PagerDuty is often one of the first tools engineering teams adopt for on-call management and alerting. It’s a foundational piece of the puzzle for notifying the right person when something goes wrong. However, as organizations mature, incident management evolves from simple alerting into a comprehensive, end-to-end process. The focus shifts from just knowing about a problem to resolving it faster, communicating effectively, and learning from it to build more resilient systems.
As these needs grow, many teams find they've outgrown PagerDuty's core functions, leading them to search for the best PagerDuty alternatives. With the high cost of downtime and a rapidly expanding incident management market—valued at approximately USD 141.79 billion in 2025 [2]—having a robust platform is more critical than ever. For teams seeking advanced automation, seamless collaboration, and continuous improvement, Rootly emerges as the top choice for managing the entire incident lifecycle.
What to Look for in a Modern Incident Management Platform
When you compare oncall platforms, it's important to look beyond basic alerting. The top incident management tools today offer a complete solution for navigating the complexities of service outages.
Here are the key criteria for evaluating a modern platform:
- End-to-End Lifecycle Management: The platform should support the entire incident process, from initial detection and response through to final resolution and learning.
- Powerful Automation: Look for features that automate repetitive tasks. This includes creating communication channels, notifying stakeholders, assigning roles, and pulling relevant data to reduce manual work for your team.
- Seamless Collaboration: Deep integrations with the tools your team already uses, especially Slack, are crucial for centralizing communication and keeping everyone on the same page.
- Actionable Insights: The tool must provide robust analytics and retrospective (or postmortem) features. These help teams understand not just what happened, but why it happened, enabling them to learn from incidents and improve system reliability.
- Flexibility and Scalability: The platform should be customizable to fit your team's specific workflows and be able to scale as your organization and services grow.
An effective platform will check all these boxes, as detailed in this incident management platform showdown.
Head-to-Head Comparison: Rootly vs. PagerDuty
This direct alert management software comparison highlights how Rootly and PagerDuty approach incident management differently across key areas.
Feature
PagerDuty
Rootly
Alerting & On-Call
Industry leader in alert routing
Integrates with all alerting tools to orchestrate response
Automation
Basic, predefined response plays
Powerful, no-code workflow engine for the full lifecycle
Slack Integration
Basic notifications and actions
Deep, bidirectional; manage incidents entirely in Slack
Retrospectives
Basic postmortem reports
Automated, data-rich, and customizable templates
Analytics
Primarily on-call and alert metrics
Deep insights into reliability, MTTR, and business impact
Alerting and On-Call Scheduling
- PagerDuty: PagerDuty is an industry leader in on-call scheduling and alert routing. Its core strength lies in making sure the right person gets notified at the right time through various channels like phone calls, SMS, and push notifications.
- Rootly: Rootly complements and enhances your existing alerting setup. It integrates seamlessly with PagerDuty, Opsgenie, and other tools, acting as an orchestration layer to kickstart the entire response process once an alert fires. While Rootly also provides its own on-call and alerting capabilities, its real power is turning an alert from any source into a coordinated and automated incident response. This makes it a great option for teams looking for
Opsgenie alternativesthat offer a more complete incident lifecycle solution.
Incident Response and Workflow Automation
- PagerDuty: PagerDuty offers "response plays" that can automate some basic actions, such as sending a status update or adding a note. However, managing the incident often still requires responders to jump between the PagerDuty UI, Slack, Jira, and other tools, leading to context switching and potential confusion.
- Rootly: Rootly shines with its powerful, no-code workflow engine. You can automate hundreds of manual steps that happen at the start of an incident. For example, a workflow can automatically create a dedicated Slack channel, invite the right responders based on the service affected, start a video conference call, assign incident roles, and post an initial stakeholder update. This is all managed through a deep, bidirectional Slack integration that lets your team manage the entire incident without ever leaving their primary communication tool.
Post-Incident Learning and Analytics
- PagerDuty: PagerDuty provides basic postmortem functionality and analytics that are primarily focused on alerting and on-call metrics, such as mean time to acknowledge (MTTA) and alert volume.
- Rootly: Rootly is built to facilitate deep learning. It automatically generates a comprehensive retrospective by pulling in the complete incident timeline, Slack conversation transcripts, key events, and graphs. This saves engineers hours of manual work. You can use customizable templates to standardize your review process and ensure consistency. Furthermore, Rootly offers deep analytics on critical reliability metrics like mean time to resolve (MTTR), incident frequency by service or severity, and even the business impact of incidents, empowering teams to make data-driven improvements.
Why Modern Engineering Teams Choose Rootly as their PagerDuty Alternative
For teams looking for the best oncall software for teams that can help them mature their incident management practices, Rootly offers clear advantages.
Unparalleled Automation to Reduce Toil
Rootly’s workflows go far beyond basic alerts to automate the entire incident lifecycle. By handling the tedious, manual coordination tasks, Rootly frees up your engineers to do what they do best: focus on investigating and resolving the issue.
A True Command Center in Slack
Rootly meets developers where they are—in Slack. The ability to declare incidents, run automated workflows, pull in data, and communicate with stakeholders without leaving Slack is a massive productivity booster. It eliminates context switching and keeps the entire response organized in one place.
A Focus on Learning and Reliability
Rootly is a platform built with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles at its core. While other tools are recognized for their incident management features [8], Rootly's integrated retrospectives and powerful analytics help teams shift from a reactive "firefighting" mode to a proactive approach focused on continuous improvement and long-term system reliability.
Making the Switch: Is Rootly Right for You?
As the incident management market grows toward an expected USD 250.01 billion by 2034 [3], adopting advanced solutions is becoming a competitive necessity. Ask yourself these questions to determine if your team has outgrown its current tools:
- Are your engineers spending too much time on manual tasks during incidents?
- Is incident communication scattered across multiple tools and channels?
- Are your post-incident reviews inconsistent, time-consuming, or lacking in actionable insights?
- Do you struggle to track meaningful reliability metrics like MTTR?
If you answered "yes" to any of these, it's likely time to consider a dedicated incident management platform like Rootly.
Conclusion: Move Beyond Alerting to True Incident Management
While PagerDuty is an excellent tool for alerting, modern incident response demands a more comprehensive, automated, and collaborative platform. Rootly stands out as the best PagerDuty alternative by providing an end-to-end solution that reduces manual work, centralizes communication in Slack, and embeds continuous learning directly into the incident lifecycle. It empowers teams to not only resolve incidents faster but also build more reliable systems for the future.
Ready to see how Rootly can transform your incident management process? Book a demo or start your free trial today.