PagerDuty has long been a prominent name in incident management and on-call alerting. However, despite its established market position, modern engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and DevOps teams are increasingly seeking PagerDuty alternatives. The needs of today's fast-paced tech environments have evolved beyond simple alerting, creating a demand for more integrated, automated, and collaborative solutions.
This article explores the reasons behind this shift and provides a ranked comparison of the best oncall software for teams. Discover why a new generation of incident management software is emerging and why Rootly is the top choice to lead your team into the future of reliability.
Why Teams Are Searching for PagerDuty Alternatives
The incident management landscape is no longer just about waking someone up at 3 a.m. While PagerDuty excels at alerting, modern teams need comprehensive, end-to-end DevOps incident management solutions. The disconnect between traditional alerting tools and the full incident lifecycle creates significant friction, leading teams to look for better options.
Pain Points of Traditional On-Call Tools
- High Costs and Complex Pricing: A major driver for seeking alternatives is PagerDuty's pricing model. Essential features are often locked behind expensive, higher-tier plans, causing costs to balloon as teams scale. PagerDuty's pricing can start at $21 per user per month but quickly escalates to over $41 for essential features, leading many users to seek more cost-effective alternatives [3].
- Lack of Comprehensive Automation: Modern incident response requires automating repetitive tasks to reduce cognitive load and speed up resolution. This goes beyond simple alerting to include creating dedicated Slack channels, pulling in the right responders, updating status pages, and scheduling post-mortems—tasks where traditional tools often fall short.
- Fragmented User Experience: Responders using legacy tools are forced to constantly switch context. They might get an alert from PagerDuty, communicate in Slack, track tasks in Jira, and write retrospectives in Google Docs. This fragmentation slows down response times and increases the chance of human error, which is costly when some outages can cost organizations over $100,000.
- Innovation vs. Brand Recognition: While PagerDuty's brand is powerful, its pace of innovation has been questioned. In contrast, many agile competitors are building more modern, integrated, and user-friendly platforms designed for today's engineering workflows [1].
What to Look For: Key Features of Modern Incident Management Software
To effectively compare oncall platforms, you need to evaluate them against the requirements of a modern reliability practice. The best site reliability engineering tools offer a holistic solution that supports teams throughout the entire incident lifecycle. These features are precisely what the most reliable engineering teams use to build a resilient SRE toolkit.
Evaluation Criteria
- End-to-End Lifecycle Management: The tool must cover everything from initial detection and alerting to coordinated response, swift resolution, collaborative retrospectives, and insightful analytics.
- Powerful Workflow Automation: The ability to automate runbooks and eliminate manual toil is a game-changer for reducing Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR). Look for a platform that allows you to codify your incident response processes.
- Seamless ChatOps Integration: The best tools integrate deeply with collaboration hubs like Slack and Microsoft Teams. This allows teams to manage incidents from start to finish within the chat tools they already use, keeping everyone in sync.
- Integrated Retrospectives (Post-mortems): A modern platform should facilitate a blameless post-incident review process, automatically gathering data from the incident timeline and helping track action items to prevent future occurrences.
- Actionable Analytics and Insights: Your incident management tool should be a source of truth, providing clear data on key reliability metrics like MTTR and Mean Time To Detect (MTTD). This helps you understand incident trends and make data-driven improvements.
- Transparent and Scalable Pricing: Pricing should be predictable, easy to understand, and provide clear value at every tier without hiding essential features behind enterprise-level paywalls.
The Top PagerDuty Alternatives Ranked for 2026
1. Rootly: The Best Overall PagerDuty Alternative
Rootly is the definitive leader for modern incident management. It's a comprehensive platform that unifies on-call scheduling, alerting, and powerful workflow automation within a single, developer-first interface, making it one of the top incident management tools available today.
Why It's #1:
- All-in-One Platform: Rootly is built to manage the entire incident lifecycle. It automates everything from incident declaration to resolution and retrospectives, all within one unified platform.
- Native ChatOps Experience: Empower your team to declare, manage, and resolve incidents entirely within Slack or Microsoft Teams. This eliminates context switching and keeps response efforts centralized and efficient.
