While PagerDuty has long been a leading tool for on-call management and incident response, the landscape of DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is constantly evolving. The global incident and emergency management market is projected to grow to over $255 billion by 2034, highlighting a massive demand for more advanced and comprehensive solutions [1]. As of January 2026, many engineering teams are exploring PagerDuty alternatives to manage costs, gain more powerful features, and centralize their entire incident management process.
This guide explores the best PagerDuty alternatives, focusing on the top incident management tools for modern SRE and DevOps teams: Rootly, Opsgenie, and Splunk On-Call.
Why Look for a PagerDuty Alternative?
Teams seek alternatives to PagerDuty for several common reasons as their needs for incident management software grow more sophisticated.
- Cost and Scalability: PagerDuty's per-user pricing model can become expensive as engineering teams and the number of services they manage expand. This often prompts a search for more cost-effective solutions that don't penalize growth.
- Need for a Unified Platform: Many teams want to consolidate their tools. Instead of using one tool for alerting and another for incident coordination, they prefer a single platform that handles the entire incident lifecycle, from the initial alert to the final retrospective.
- Desire for Deeper Automation: Modern incident response is driven by automation. Teams need powerful workflow tools that can automatically handle repetitive tasks like creating Slack channels, inviting the right responders, sending status page updates, and logging key events. This frees up engineers to focus on resolving the problem.
- Evolving SRE and DevOps Practices: SRE trends in 2026 are heavily focused on AI-powered observability and autonomous incident response [2]. Engineers need tools that are not just for alerting but are core components of an integrated, modern SRE tooling stack.
Compare Top On-Call Platforms: PagerDuty vs. Alternatives
This table provides a quick alert management software comparison of the key features across PagerDuty and its top alternatives.
Feature
Rootly
Opsgenie
Splunk On-Call
PagerDuty
Core On-Call & Alerting
Yes (Rootly On-Call)
Yes
Yes
Yes
Incident Response Automation
Advanced (Codeless Workflows)
Yes
Yes
Basic
Integrated Retrospectives
Yes
Yes (via Jira)
Basic
Yes
Status Pages
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Native Slack Functionality
Advanced (Run incidents in Slack)
Basic
Basic
Basic
Pricing Model
Usage-based & User-based tiers
User-based
User-based
User-based
All-in-One Platform
Yes
No (Relies on Atlassian suite)
No (Relies on Splunk suite)
No (Primarily alerting)
Deep Dive into the Best PagerDuty Alternatives
1. Rootly: The All-in-One Incident Management Platform
Overview:
Rootly stands out as a comprehensive incident management platform built to manage the entire incident lifecycle within a single tool. Unlike solutions that focus primarily on alerting, Rootly centralizes everything from detection and response coordination to post-incident learning and analytics. This means you can handle every stage of an incident from start to finish.
Key Features & Benefits:
- Unified Platform: With the introduction of Rootly On-Call, Rootly now offers a complete solution for on-call scheduling, escalations, alerting, and incident response. This allows teams to consolidate their tooling into a single, cohesive platform, serving as a full replacement for PagerDuty.
- Powerful Automation: Rootly’s no-code workflow engine automates hundreds of manual steps. It can automatically create dedicated Slack channels, pull in the right teams based on service catalogs, assign roles, update stakeholders via a status page, and much more.
- Native Slack Operation: A key differentiator is the ability for teams to run the entire incident response process from within Slack. This minimizes context switching and allows responders to work in the environment where they already collaborate.
- Integrated Learning: Retrospectives and analytics are built directly into the platform. This makes it easy to conduct blameless post-mortems, generate reliability metrics like Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR), and turn insights from incidents into actionable improvements.
Best For:
- Teams looking to consolidate tools and manage the entire incident lifecycle in a single, automation-first platform.
- Organizations that are heavy Slack users and want to empower responders to work where they are.
2. Opsgenie (by Atlassian): The Atlassian Ecosystem Choice
Overview:
Opsgenie is a strong PagerDuty alternative, particularly for teams deeply integrated into the Atlassian product suite like Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket. It is a popular choice for those looking for Opsgenie alternatives that still deliver robust on-call management.
