While PagerDuty was a trailblazer in on-call alerting, modern reliability engineering needs more than just a notification. When systems go down, teams need a comprehensive incident management software that can guide them through the entire process, from the first alert to the final lessons learned.
Unfortunately, many teams that rely on traditional tools like PagerDuty still grapple with common frustrations. They face a constant barrage of notifications, spend too much time on manual administrative tasks during an outage, and struggle to learn from past incidents. This is where Rootly comes in. As a modern PagerDuty alternative, it’s designed not just to page someone, but to automate, streamline, and ultimately improve your entire incident response process.
The Limitations of Traditional On-Call Alerting Tools
PagerDuty is effective for its original purpose: on-call scheduling and sending alerts. However, when a tool's primary focus is just on notifications, several pain points emerge for the teams using it. While PagerDuty is ranked #1 in its category, its scope remains narrow, which can create challenges for teams managing complex systems [1].
- Alert Fatigue: Engineers get so many notifications that it becomes difficult to distinguish signal from noise. In any
alert management software comparison, the ability to reduce noise is a critical factor for preventing burnout and ensuring important alerts aren't missed. - Manual Coordination: During an incident, responders waste precious time on manual tasks like creating a new Slack channel, inviting the right team members, starting a video call, and keeping stakeholders updated. Every minute spent on admin is a minute not spent fixing the problem.
- Disjointed Workflow: Information about an incident gets scattered across many different tools—Slack for communication, Jira for tasks, and monitoring dashboards for data. This disorganization makes it harder to resolve the issue and nearly impossible to piece together what happened afterward.
- Focus on Paging, Not Process: These tools are excellent at getting an engineer's attention but offer very little support for the complex coordination, communication, and problem-solving that needs to happen after the alert is acknowledged.
How Rootly Modernizes Incident Management
Rootly is an end-to-end platform for DevOps incident management that automates the entire incident lifecycle. Instead of juggling multiple tools, Rootly provides a single, central place to manage incidents from the moment they are detected until they are resolved and reviewed. This comprehensive approach to incident management involves several key stages:
- Detection & Alerting: Rootly connects with your existing monitoring tools and can automatically create incidents based on rules you define.
- Triage & Response: Once an incident is declared, Rootly automates the tedious setup work. It can create a dedicated Slack channel, invite the on-call responders, and assign roles so everyone knows their responsibilities.
- Coordination: Powerful, no-code workflows handle routine tasks automatically. This can include sending status updates to stakeholders, communicating with customers, and tracking action items.
- Resolution & Retrospectives: After the incident is resolved, Rootly automatically generates a retrospective document with a complete timeline, key metrics, and all related tasks. This ensures your team can learn and improve from every event.
- Analytics & Insights: Dashboards help you track important metrics like Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) and identify patterns in your incidents, so you can address recurring problems.
Compare On-Call Platforms: Rootly vs. PagerDuty
To find the best oncall software for teams, it’s helpful to see a direct comparison. Here’s how Rootly and PagerDuty stack up in key areas.
Incident Response Automation
- PagerDuty: Focuses on automating the alerting process, ensuring the right person is notified through escalations.
- Rootly: Goes much further by offering a powerful workflow engine that automates hundreds of manual steps during the incident. This can range from creating Jira tickets and updating status pages to running diagnostic scripts, all without human intervention [2].
On-Call Management and Integration
- PagerDuty: Is a market leader in on-call scheduling and escalation policies.
- Rootly: Offers its own robust on-call scheduling feature, Rootly On-Call, that can serve as a complete replacement for PagerDuty. However, for teams already using PagerDuty, Rootly provides a deep, two-way integration. This means you can keep your PagerDuty schedules while enhancing them with Rootly's powerful automation workflows. You get the best of both worlds [3]. You can explore the details of our seamless PagerDuty integration to see how it works.
Post-Incident Learning and Analytics
- PagerDuty: Provides basic capabilities for creating post-mortems.
- Rootly: Automates the creation of retrospectives that are rich with data. It automatically captures the entire incident timeline, communications, and key metrics. This structured approach is a core feature of advanced
site reliability engineering tools, turning every incident into a valuable learning opportunity. Users on TrustRadius rate Rootly at 9.4 out of 10, compared to PagerDuty's 8.6, often highlighting these powerful learning features [4].
Beyond PagerDuty: How Rootly Stacks Up Against Other Alternatives
When you compare oncall platforms, it's not just about PagerDuty. Other tools, including Opsgenie alternatives, also compete in this space.
Rootly vs. Opsgenie
Opsgenie is another popular choice with strong on-call features. However, Rootly's main advantage is its deep and flexible automation engine, which is designed to minimize manual work across the entire incident lifecycle [5]. This focus on automation and process improvement is why Rootly consistently ranks among the top incident management tools and is recognized as a leading alternative for cutting costs and recovery time [6].
Why SRE and DevOps Teams Choose Rootly
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps teams choose Rootly because it directly addresses their core goals. With major outages costing some organizations over $1 million, having the right tools is not a luxury—it's a necessity.
- Reduce MTTR and Toil: By automating repetitive tasks, Rootly lets engineers focus on diagnosing and fixing the problem. This directly lowers Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) and reduces the manual "toil" that leads to burnout.
- Foster a Blameless Culture: Automated retrospectives filled with data help teams focus on improving processes, not pointing fingers. This creates a blameless culture where everyone feels safe to learn from failures.
- Consolidate Your Toolchain: Rootly can replace several different tools—for on-call, status pages, and incident management—simplifying your workflows and often reducing overall costs. It's one of the essential SRE tools for building a modern and reliable system.
Conclusion: Move Beyond Alerting and Start Improving
The choice is clear: PagerDuty is an alerting tool, while Rootly is a complete incident improvement platform. For teams that want to mature their incident response, eliminate manual work, and turn every incident into a learning opportunity, Rootly is the superior choice.
By centralizing and automating the entire response process, Rootly helps teams save time, reduce stress, and improve the reliability of their systems [7].
Ready to see how Rootly can transform your incident management? Schedule a demo or start a free trial today to see the difference for yourself.