- No-Code Workflow Automation: Unlock massive efficiency gains by automating hundreds of manual steps. Automatically create incident channels, page on-call teams, update status pages, create Jira tickets, and much more with an intuitive, no-code workflow builder.
- Integrated Learning: Rootly automatically generates retrospective documents populated with a complete timeline, key metrics, and participant data. Most importantly, it helps you track follow-up action items to ensure continuous improvement and turn every incident into a learning opportunity. With Rootly, you can manage the full incident lifecycle, from detection and alerting to response, coordination, and retrospectives.
Best for: SRE, DevOps, and platform engineering teams looking to supercharge their incident response process, consolidate their tooling, and build a more reliable system with a single, collaborative platform.
2. Opsgenie (by Atlassian): Best for the Atlassian Ecosystem
Opsgenie is a robust on-call and alerting tool that is now a core part of the Atlassian product suite. It stands out as a strong solution for teams already embedded in the Atlassian world.
Pros:
- Offers deep integrations with other Atlassian products like Jira Service Management and Confluence, making it a natural fit for those ecosystems [6].
- Provides flexible and powerful rules for alerting and on-call scheduling.
Cons:
- Lacks the seamless, end-to-end incident management workflow found in Rootly. Key processes like retrospectives and full incident orchestration often require other tools or manual effort.
- The user experience can feel less modern, and configuration can be complex compared to more intuitive platforms.
Best for: Teams heavily invested in the Atlassian ecosystem who primarily need a powerful alerting and on-call tool.
3. Squadcast: A Strong Contender for Reliability Orchestration
Squadcast is an incident management platform that combines on-call scheduling with SRE-focused features, including status pages and reliability workflows.
Pros:
- Maintains a good focus on Site Reliability Engineering principles.
- Offers built-in status pages as a core feature of the platform.
Cons:
- Its automation capabilities and ChatOps integrations are not as deep or intuitive as Rootly’s, limiting its ability to fully automate the response process.
Best for: Teams looking for a straightforward on-call management and SRE tools for incident tracking with a focus on reliability.
4. ServiceNow: The Enterprise ITSM Choice
ServiceNow is a giant in the enterprise IT Service Management (ITSM) space, and its incident management module is one small piece of a much larger suite.
Pros:
- Extremely powerful for large organizations with mature, process-heavy ITSM frameworks.
- Integrates with a vast array of other enterprise systems and platforms.
Cons:
- It is often overly complex, slow, and expensive for most engineering and DevOps teams. It is an IT-first platform, not a developer-centric tool. Its main goal is to help IT support keep employees productive within a broad ITSM context [7].
Best for: Large enterprises that need to integrate technical incident management into a broader, company-wide ITSM strategy.
Comparison Table: Rootly vs. PagerDuty vs. Opsgenie
This alert management software comparison shows how the top platforms stack up across key criteria for modern teams.
Feature
Rootly
PagerDuty
Opsgenie
Core Focus
Full Incident Management
Alerting & On-Call
Alerting & On-Call (Atlassian Focus)
ChatOps (Slack/Teams)
Full Lifecycle Management in Chat
Basic Notifications & Actions
Basic Notifications & Actions
Workflow Automation
No-Code, Extensive & Customizable
API/Script-based, Limited
Rule-based, Less Intuitive
Integrated Retrospectives
Yes, with automated data & action tracking
No, requires third-party tools
No, requires Confluence/other tools
Pricing Model
Transparent, All-in-one
Complex Tiers, High Upsell
Tiered, Integrated with Atlassian
Ideal User
Modern SRE/DevOps Teams
Traditional Ops/IT
Teams in the Atlassian Ecosystem
Conclusion: Why Rootly Is the Best PagerDuty Alternative
The market for incident management has moved far beyond simple on-call alerting. Modern engineering teams require a unified platform that automates manual work, fosters seamless collaboration, and helps them learn from every incident.
Rootly is designed from the ground up to meet these needs. It consolidates alerting, communication, automation, and learning into a single, cohesive platform. By doing so, Rootly empowers teams to drastically reduce MTTR, minimize the cognitive load on responders, and build a fundamentally more reliable system. It's a core part of the modern SRE toolset for high-performing teams.
Ready to move beyond legacy tools and embrace a modern, automated approach to incident management?
Book a demo of Rootly today and see how you can transform your incident response.