As engineering teams scale, their needs for DevOps incident management evolve. Simple on-call alerting is no longer enough. While PagerDuty is a well-known name in the market, many growing teams find themselves looking for PagerDuty alternatives. Common frustrations include pricing structures that become complex and expensive, along with a primary focus on alerting rather than the complete incident lifecycle [7].
This article will explore the best PagerDuty alternatives for growing teams. We'll compare the top incident management tools and show why Rootly stands out as a comprehensive solution designed to help you scale reliability.
Why Growing Teams Look for PagerDuty Alternatives
Several common pain points drive teams to search for a new incident management software solution.
- High Costs: PagerDuty's pricing plans can become a significant expense as teams add more users and services, making it less budget-friendly for scaling organizations [6].
- Alert Fatigue: One of the biggest challenges in on-call management is alert fatigue. Teams are often flooded with low-priority or non-actionable notifications, leading to burnout and missed critical alerts.
- Limited to On-Call: PagerDuty excels at alerting and on-call management. However, modern incident response requires support for the entire incident lifecycle, from detection and coordination to resolution and learning. Many teams need a tool that does more than just wake someone up.
- Complexity and Feature Gaps: Some organizations find PagerDuty's platform complex to configure or discover that it lacks the specific automation and integration capabilities they need to streamline their workflows [8].
What to Look for in a Modern Incident Management Tool
When you compare oncall platforms, it's crucial to look beyond basic alerting. A modern solution should empower your team to manage incidents efficiently and learn from them. Here are the key criteria to consider:
- End-to-End Lifecycle Management: The best tools support the entire incident process. This includes detection, declaring an incident, coordinating the response with defined roles and tasks, communicating with stakeholders, resolving the issue, and conducting post-incident analysis. A platform that covers every phase of the incident lifecycle centralizes your efforts and provides a single source of truth.
- Powerful Automation: Look for a platform with a robust workflow engine that automates repetitive tasks. This can include creating dedicated Slack channels, inviting the right responders, pulling in relevant data from monitoring tools, and updating external status pages. Automation reduces cognitive load and allows engineers to focus on solving the problem.
- Seamless Integrations: Your incident management software must fit into your existing SRE tools for incident tracking and DevOps workflows. It should offer deep integrations with monitoring and observability platforms (like Datadog), communication tools (like Slack), and project management systems (like Jira).
- Integrated On-Call Management: While the tool should do more than just alerting, it still needs robust on-call capabilities. Look for flexible scheduling, customizable escalation policies, and multi-channel notifications to ensure the right person is always reached. You can get started with on-call management in minutes with the right platform.
- Actionable Analytics and Retrospectives: To build a more reliable system, you need to learn from every incident. A great tool facilitates blameless retrospectives and provides actionable analytics on key metrics like Mean Time to Detection (MTTD) and Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR).
Compare Oncall Platforms: Rootly vs. The Rest
Here's a look at some of the top incident management tools and how they stack up as PagerDuty alternatives.
Rootly: The All-in-One Incident Management Platform
Overview: Rootly is a comprehensive, end-to-end incident management platform built to help teams resolve incidents faster. It operates natively within Slack, allowing teams to manage the entire incident lifecycle without context switching. Unlike tools that focus solely on alerting, Rootly combines on-call management with powerful automation and retrospective features.
Key Differentiators:
- Full Lifecycle Management: Rootly guides teams from the initial alert through the final retrospective, providing a unified experience.
- No-Code Workflow Automation: Automate hundreds of manual steps with an intuitive workflow engine. Automatically create Slack channels, assign incident roles, pull logs, update status pages, and generate retrospective timelines.
- Native Slack Operations: Run your entire incident response from within Slack. Declare incidents, add responders, execute tasks, and communicate with stakeholders without ever leaving your chat client.
- All-in-One Solution: Rootly includes built-in on-call scheduling, escalations, automated retrospectives, and rich analytics, eliminating the need for multiple disparate tools.
Best For: Growing teams and enterprises looking for a single platform to standardize and automate their entire incident response process. Rootly is ideal for organizations that want to reduce MTTR, eliminate manual toil, and foster a culture of continuous learning.
Opsgenie (by Atlassian)
Overview: Opsgenie is a strong PagerDuty and Opsgenie alternative itself, particularly for teams already invested in the Atlassian ecosystem. It offers robust alerting and on-call management.
