# Why our comparison page only says things you can check

URL: https://rootly.com/blog/why-our-comparison-page-only-says-things-you-can-check
Author: Adam Frank
Published: 2026-08-24
Updated: 2026-08-24

> We published a Rootly vs. incident.io page under one rule: every claim had to be something you could verify. Where incident.io is better at something, we say so.

A lot of vendors stop telling the truth on comparison pages. The format encourages this because you control both columns, you write both sides, and the other company never gets a chance to respond. As a result, you give yourself all the checkmarks and give the competitor a list of things they supposedly can't do.

We recently published [a comparison page for Rootly and incident.io](https://rootly.com/alternatives/rootly-vs-incident-io). Before we wrote a single word, we set one rule: every claim on the page had to be something we could prove to you—a source, a capability, or a case study. If we couldn't back it up, it wouldn't appear on the page. Where incident.io is actually better at something, we say so.

## The market now has two main names

For most of the past decade, if you were running software, your on-call system was based on PagerDuty. They created the entire category back in 2009, they taught the industry how on-call should work, and a large portion of the market still uses them today. We have a great deal of respect for them, both as competitors and as fellow Canadians.

That said, the market is currently going through a real shift. PagerDuty is now a legacy product and there are signals indicating the company might go private this year. That kind of pressure affects a company that has been classified as mature and stable, rather than one that is defining the future; one that is innovating.

What has grown in this area are now two leading companies. When a team takes the time in 2026 to properly evaluate modern incident management, the real shortlist will be Rootly and incident.io. That's the comparison buyers are currently running.

## Why this page exists

People type "Rootly vs incident.io" into Google; they ask ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity similar questions and then read whatever those tools return. Someone's content is going to answer that query. We prefer the answer to be ours and accurate rather than ours but incomplete, or someone else's and incorrect.

That's the game we have to play—pretending otherwise would be a lie. Controlling the narrative is part of how marketing works, and the only real choice a vendor has is whether the narrative it promotes turns out to be true.

There's also a straightforward business reason: a comparison page is infrastructure. When we run ads aimed at comparison searches, those clicks need a destination that actually answers the question in order to even be shown 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 draw from too. This page is that destination and that source. It makes search work more efficiently, ensures our ad spending is effective, and gives the models something accurate to cite. None of this requires distorting a single fact, which is precisely why I'm comfortable saying it publicly.

## incident.io wrote a page about us

incident.io is a serious company with a genuinely good product and excellent marketing. I'd rather compete with them than with any other team in this category. And that's exactly the reason I didn't like the page they wrote about us.

Most of it is based on quotes without any sources and on a clichéd checklist that isn't true at all. "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, and so on.

The problem with an anonymous quote is simply that you can't verify it. You don't know which customer said it, in what year, on which version of the product, or whether they switched for some reason unrelated to the statements on the page—neither can we. A claim you can't trace isn't evidence, it's just atmosphere.

When we make a claim about Rootly, we point to public documentation, to named customers you can contact, to capabilities you can try, to our security and compliance page, and so on. When incident.io makes a statement about us that is out of date or incorrect, we respond 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 and meet both companies, test both products, work with a partner who is helping you, not one that's saying bad things about the competition.

## How we actually operate

I want to be careful here, because there's a version of this post in which we're the saints and they're the villains, and that version isn't true either.

Rootly has made mistakes in the past, we've made errors. Every company that is actually growing has a list of mistakes, just as any person learning does. After all, it's still people who are running companies. What matters is how you deal with that list. We take ownership of those moments, we fix them, and the product and company today include both the lessons learned and the scars from those mistakes. I'll trust a company that can tell you what it has learned over one that acts as if it has never had anything to learn.

So when incident.io's page says that some teams found Rootly hard to adopt or hard to maintain, I won't claim that no customer ever felt that way. What I'll do is show you where we are now and let you check it yourself, because that's the honest answer and an anonymous quote or a minus in a chart isn't.

And we don't spread misinformation about incident.io or any of our competitors; in an actual sales process our team talks about Rootly, not about them. If you ask us to compare the two, you'll get a direct answer with sources. But we don't go out looking for things to say about a competitor's product, their business, or their people. I believe in our team and what we've built, and a company that is confident in its product doesn't need to spend its energy picking apart someone else's.

This is the only place we respond at all, and only because buyers are already asking the question out loud and there's currently only one side to the story. Now there are two.

## Why we care so 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 dealt with incidents knows this. The dashboard can show as green while the system is actually down, and the status page can say "investigating" even though you already know the cause. Reality doesn't change to match the story you'd prefer to tell. The whole point of the job is to find out what's actually true as quickly as possible and act 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're willing to distort the truth when the only thing at risk is a sale, then you have every reason to question what we'll say when the stakes are real—when our product does something wrong during your incident and the honest answer is expensive. The standard has to hold in both cases, or it was never a standard.

Honesty isn't just a nice-to-have value. The people we're selling to spend their lives debugging reality, and they can smell a vendor managing the story from a mile away. That's also why we don't use phrases like "best-in-class" or "world class". We're making incident management software for engineers, not aiming for a JD Power award.

## Go and check it out

The page is live. Read it with a skeptical eye. Check the sources. An anonymous quote can't be corrected because there's no one behind it to make the correction. A claim that is supported by sources can be, and we'll keep updating ours as the facts change, because they will.

Then do the one thing that no comparison page can do for you. Try both products. Declare a real incident in each, route it, run it, and close it out. The platform that is willing to have its marketing claims fact-checked is the one I'd bet on telling you the truth when you're on call at 3 a.m. and need it most.