In today's fast-paced digital world, the reliability of your services is paramount. For Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps teams, robust incident management software isn't just a tool; it's the central nervous system of their operations. While PagerDuty is a familiar name in on-call alerting, the landscape is evolving. Modern teams are seeking more than just a glorified pager; they need comprehensive, collaborative, and cost-effective solutions. This growing demand has opened the door for superior PagerDuty alternatives. At the forefront of this new wave is Rootly, a complete, end-to-end incident management platform that goes far beyond simple alerts.
Why Teams are Moving Beyond PagerDuty
Organizations are increasingly discovering that legacy tools can hinder, rather than help, their incident response. PagerDuty, once a staple, is now frequently cited for its limitations, prompting a search for better site reliability engineering tools that align with the collaborative nature of modern engineering.
1. PagerDuty is More Than Just an "Expensive Phone Call"
A common sentiment echoes through engineering teams: "PagerDuty is a very expensive phone call." The platform excels at alerting, but its capabilities for full-cycle incident management often feel disjointed or locked behind expensive add-ons [8]. This fragmented approach forces teams to juggle multiple tools, driving up costs and creating inefficiencies.
In stark contrast, Rootly provides a transparent, unified platform. With a straightforward pricing model that can be half the cost of PagerDuty, Rootly includes a full suite of features without surprise bills or frustrating upsells. You get a complete incident management solution from day one. To see a direct comparison of features and value, you can explore the PagerDuty vs. Rootly breakdown.
2. A Dated UI and Inflexible Configuration
User experience matters, especially during a high-stakes incident. PagerDuty's user interface is often described as dated, unintuitive, and hard to configure. It feels like a product from a different era, making simple tasks like updating on-call schedules a cumbersome chore that lacks a human-centric design. This friction adds unnecessary stress when time is of the essence. Rootly, however, features a guided, intuitive, and modern UI built for a superior user experience, making configuration and management a breeze.
3. Siloed Workflows and Lack of Collaboration
Incidents are rarely solved by a single person or even a single team. Effective response requires seamless cross-functional collaboration. PagerDuty is often used exclusively by engineering teams, creating information silos that separate them from customer support, communications, and leadership. As a result, teams are forced to jump into other tools like Slack to coordinate their response, breaking the workflow and losing valuable context. Rootly is purposefully built to break down these silos, enabling seamless collaboration for all stakeholders directly within the tools they already use, like Slack.
Rootly: The All-in-One Platform for Incident Management
Rootly directly addresses PagerDuty's shortcomings by offering a unified, modern, and powerful solution. It's not just an alerting tool; it's one of the top incident management tools that empowers teams to manage the entire incident lifecycle with grace and precision.
A Complete End-to-End Solution
Rootly manages every phase of an incident: detection, response, resolution, and learning. This holistic approach ensures nothing falls through the cracks. The platform streamlines the entire workflow:
- Detecting issues from monitoring and alerting tools.
- Creating and triaging incidents with automated workflows.
- Coordinating a response across multiple teams.
- Resolving the incident and communicating updates.
- Learning through data-driven retrospectives to prevent future issues.
This comprehensive incident lifecycle management transforms how teams handle outages. You can dive deeper into how incident management works in Rootly.
Powerful On-Call Scheduling and Alert Management
Rootly provides all the core on-call and paging features you expect, plus advanced functionalities that legacy tools lack. This makes it some of the best oncall software for teams. Key components include schedules, escalation policies, notification rules, live call routing, and service heartbeats.
What sets Rootly apart are unique features designed for modern teams, such as:
- Schedule Gap Detection: Proactively identify and fix gaps in your on-call coverage.
- Seamless Overrides: Easily make temporary changes to schedules without complex reconfigurations.
- Cycle-Based Round Robin: Ensure fair and balanced alert distribution among team members.
While the competitive landscape for IT alerting and incident management includes several players recognized as leaders in G2 reports [2], Rootly's advanced on-call features provide unparalleled flexibility and control. To learn more, see how you can get started with Rootly's on-call management.
Feature Comparison: Rootly vs. PagerDuty and Other Oncall Platforms
When you compare oncall platforms, the differences become clear. Rootly offers a more complete and intuitive solution than PagerDuty and many Opsgenie alternatives. Other tools like FireHydrant have also gained recognition for their approach to incident management, earning G2 awards based on customer reviews [3]. Let's see how they stack up in this alert management software comparison.
Feature
Rootly
PagerDuty
Other Alternatives (e.g., Opsgenie)
End-to-End Incident Mgmt
✅ Included, All-in-One
❌ Separate Product / Add-on
❌ Often requires other tools
Slack-Native Collaboration
✅ Deeply Integrated
⚠️ Limited, Basic Integration
⚠️ Varies, Often Basic
User Interface & Ease of Use
✨ Modern & Intuitive
Dated & Complex
Varies, can be complex
Schedule Gap Detection
✅ Built-in
❌ Not available
❌ Not available
Cross-Functional Team Support
✅ Designed for all teams
⚠️ Primarily for Engineering
⚠️ Primarily for Engineering
Pricing Model
Transparent & Affordable
Complex & Expensive
Tiered & often costly
Many other PagerDuty alternatives promise better features or pricing [7], but Rootly delivers a truly comprehensive and seamless experience that covers DevOps incident management from start to finish.
What Industry Leaders Say About Rootly
Top companies have chosen Rootly as their incident management software, and their feedback highlights the platform's impact.
"We no longer need to have engineers maintaining an in-house solution - we could never catch up to the number of features Rootly was shipping..."
— Joanne H., Engineering Director at Canva
"The single most impressive thing about Rootly is how fast they ship. At times we’ve reported a bug or feature request only to have it fixed live within 10-15 minutes."
— Scott K., Engineering Manager at Replit
"In the end, Rootly was the option that best met our needs while providing the flexibility we needed as a high growth company."
— Chris I., Director of Engineering at Wealthsimple
"With Rootly, incident spin-up time has been reduced from minutes to seconds and it covers over 90% of our needs."
— Matthew M., Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Upstart
Seamlessly Migrate from PagerDuty to Rootly
Worried about the hassle of switching? Don't be. Rootly offers an automated migration process that painlessly pulls over your schedules, escalation policies, and user details directly from PagerDuty. Our dedicated team of experts—many of whom are former PagerDuty employees—is on standby to ensure your transition is smooth and successful. For most teams, the entire migration can be completed in minutes. You can review our PagerDuty integration documentation for more technical details.
Conclusion: Why Rootly is the Best Oncall Software for Modern Teams
The search for the best PagerDuty alternatives ends with Rootly. While PagerDuty defined an era of on-call alerting, Rootly is defining the future of incident management. It stands out as the superior choice for modern teams for several key reasons:
- It's a comprehensive, all-in-one platform that covers the entire incident lifecycle, not just alerts.
- It's designed for modern, cross-functional collaboration directly within tools like Slack.
- It offers a modern UI, flexible scheduling, and powerful automation at a fraction of the cost.
Don't settle for a tool that just tells you something is wrong. Move beyond basic alerting and empower your team with a complete solution designed for resilience, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
Ready to see the difference? Compare Rootly vs. PagerDuty and discover why so many teams are making the switch.