- Pros: Features deep integration with Jira, Confluence, and other Atlassian products, along with flexible alert routing rules.
- Cons: The user experience can feel fragmented for teams that don't rely on the full Atlassian suite. It may not provide the same depth of workflow automation as dedicated platforms like Rootly.
- Best For: Organizations that use Jira as their central work hub and want an on-call tool that connects directly to it [8].
Squadcast
Overview: Squadcast is a modern incident management software designed with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps principles at its core.
- Pros: It offers a user-friendly interface, built-in Service Level Objective (SLO) tracking, and a "virtual war room" for real-time collaboration. It's often seen as more affordable for smaller teams.
- Cons: As a newer platform, its integration marketplace and enterprise-grade features may be less extensive compared to more established competitors.
- Best For: SRE-focused teams and startups seeking a cost-effective tool with a strong emphasis on reliability management [2].
VictorOps (by Splunk)
Overview: Now known as Splunk On-Call, VictorOps is an incident response tool tailored for DevOps teams, with a powerful connection to Splunk's observability platform.
- Pros: It's an excellent choice for teams that use Splunk for monitoring, offering features like a real-time incident timeline and intelligent responder suggestions.
- Cons: The tool can be expensive, and its full value is primarily realized when integrated with Splunk, which may limit its appeal for teams using other observability stacks.
- Best For: DevOps teams that rely heavily on Splunk for their logging and monitoring needs.
Feature Comparison Table: Top Incident Management Tools
Feature
PagerDuty
Rootly
Opsgenie
Squadcast
End-to-End Incident Lifecycle
Limited
✅ Yes
Partial
Partial
Native Slack Operations
Partial
✅ Yes
Partial
Partial
No-Code Workflow Automation
Basic
✅ Yes
Basic
Basic
Integrated Retrospectives
Add-on
✅ Yes
Partial (via Confluence)
✅ Yes
On-Call & Alerting
✅ Yes
✅ Yes
✅ Yes
✅ Yes
Primary Focus
Alerting & On-Call
Full Lifecycle Automation
Alerting & On-Call
SRE & On-Call
Ideal Customer
Enterprises needing on-call
Growing teams & enterprises
Atlassian-centric teams
SRE teams & startups
What’s included in the Modern SRE Tooling Stack?
Incident management doesn't exist in a vacuum. It’s a critical component of a broader ecosystem of site reliability engineering tools. A modern SRE tooling stack typically includes:
- Monitoring & Observability: Tools like Datadog, Prometheus, and Grafana provide the real-time visibility needed to detect anomalies and track system health.
- Incident Management: A central platform like Rootly acts as the command center to ingest alerts, coordinate the response, and automate workflows. It ties everything together.
- Logging: Platforms such as Splunk or the ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana) are essential for deep-diving into event logs during troubleshooting.
- Collaboration: ChatOps tools, especially Slack, are the communication backbone for incident response, enabling teams to collaborate in real time.
- Post-Incident Analysis: Tools that help you learn from incidents through automated retrospectives and track key improvement metrics over time are vital.
The best oncall software for teams integrates seamlessly with all other parts of the SRE stack, creating a cohesive and efficient system. For a closer look at other key platforms, check out this list of 10 SRE tools that reliable teams use.
Conclusion: Why Rootly is the Best PagerDuty Alternative for Growing Teams
While PagerDuty is a capable tool for on-call alerting, growing teams need a more holistic solution. Rootly stands out as the best PagerDuty alternative because it addresses the entire incident management lifecycle with a focus on automation and continuous improvement.
- Unifies the Entire Process: Rootly brings alerting, on-call, response coordination, and learning into a single, cohesive platform. This reduces tool sprawl and the cognitive load on your engineers during stressful situations.
- Built for Scale with Automation: Rootly's powerful no-code workflow engine automates the manual toil associated with incidents. This allows your team to scale its response efforts efficiently and consistently, without needing to add more people.
- Fosters Continuous Improvement: With integrated retrospectives and rich analytics, Rootly embeds learning directly into your incident management process. It helps you move from simply fixing problems to building a more resilient and reliable system over time.
If you're ready to move beyond basic alerting and implement a modern, automated incident management process, Rootly is the clear choice.
Ready to see how Rootly can transform your incident management? Book a personalized demo today.