Incident management is the process teams use to respond to and resolve technical outages. For site reliability engineering (SRE) and DevOps teams, having a strong incident management process is essential for keeping software and services reliable. For years, PagerDuty has been a popular tool for on-call alerting. But as technology evolves, simply getting an alert isn't enough. Teams are now looking for more complete solutions.
Many organizations are exploring PagerDuty alternatives because of concerns like high costs and a need for more features than basic alerting provides [8]. Rootly is a leading, modern alternative that offers a complete, end-to-end platform for incident management software.
What is PagerDuty?
PagerDuty's main job is on-call scheduling and alerting. It connects to monitoring systems and notifies the right engineer when a problem is detected. It plays an important role in making sure critical issues get attention quickly.
While PagerDuty is a strong player in the alerting space, its features are primarily focused on the very beginning of an incident. The market for incident management has grown significantly, and there are now many powerful alternatives available that offer a more complete solution [6].
Why Teams Are Looking for PagerDuty Alternatives
While PagerDuty is good at alerting, modern incident response requires a more integrated approach. Several common pain points lead teams to search for PagerDuty alternatives.
High Costs and Complex Pricing Tiers
PagerDuty's pricing is often based on the number of users, which can get expensive as teams grow. Furthermore, many essential features are only available in higher-priced plans, which can significantly increase the total cost for organizations needing a full set of capabilities.
A Fragmented Incident Management Process
Using PagerDuty for alerts often means teams have to piece together other tools to manage the rest of the incident. For example, an engineer might get an alert from PagerDuty, communicate with the team in Slack, track tasks in Jira, and write a post-incident report in a separate document. This constant switching between tools is inefficient and can lead to lost information during a stressful event. A unified set of SRE tools for incident tracking is a much better approach.
Limited Scope Beyond Alerting
In an alert management software comparison, PagerDuty's strength is clearly alerting. However, it provides limited support for other critical phases of the incident lifecycle. Important tasks like running automated workflows, conducting collaborative post-incident reviews (retrospectives), and analyzing incident data require other tools or significant manual effort.
Introducing Rootly: The All-in-One Incident Management Platform
Rootly is a comprehensive solution designed to manage the entire incident lifecycle from a single platform. It goes beyond simple alerting by integrating communication, automation, and learning into one cohesive system. This allows teams to streamline every step, from the moment an issue is detected to the final analysis and follow-up. You can find a complete overview of how Rootly handles incidents from start to finish.
Rootly helps teams manage every stage of an incident:
- Detection & Alerting
- Triage & Assessment
- Response & Coordination
- Resolution
- Retrospectives
- Analytics & Insights
Compare Oncall Platforms: Rootly vs. PagerDuty
When you compare oncall platforms, the advantages of a holistic solution like Rootly become clear, showing why it’s one of the best PagerDuty alternatives.
Feature
PagerDuty
Rootly
Primary Focus
Alerting & On-Call Scheduling
End-to-End Incident Management
Automation
Basic notification rules
Powerful no-code workflow engine for hundreds of tasks
Retrospectives
Limited; requires third-party tools
Integrated, collaborative, and automatically populated with data
Core Process
Manual coordination across many tools
Unified platform experience, often managed directly within Slack
Pricing Model
Per-user model that can become costly
Cost-effective and predictable
Full Lifecycle Management vs. Alert-Focused Response
PagerDuty: Its main purpose is to get the right person's attention when an alert goes off. After the notification, the user is largely on their own.
Rootly: Manages the entire process. Rootly is a key part of the modern SRE toolkit because it automates repetitive tasks, centralizes communication, and streamlines retrospectives so teams can learn from every incident.
Powerful Automation vs. Manual Coordination
PagerDuty: Offers basic automation for routing notifications and escalating alerts.
Rootly: Features a powerful, no-code workflow engine that automates hundreds of manual steps. This can include creating Slack channels, inviting responders, assigning roles, updating status pages, and creating Jira tickets, freeing up engineers to focus on fixing the problem.
Integrated Retrospectives and Learning
PagerDuty: Retrospective capabilities are minimal. Teams usually need to use another tool and manually gather incident data and timelines.
Rootly: Includes built-in, collaborative retrospectives that automatically pull in incident data, from chat logs to timeline events. This makes it easy to track action items and use analytics to identify trends and prevent future incidents.
Cost-Effective and Predictable Pricing
PagerDuty: Its per-user pricing can be unpredictable and become very expensive as your team scales.
Rootly: Offers a more transparent and often more cost-effective pricing model that includes a broader range of features without requiring expensive upgrades.
Can Rootly Replace PagerDuty Completely?
Yes. With the launch of Rootly On-Call, Rootly can now serve as a full replacement for PagerDuty. It handles on-call scheduling, escalations, and alerting within the same unified platform where you manage the rest of your incident response.
For teams that prefer to transition slowly, Rootly also offers a seamless integration with PagerDuty. This allows you to continue using PagerDuty for alerts while leveraging Rootly's powerful platform to orchestrate the rest of the incident response process.
What Makes Rootly One of the Top Incident Management Tools?
Rootly's all-in-one approach and modern features make it a top choice for DevOps incident management. The best incident management software consolidates core functions into a single platform to make workflows smoother, which is exactly what Rootly does [3].
- Unified Platform: Rootly reduces the number of tools your team needs to juggle, which cuts down on confusion and inefficiency.
- Deep Slack Integration: Teams can manage incidents from start to finish without ever leaving Slack, their main communication tool.
- Data-Driven Improvement: The platform offers powerful analytics on key metrics like Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) and incident frequency, helping teams understand their performance and improve over time.
- Flexibility: Rootly is highly customizable and integrates with a wide range of tools. It can serve as a complete PagerDuty replacement or work together with it.
Conclusion: The Future of Incident Management is Integrated
In today's world of complex systems, traditional tools that only focus on alerting are no longer enough. The future of incident management is integrated, automated, and driven by data. Modern IT teams require solutions that bring all aspects of incident response together into one cohesive platform [4].
Rootly offers this holistic and efficient approach by unifying the entire incident lifecycle. It's more than just one of the best oncall software for teams; it’s a complete site reliability engineering tool designed to improve collaboration, automate manual work, and drive continuous improvement.
Ready to move beyond basic alerting? Book a demo with Rootly and discover a better way to manage incidents.