The incident and emergency management market is experiencing rapid growth, highlighting an increasing industry-wide need for robust, scalable solutions. The global market was valued at approximately USD 141.79 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach USD 245.9 billion by 2034 [3]. This expansion is driven by stricter public policies and the need to manage everything from natural disasters to cyber-attacks, underscoring the demand for modern infrastructure [4].
As companies scale, their engineering and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams often find that legacy tools like PagerDuty struggle to keep up with the increasing complexity and volume of incidents. For growing organizations looking for the best PagerDuty alternatives, a modern solution is essential. Rootly is a comprehensive incident management platform built specifically for scalability, making it one of the top choices for DevOps and SRE teams focused on growth.
The Challenge with Legacy On-Call Tools at Scale
Traditional on-call software, including PagerDuty and popular Opsgenie alternatives, presents several challenges for expanding organizations. These pain points become more pronounced as teams and systems grow.
- Alert Fatigue: Basic alert routing often floods channels with noise, leading to non-critical notifications being ignored and desensitizing responders to important alerts.
- Fragmented Workflows: Many legacy tools only handle one part of the incident lifecycle, such as alerting. This forces teams to manually stitch together separate tools for communication (like Slack), documentation (like Confluence), and retrospectives, creating inefficient and error-prone workflows.
- Manual Toil: Responders spend valuable time on administrative tasks: declaring an incident, creating a Slack channel and video conference link, paging the right people, updating stakeholders, and compiling post-mortem reports. This manual work slows down resolution and distracts engineers from the core problem.
- Limited Scalability: Rigid configurations and per-user pricing models can become prohibitively expensive and inflexible as an organization adds more engineers and services, hindering growth rather than supporting it.
Why Rootly is the Best Incident Management Platform for Growth
Rootly addresses the limitations of older platforms by offering a unified, automated, and scalable system. It's an incident management software designed for the entire lifecycle, from the first alert to the final lessons learned.
A Unified End-to-End Incident Lifecycle
Unlike fragmented solutions, Rootly manages the entire incident lifecycle within a single, cohesive platform. This integrated approach ensures a smooth and consistent process that reduces cognitive load on responders. The key phases Rootly covers include:
- Detect
- Create
- Triage
- Respond
- Resolve
- Retrospective
- Analytics
This end-to-end management means teams can handle every aspect of an incident without context-switching between different tools, leading to faster, more organized responses.
Intelligent On-Call Schedules and Escalations
As one of the best on-call software for teams, Rootly provides a modern and flexible approach to on-call management. It ensures that critical alerts always reach the right person quickly without creating unnecessary noise for the rest of the team. Key components include:
- Schedules: Supports complex rotations with multiple team members, layered coverage (e.g., primary and secondary responders), and seamless time-zone awareness.
- Escalation Policies: Allows you to build multi-level escalation paths that can page individual users, entire teams, or other on-call schedules until an alert is acknowledged.
- Multi-Channel Notifications: Responders can be notified via their preferred channels, including phone calls, SMS, push notifications, Slack, and email.
Getting started with a more intelligent on-call and alerting system is straightforward with Rootly's intuitive design.
Powerful Workflow Automation to Eliminate Toil
Rootly's workflow automation engine is a key differentiator and one of the most powerful SRE tools for incident tracking and management. It allows teams to automate hundreds of manual steps, freeing responders to focus on what matters: resolving the incident.
Examples of automated tasks include:
- Automatically creating a dedicated Slack channel and an incident-specific video conference link.
- Paging the on-call engineer and notifying relevant stakeholders based on the incident's severity or type.
- Assigning key roles, such as an Incident Commander, to streamline coordination.
- Creating a retrospective document in Google Docs or Confluence, pre-populated with all relevant incident data, as soon as the issue is resolved.
This level of automation drastically reduces manual toil and enforces consistent processes, which is critical for scaling teams.
Compare On-Call Platforms: Rootly vs. The Alternatives
When evaluating DevOps incident management tools, a direct comparison can clarify which platform best fits your needs.
Feature and Philosophy Comparison
Here’s how Rootly stacks up against traditional PagerDuty alternatives and Opsgenie alternatives:
Feature
Rootly
PagerDuty
Opsgenie
Unified Platform
✅ All-in-one platform for alerting, response, retrospectives, and analytics.
Primarily alerting and on-call; other functions require integrations or separate products.
Primarily alerting and on-call; other functions require integrations.
Workflow Automation
✅ Powerful no-code, trigger-based engine for automating the entire lifecycle.
Basic automation for routing alerts and simple actions.
Automation focused on alert processing and routing.
Slack-Native Experience
✅ Deep integration lets teams manage incidents entirely within Slack.
Basic Slack integration for notifications and simple commands.
Basic Slack integration for notifications and simple commands.
Retrospectives & Learning
✅ Built-in, automated retrospective generation with rich data and analytics.
Requires separate processes or third-party tools for effective retrospectives.
Requires separate processes or third-party tools.
Pricing Model
Designed for scalability, encouraging widespread adoption without prohibitive per-user costs.
Traditional per-user pricing that can become expensive as teams grow.
Traditional per-user pricing that can become expensive.
Built for the Modern SRE Tooling Stack
The role of Site Reliability Engineering is evolving. Today's SREs are focused on building resilient systems and, crucially, learning from every incident to prevent future failures. Learning from incidents is a top priority for SRE teams [7]. Furthermore, The 2024 SRE Report highlights that SREs are increasingly focused on improving digital experiences, with 64% agreeing it's essential to monitor endpoints outside their direct control [8].
This shift means a modern SRE tooling stack must do more than just send alerts. It needs to support this learning cycle by deeply integrating automation and data analysis into the incident response process. Rootly is built on this principle, providing teams with the tools they need to not only respond faster but also learn more effectively. By automating data collection and retrospective generation, Rootly ensures that valuable lessons aren't lost, helping teams build more reliable systems over time [6].
Conclusion: Stop Paging, Start Scaling with Rootly
For teams planning to scale, clinging to legacy tools that only solve part of the problem is no longer a viable strategy. As one of the best PagerDuty alternatives, Rootly offers a clear path forward. Its unified platform, powerful automation, and modern design are built to reduce manual work, streamline collaboration, and help teams learn and improve continuously.
By choosing Rootly, organizations are investing in a more resilient, efficient, and scalable approach to DevOps incident management. Instead of just managing pages, your team can focus on building a more reliable future.
Ready to see how Rootly can transform your incident management process? Learn more about our on-call capabilities and start building a more scalable response today.