the difference between Rootly and incident.io?
Rootly and incident.io are both incident management platforms that cover on-call, incident response, status pages, retrospectives, and AI-assisted investigation. The key differences are support, AI, and economics at scale. Rootly offers deeper RBAC and workflow customization with no workflow limits, full feature access on every plan regardless of team size, a dedicated AI research division (Rootly AI Lab) backed by Google DeepMind and Anthropic, and direct access to Rootly employees. Rootly wins when organizations need enterprise-grade control, predictable pricing, workflows that work the way you need, and AI that goes beyond summarization.
Is Rootly or incident.io better for enterprise teams?
Rootly is purpose-built for the complexity enterprise engineering organizations face — granular RBAC across roles, services, teams, severities, and components; private incidents invisible to the rest of the org by default; just-in-time access controls; and isolated tenant support for security teams. incident.io's RBAC is more limited and its workflows are not flexible, which works for smaller teams but creates friction as organizations scale. Enterprise teams consistently choose Rootly when governance, compliance, and operational complexity are non-negotiable.
How does Rootly's pricing compare to incident.io?
Rootly is a profitable business with transparent, predictable pricing. Every major feature is available on every plan regardless of team size—no gated capabilities, no surprise add-ons. incident.io customers consistently report sticker shock at renewal—lower prices in year one followed by significant increases in year two. For organizations planning multi-year reliability investments, Rootly's pricing model is structurally more predictable.
How does Rootly's AI SRE compare to incident.io's AI SRE?
Rootly AI SRE is generally available, built on a historical corpus of hundreds of thousands of real incidents, and runs parallel hypothesis checks per incident. Every finding includes a confidence score and a visible reasoning chain—engineers see exactly how the AI reached its conclusion before acting on it. Rootly AI also works across the full incident lifecycle: investigation, stakeholder updates, call transcription, action item tracking, and retrospective generation. incident.io's AI SRE focuses primarily on investigation and fix suggestions. Rootly AI SRE is also backed by Rootly AI Labs, a dedicated research division funded and mentored by Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and Google Cloud — with research published at NeurIPS, ACL, and ICML.
Does Rootly have a service catalog like incident.io?
Yes. Rootly Catalog connects services, teams, runbooks, and dependencies directly to every incident—powering alert routing, workflow automation, AI investigation, and retrospective reporting from a single ownership model. Unlike incident.io's Catalog, Rootly's is designed to reflect your org's terminology and structure without imposing a rigid data model. It syncs from existing tools like Cortex and Backstage, and activates immediately across the entire platform.
How does Rootly's on-call compare to incident.io's?
Rootly On-Call supports native shadow rotations, simultaneous paging to a level and Slack channel in one step, and resolves incidents when any responder acknowledges—so MTTR metrics stay accurate even when someone misses a page. incident.io requires workarounds for shadow schedules, cannot natively page a level and Slack channel simultaneously, and requires all paged responders to acknowledge before an incident resolves—meaning one missed page leaves the incident perpetually unresolved and corrupts MTTR data.
What do customers say about switching from incident.io to Rootly?
Customers who move from incident.io to Rootly most commonly cite the following reasons: incident.io's workflows are too rigid and can't be adjusted; AI output quality degrades at scale with more false positives than useful findings; pricing increases significantly at renewal; verbose information in Slack that renders notification unusable; lack of RBAC depth and control. Rootly's mobile app and UX; workflows, deeper RBAC, AI quality, and predictable pricing are the most frequently cited reasons for switching.
Does Rootly work with Slack and Microsoft Teams?
Yes. Rootly is fully native to both Slack and Microsoft Teams—incidents can be declared, managed, and resolved entirely within either platform. Stakeholder updates, workflow automations, AI investigation summaries, and on-call notifications all flow through the communication tool your team already uses.
How does Rootly support the reliability community differently from incident.io?
Rootly is invested in the reliability community beyond the product—offering the industry's only incident simulation training, Rootly Academy, and open source projects from Rootly AI Labs including oncallhealth.ai and SRE-bench. Rootly AI Lab is a dedicated research division that publishes at NeurIPS, ACL, and ICML, and is funded by Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and Google Cloud. This level of community investment and published research has no equivalent at incident.io.
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