PagerDuty has long been a foundational tool for on-call management and incident response. For many engineering teams, its name is synonymous with the alerts that signal something has gone wrong. However, as engineering teams and their systems grow more complex, their needs evolve. This often leads them to search for PagerDuty alternatives that can offer more than just basic alerting. The most common drivers for this search are rising costs, a need for more comprehensive features, and the desire for a streamlined, all-in-one incident management software. While PagerDuty has a strong market presence, a growing number of competitors are challenging its position by offering more modern and integrated solutions [8].
Why Teams Look for PagerDuty Alternatives
Several common pain points drive users to explore other options. Understanding these challenges is the first step in finding the right tool for your team.
- High Costs: PagerDuty's pricing can become prohibitively expensive as teams scale. Many organizations find that essential features are often available only on more expensive tiers or require costly add-ons, making it difficult to manage budgets [4].
- Fragmented Toolchain: PagerDuty primarily focuses on on-call scheduling and alerting. This often requires teams to purchase and integrate separate tools for other critical parts of the incident lifecycle, such as coordinating the response in Slack, managing stakeholder communications via status pages, and conducting retrospectives.
- Desire for Automation and Integration: Modern DevOps incident management is about working smarter, not harder. Teams want tools that are deeply integrated into their daily workflows—especially platforms like Slack—and offer powerful automation to reduce the manual, repetitive tasks associated with responding to incidents.
Top PagerDuty Alternatives for Scaling Teams
For organizations looking to scale their incident management practices, three platforms often emerge as the top incident management tools: Rootly, Opsgenie, and Splunk On-Call. Each is designed to meet different needs and priorities.
Rootly: The All-in-One Incident Management Platform
Rootly is a comprehensive, modern solution designed to unify the entire incident lifecycle, from the first alert to the final retrospective. It combines processes that are often scattered across multiple tools into a single, cohesive platform.
Its key strengths include:
- Unified Platform: Rootly combines on-call scheduling, alerting, incident response coordination, status page communications, and retrospectives in one place.
- Powerful Automation: Its no-code workflow engine automates hundreds of manual tasks. This includes automatically creating dedicated Slack channels, inviting the right responders based on service ownership, and keeping stakeholders updated.
- Slack-Native: It allows teams to manage the entire incident lifecycle without ever leaving Slack, which drastically reduces context switching and streamlines communication.
With the release of Rootly On-Call, the platform is now a complete replacement for PagerDuty. Teams can migrate fully to Rootly or leverage its powerful incident management features while integrating with an existing PagerDuty setup for alerts.
Atlassian Opsgenie: A Strong Contender (with a Catch)
For years, Opsgenie has been one of the most popular PagerDuty alternatives, especially for teams already invested in the Atlassian ecosystem of tools like Jira and Confluence [2]. Its flexible on-call scheduling, robust alerting rules, and deep integration with Jira Service Management made it a strong choice for many teams.
However, there's a major catch: Atlassian is discontinuing Opsgenie as a standalone product. Sales to new customers ceased in 2025, and the platform will be completely shut down in 2027. This forces existing customers to migrate to other Atlassian products or search for entirely new Opsgenie alternatives [5]. While it was once a formidable competitor, Opsgenie is no longer a viable or future-proof solution for teams seeking a scalable, long-term platform.
Splunk On-Call (formerly VictorOps): For Observability-Driven Teams
Splunk On-Call is an alert management software comparison favorite for teams that depend heavily on the Splunk platform for observability and log management. Its main value is its tight integration with the broader Splunk ecosystem, which creates a more seamless workflow from alert detection in Splunk to incident response.
Key features include a collaborative incident timeline, intelligent alert routing to reduce noise, and detailed post-incident reporting. When comparing pricing, Splunk On-Call offers several tiers, with its Standard plan at $29 per user per month and the Enterprise plan at $49 per user per month [3]. It's a solid choice for organizations already committed to Splunk but may be less appealing for those who prefer a more vendor-agnostic solution.
Comparison at a Glance: Rootly vs. Opsgenie vs. Splunk
To effectively compare oncall platforms, it helps to see their core attributes side-by-side. Based on user reviews and recommendations, Opsgenie has historically been highly rated with a 100% recommendation rate, though its discontinuation changes its value proposition. PagerDuty maintains a 98% recommendation rate, while Splunk On-Call has an 83% recommendation rate [1].
Feature
Rootly
Opsgenie
Splunk On-Call
Core Function
All-in-one Incident Management
On-Call & Alerting (Discontinued)
On-Call & Alerting
Best For
Teams seeking a unified, scalable platform
Legacy Atlassian users
Heavy Splunk users
Future-Proofing
Actively developed & expanding
Being sunset in 2027
Dependent on Splunk ecosystem
Key Differentiator
Full incident lifecycle automation in Slack
Deep Jira integration
Deep Splunk integration
How to Choose the Right Incident Management Software
Selecting the best oncall software for teams requires careful consideration of your specific needs. Here are a few steps to guide your decision:
- Evaluate Your Needs: Does your team just need a simple alerting tool, or would it benefit from a complete incident management platform that handles everything from detection to resolution and learning?
- Consider Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): Look beyond the per-user price. Factor in the hidden costs of integrating and maintaining multiple tools versus the efficiency gained from a single, unified platform. Many PagerDuty alternatives promote more transparent pricing as a key benefit [6].
- Check for Key Integrations: Ensure the tool integrates seamlessly with your team's critical systems, such as Slack, Jira, GitHub, and your monitoring tools.
- Prioritize Scalability and Future-Proofing: Choose a solution that can grow with your team and isn't at risk of being discontinued. An actively developed platform is more likely to meet your future needs.
- Focus on SRE Principles: The best site reliability engineering tools help you implement SRE best practices, such as automating runbooks, facilitating blameless retrospectives, and tracking reliability metrics. Modern platforms often provide incident playbooks and post-mortem capabilities to support this [7].
Conclusion: Making the Right Choice for Your Team
While PagerDuty remains a market leader, its high costs and fragmented approach to the incident lifecycle are driving more teams to seek superior PagerDuty alternatives. In this evolving landscape, it's critical to choose a platform that is not only powerful but also sustainable. With Opsgenie's impending shutdown, it can no longer be considered a safe choice for the future.
For teams looking for a truly scalable, cost-effective, and comprehensive solution, Rootly stands out. By consolidating on-call management, alerting, incident response, and retrospectives into a single, automated platform, Rootly eliminates tool sprawl and reduces manual work. This allows your engineers to focus on what they do best: building and maintaining reliable systems.
Ready to see how a unified incident management platform can transform your response process? Book a demo of Rootly today.