.svg)
Comparison pages are where a lot of vendors quietly stop telling the truth. The format invites it; you own both columns, you write both sides, and the other company never gets to reply. So you hand yourself every checkmark and hand the competitor a list of things they supposedly can't do.
We just published a page comparing Rootly and incident.io. Before we wrote a word of it, we gave it one rule: every claim on the page has to be something we can show you. A source, a capability, a case study, etc. If we couldn't back it, it didn't go on the page. Where incident.io is genuinely better at something, we say so.
The market has two names now
For most of the last decade, if you ran software, your on-call ran on PagerDuty. They created this category in 2009, they taught a whole industry how on-call is supposed to work, and an enormous part of the market still runs on them today. We have a huge amount of respect for them both as competing companies and fellow Canadians.
The market is in the middle of a real shift, though. PagerDuty is a legacy product now, and the signals around the company point to active speculation about it going private this year. That is the kind of pressure that lands on a company the market has filed under mature and steady, rather than the one defining what comes next, aka innovating.
What's grown into that space is a now two leading companies. When a team sits down to seriously evaluate modern incident management in 2026, the real shortlist is Rootly and incident.io. That's the comparison buyers are running.
Why this page exists
People type "Rootly vs incident.io" into Google; they ask ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity similar questions and read whatever those tools hand back. Someone's content is going to answer that query. We would rather the answer be ours and accurate than ours and missing, or someone else's and wrong.
That's the game we have to play, pretending otherwise would be its own small lie. Controlling the narrative is part of how marketing works, and the only real choice a vendor has is whether the narrative it pushes happens to be true.
There's also a plain business reason, a comparison page is infrastructure. When we run ads against comparison searches, those clicks need a destination that actually answers the question in order to even be presented to someone. When someone asks an AI assistant which tool to choose, the model can only repeat what it's able to read, so there has to be a clear, factual, well-structured Rootly source for it to pull from too. This page is that destination and that source. It makes search work smarter, makes the ad spend land, and gives the models something accurate to cite. None of that requires bending a single fact, which is exactly why I'm fine saying it in public.
incident.io wrote a page about us too
incident.io is a serious company with a genuinely good product and excellent marketing. I'd rather compete with them than any other teams in this category. Which is exactly why I didn't love the page they wrote about us.
Most of it runs on quotes with no sources attached and the cliche checklist that’s just not true. "Adoption was low." "You need a dedicated person just to maintain the workflows." "It felt like Lego blocks that didn't work outside their intended use." Automatic role assignment=x, Native service catalog=x, blah blah blah…
The trouble with an anonymous quote is simply that you can't check it. You can't tell which customer said it, in what year, on which version of the product, or whether they switched for a reason that has nothing to do with the words on the page, neither can we. A claim you can't trace isn't evidence, it's atmosphere.
When we make a claim about Rootly, we point towards public documentation, named customers you can go ask, capability you can try, our security and compliance page, etc. When incident.io says something about us that's out of date or wrong, we answer it with something you can verify.
You don't have to take our word for any of it and that's the point. You shouldn't have to take anyone's word for it, including ours. Go meet both companies, go test both products, work with a partner that’s helping you, not one that’s talking trash about competition.
How we actually operate
I want to be careful here, because there's a version of this post where we're the saints and they're the villains, and that version isn't true either.
Rootly has gotten things wrong in the past, we’ve made mistakes. Every company that's actually growing has a list of mistakes, the same way any person who's learning does. After all it’s still people that are learning that are running companies. What matters is what you do with the list. We own those moments, we fix them, and the product and company today carries both the scars and the lessons. I'll trust a company that can tell you what it learned over one that acts like it never had anything to learn.
So when incident.io's page says some teams found Rootly hard to adopt or maintain, I'm not going to claim no customer ever felt that. What I'll do is show you where we are now and let you check it, because that's the honest answer and an anonymous quote or an x in a chart isn't.
And we don't run fud about incident.io, or any competition; we don't brief against their product, and in an actual sales cycle our team talks about Rootly, not about them. Ask us to compare and you'll get a straight answer with sources. But we don't go hunting for things to say about a competitor's product, their business, or their people. I believe our team and what we've built win on their own merits, and a company that's confident in its product doesn't need to spend its energy taking apart someone else's.
This page is the one place we respond at all, and only because buyers are already asking the question out loud and there’s currently on side to the story; one answer. Now there’s two.
Why we care this much about a marketing page
A lie is still a lie even if everyone believes it. The truth is still the truth even if no one believes it.
Anyone who has run incidents already lives by this. The dashboard can be green while the system is down, the status page can say "investigating" while you already know the cause. Reality doesn't rearrange itself to match the story you'd prefer to be telling. The whole job is finding what's actually true, fast, and acting on it before the convenient version of events costs you another twenty minutes.
A comparison page is a low-stakes version of the same test. If we'll shade the truth when the only thing at risk is a sale, you have every reason to wonder what we'll tell you when the stakes are real, when our product did something wrong in the middle of your incident and the honest answer is expensive. The standard has to hold in both places, or it was never a standard.
Honesty isn’t just a nice to have value. The people we're selling to debug reality for a living, and they can smell a vendor managing the story a mile away. It’s also why we don’t use words like “best-in-class” and “world class”. We’re creating incident management software for engineers, not targeting a JD Power award.
Go check it
The page is live. Read it like a skeptic. Click the sources. An anonymous quote can't be corrected, because there's no one standing behind it to correct. A sourced claim can, and we'll keep correcting ours as the facts change, because they will.
Then do the one thing no comparison page can do for you. Try both. Declare a real incident in each, route it, run it, close it out. The platform willing to be fact-checked on its marketing page is the one I'd bet on telling you the truth when you're on call at 3 a.m. and need it most.