Key Features & Benefits:
- Deep Atlassian Integration: Its primary strength is the seamless connection with Jira. This allows for effortless ticket creation and tracking during incidents, keeping development and operations workflows tightly aligned.
- Robust Alerting and On-Call: Opsgenie provides flexible on-call scheduling, alert routing rules, and escalation policies to ensure the right person is notified every time.
- Incident Command Center: The platform includes features for centralizing communication and coordinating response efforts during a critical incident.
- For teams who prefer Opsgenie for its on-call capabilities but want more advanced incident management, Rootly offers a deep integration with Opsgenie to combine the best of both worlds.
Best For:
- Companies already heavily invested in the Atlassian ecosystem.
- Teams who need tight integration between their on-call alerts and Jira workflows.
3. Splunk On-Call (formerly VictorOps): The Observability-Driven Choice
Overview:
Splunk On-Call is an incident management tool that is part of the broader Splunk observability platform. It's designed for teams who want to connect their monitoring data directly to their response process.
Key Features & Benefits:
- Alert Enrichment: The platform excels at adding contextual information from Splunk logs and metrics directly to alerts. This gives responders more information to diagnose the issue quickly without having to hunt for data.
- Incident Timeline: Splunk On-Call provides a chronological timeline view of an incident, showing every alert, action, and communication in one place. This is valuable for both real-time response and post-incident reviews.
- Integration with Splunk: Its main advantage is the seamless workflow for organizations that use Splunk for logging, monitoring (APM), and security (SIEM). This fits well with the growing SRE trend of integrating security and reliability practices [3].
Best For:
- Organizations that have standardized on the Splunk platform for observability and security.
- Teams that want to bridge the gap between their observability data and their incident response process.
What’s Included in the Modern SRE Tooling Stack?
To effectively manage reliability in 2026, a modern SRE tooling stack needs to cover the entire incident lifecycle. The most effective stacks consolidate these functions to reduce complexity and improve efficiency [4]. Here are the essential site reliability engineering tools:
- Monitoring & Observability: Tools that generate signals about system health, such as Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, and New Relic.
- Alerting & On-Call: Platforms to route alerts to the right on-call engineer. This includes the best oncall software for teams like Rootly, PagerDuty, or Opsgenie.
- Incident Management & Collaboration: A central hub like Rootly for DevOps incident management to coordinate the response, automate tasks, and facilitate collaboration in tools like Slack.
- Retrospectives & Learning: Integrated SRE tools for incident tracking and post-incident analysis that help teams learn from failures and track reliability metrics over time.
- Status Pages: Tools to communicate service status and incident updates to both internal and external customers.
How to Choose the Right On-Call & Incident Management Software
Choosing the right tool is a critical decision. Here’s a short guide to help you select the best fit for your team.
- Assess Your Core Need: Are you just replacing on-call alerting, or do you need a platform for the entire incident lifecycle?
- Evaluate Your Current Ecosystem: How important is integration with tools like Slack, Jira, or Splunk?
- Consider Total Cost of Ownership: Look beyond the license fee. Factor in the cost of context switching, manual toil, and managing multiple tools.
- Prioritize Automation: Evaluate the depth and flexibility of the platform’s automation capabilities. Can it automate the repetitive tasks your team hates?
- Start a Trial: Encourage readers to test the top contenders with their actual team and workflows to see which is the best fit.
Conclusion: The Future is Integrated Incident Management
While PagerDuty remains a popular tool for on-call alerting, the DevOps incident management market is clearly shifting toward more integrated, all-in-one platforms. For teams seeking to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and adopt modern SRE practices, an all-in-one platform like Rootly presents a compelling alternative that can manage the full lifecycle. Opsgenie and Splunk On-Call remain strong choices, particularly for teams committed to the Atlassian and Splunk ecosystems, respectively.
Ultimately, choosing the right tool is about more than just alerting the on-call engineer. It's about finding a solution that empowers your entire team to resolve incidents faster, automates away the toil, and helps you learn from every single event. A truly comprehensive incident management platform provides much more than what traditional on-call tools offer, creating a foundation for a more reliable and resilient organization. To see how a full platform compares to a traditional alerting tool, you can explore what a full incident management integration looks like.