In modern Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps, effective incident management is non-negotiable for maintaining service reliability and customer trust. For years, PagerDuty has been a foundational tool for on-call scheduling and alerting. However, the landscape of incident response is evolving rapidly.
Today, engineering teams are seeking PagerDuty alternatives that offer more than just alerts. They require comprehensive incident management software that supports the entire incident lifecycle from detection to resolution and learning. This search is often prompted by practical concerns, as many users find PagerDuty's pricing plans to be expensive and overly complex [7]. As a leader in this new era, Rootly delivers a unified, end-to-end platform built to manage every phase of an incident.
Why Teams Are Exploring Alternatives to PagerDuty
While PagerDuty enjoys strong brand recognition, a growing number of organizations are exploring alternatives that better align with the needs of a modern engineering team [6]. The core reasons go beyond a simple feature-to-feature comparison.
- Cost and Complexity: PagerDuty's tiered pricing can become a significant and unpredictable expense as teams scale, often forcing them into higher-cost plans to access essential features. This pushes organizations to find more cost-effective solutions.
- Fragmented Tooling: Responding to an incident often means juggling multiple tools: PagerDuty for alerts, Slack for communication, Jira for tickets, and Google Docs for retrospectives. This fragmented approach creates friction and slows down response. Teams want to consolidate these functions onto a single, integrated platform.
- Limited Scope: PagerDuty excels at alerting but provides limited capabilities for the broader DevOps incident management workflow. Key areas like automated retrospectives, in-depth analytics, and action item tracking are where purpose-built platforms now lead.
- Need for Deeper Automation: The demand for powerful workflow automation is higher than ever. To reduce manual work during stressful incidents, engineers need to automate repetitive tasks like creating communication channels, inviting the right responders, and pulling diagnostic data.
What to Look for in Modern SRE Tooling
When evaluating the top incident management tools, it's critical to look beyond basic alerting and consider how a platform supports your team's entire workflow [8]. As AI becomes more integrated into these platforms, its value in improving response is clear, with 32% of IT professionals reporting significant benefits [3].
End-to-End Incident Lifecycle Management
The best oncall software for teams manages the complete incident lifecycle, not just the initial alert. A modern platform must provide structured support for every phase: detection, response, resolution, and learning. Rootly is designed to guide teams through this entire process, ensuring every incident follows a consistent and thorough workflow from start to finish.
Integrated On-Call and Alerting
Core on-call management functionality is a must-have. This includes flexible scheduling, customizable escalation policies, and reliable multi-channel notifications (SMS, voice, push, and Slack). A truly modern platform seamlessly integrates this on-call engine with the rest of the incident response workflow. For example, Rootly provides comprehensive on-call features like schedules, overrides, and live call routing, all within the same platform where you resolve the incident.
Powerful Workflow Automation
Automation is a key differentiator in modern SRE tools for incident tracking. The ability to automate routine tasks reduces the cognitive load on responders and enforces best practices. Your chosen platform should have a flexible, no-code automation engine capable of tasks like:
- Automatically spinning up a dedicated Slack or Microsoft Teams channel.
- Paging the correct on-call engineers and subject matter experts.
- Assigning incident roles and tracking tasks.
- Posting automated status updates to internal and external stakeholders.
- Generating post-incident review documents pre-populated with key data.
Seamless Integrations
Your incident management platform should act as a central command center, which requires deep integrations with your existing tech stack. Key integration categories include:
- Monitoring & Observability: Datadog, Sentry, New Relic
- Communication: Slack, Microsoft Teams
- Project Management & Ticketing: Jira, Linear
- Security Incident Management: While this guide focuses on DevOps incidents, specialized tools also exist for security response [1].
Compare Oncall Platforms: The Best PagerDuty Alternatives
When you compare oncall platforms, look for solutions that support the complete workflow, not just a single piece of it [2]. Here’s a breakdown of the leading PagerDuty alternatives available in 2026.
Tool
End-to-End Workflow
Integrated On-Call
Automation
Pricing Model
Rootly
✅ Yes
✅ Yes
✅ Advanced, no-code
User-based
Opsgenie
🟨 Partial
✅ Yes
✅ Yes
User-based
Squadcast
✅ Yes
✅ Yes
✅ Yes
User-based
1. Rootly: The All-in-One Incident Management Leader
- Overview: Rootly is a comprehensive incident management platform that unifies the entire incident lifecycle into a single, intuitive workflow.
- Key Differentiator: Rootly is not just an integration that works with PagerDuty; it's a full replacement. With a native, fully-featured on-call management engine, teams can consolidate their tools and stop paying for a separate alerting solution.
- Features:
- Integrated on-call scheduling, escalations, and multi-channel alerting.
- A powerful, no-code workflow automation engine that automates hundreds of manual steps.
- Built-in retrospectives and analytics to track metrics like MTTR and drive continuous improvement.
- Deep integration with Slack and Microsoft Teams, allowing teams to manage incidents without context switching.
- Best For: SRE, DevOps, and platform engineering teams looking for a single, centralized platform to consolidate their site reliability engineering tools and replace multiple point solutions.
2. Opsgenie (by Atlassian)
- Overview: As a popular PagerDuty and Opsgenie alternative, this tool is a strong contender, particularly for its on-call and alerting capabilities.
- Key Differentiator: Its greatest strength is its tight integration with the Atlassian ecosystem, including Jira Service Management and Confluence.
- Features: Robust on-call scheduling, flexible alerting rules, and basic incident response features.
- Best For: Teams that are heavily invested in the Atlassian toolchain and need a powerful alerting solution that connects seamlessly with their existing tools.
3. Squadcast
- Overview: Squadcast positions itself as a reliability workflow platform designed to embed SRE principles into the incident response process.
- Key Differentiator: It provides a unified experience by combining on-call management, incident response, and public status pages in one tool.
- Features: On-call management, guided incident response, automated runbooks, and integrated status pages.
- Best For: Teams seeking a modern platform with a user-friendly interface and a strong focus on SRE best practices.
4. Other Notable Tools
- Freshservice: This is an excellent choice for IT teams that need an ITSM-focused solution. It offers robust features for ticket management and integrates well with broader business workflows [4].
- Splunk On-Call (formerly VictorOps): A solid option for teams already using the Splunk ecosystem for observability, as it provides seamless integrations with Splunk's monitoring and log analysis tools [5].
Conclusion: Unify Your Incident Management with Rootly
The market has made a decisive shift away from siloed alert management software and toward integrated incident management platforms. While PagerDuty pioneered the on-call category, modern tools like Rootly are redefining it by offering an all-in-one solution that covers the entire incident lifecycle.
Rootly stands out by unifying on-call management, incident response, powerful automation, and retrospectives into a single, cohesive platform. This consolidation empowers teams to reduce tool complexity, lower operational costs, and ultimately build more reliable services.
To see how a unified platform can transform your incident response, it's time to evaluate your complete SRE tooling stack. Explore how Rootly’s on-call management capabilities and beyond can help you resolve incidents faster and more efficiently.