For modern Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps teams, effective on-call management and incident response are non-negotiable. The high cost of downtime makes efficient tooling a critical business need. For years, PagerDuty has been a well-known tool for on-call alerting, but the demands of DevOps incident management have evolved.
Today's teams need more than just a notification; they need a comprehensive platform to manage the entire incident lifecycle. This is where Rootly stands out as a modern incident management software and one of the best PagerDuty alternatives. This article compares Rootly and PagerDuty to help you determine the best fit for your team's incident management needs.
What is PagerDuty? A Look at the Incumbent
PagerDuty's primary function is to act as an on-call and alerting platform. It's designed to notify the right people when issues arise, featuring robust on-call scheduling, escalation policies, and a wide array of integrations.
As a legacy tool in the space, it has gained wide adoption and is known for its reliability in sending alerts. However, its focus is primarily on the "alerting" part of an incident. This leaves gaps in supporting the collaborative response, resolution, and learning processes that are essential for modern teams.
What is Rootly? The Modern, All-in-One Solution
Rootly is a comprehensive incident management platform built to manage the entire incident lifecycle from start to finish. It goes beyond simple alerting to automate and streamline detection, response, communication, and learning. You can explore a detailed overview of the Rootly incident lifecycle to see how it covers every stage.
Rootly is a collaboration-first platform that allows users to select on-call services as standalone options, providing modular flexibility [1]. Key features that make Rootly one of the top incident management tools include:
- Native on-call scheduling and escalations
- A powerful, no-code workflow automation engine
- A deep, command-center-like Slack integration
- Automated retrospectives and rich analytics
Unlike tools that only handle one piece of the puzzle, Rootly can serve as a complete replacement for PagerDuty, unifying your entire response process into a single platform.
Rootly vs. PagerDuty: Head-to-Head Feature Comparison
Let's directly compare oncall platforms across the key criteria for incident management software.
Feature
PagerDuty
Rootly
Primary Focus
Alerting & On-Call Notifications
End-to-End Incident Management
Automation
Basic alert routing
Advanced, no-code workflows for the full lifecycle
Collaboration
Basic Slack integration; UI-switching often needed
Deep, native Slack integration; run incidents from chat
Retrospectives
Manual post-mortem process
Automated, data-rich retrospectives
All-in-One
No, focuses on on-call and alerting
Yes, includes on-call, response, status pages, and more
On-Call Management and Alerting
PagerDuty:
This is PagerDuty's core strength. It excels at on-call scheduling, overrides, and multi-channel notifications (SMS, phone, push). It also provides advanced features for alert noise reduction.
Rootly:
Rootly offers its own native on-call solution, complete with schedules, escalation policies, and overrides. For teams not ready to make a complete switch, Rootly also provides flexibility. You can integrate Rootly with an existing PagerDuty setup, combining PagerDuty's reliable alerting with Rootly's advanced incident response capabilities.
Automation and Incident Workflows
PagerDuty:
Automation features in PagerDuty are primarily focused on routing alerts and executing basic response plays.
Rootly:
Rootly’s powerful workflow engine automates dozens of manual tasks. It can automatically create dedicated Slack channels, invite responders, assign roles, update status pages, and create tickets in Jira. This level of automation dramatically reduces Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) and the cognitive load on responders.
Collaboration and Communication
PagerDuty:
PagerDuty has a Slack integration, but many actions require users to switch back to the PagerDuty UI, disrupting the response flow and adding friction.
Rootly:
Rootly’s deep, native Slack integration is a core design principle. It allows teams to run the entire incident from within Slack. Using simple commands like /incident, teams can manage tasks, update stakeholders, and pull reports without ever leaving their chat interface.
Retrospectives and Continuous Improvement
PagerDuty:
PagerDuty offers basic post-mortem functionality, but it is often a manual and time-consuming process to gather all the required context.
Rootly:
Rootly automatically captures every event in a detailed timeline and uses this data to generate rich, pre-populated retrospectives. With customizable templates and action item tracking, Rootly ensures continuous learning. This focus on improvement is why it's considered a top choice in the incident management platform showdown.
Why Teams Are Choosing Rootly as a PagerDuty Alternative
SRE and DevOps teams are increasingly looking for PagerDuty alternatives that provide more than just alerts. Here’s why many choose Rootly as their preferred SRE tool for incident tracking.
A Single Pane of Glass for Incidents
A modern SRE tooling stack can quickly become cluttered and expensive. Rootly acts as a unifying platform, consolidating alerting, on-call management, incident response, status pages, and retrospectives into one tool. This simplifies workflows, reduces subscription costs, and provides a single source of truth for all incident data. With a user score of 9.4 out of 10, Rootly is highly rated for its ability to automate incident response directly within Slack [2].
Drastic Reduction in Toil and MTTR
PagerDuty wakes you up, but Rootly helps you solve the problem faster. Rootly’s automation eliminates the manual, repetitive tasks (toil) that slow down incident response. For example, you can automatically create a Zoom bridge, pull logs from Datadog, or page the database team when a specific service is impacted. Other platforms also highlight that flexible automation and noise reduction are key differentiators from PagerDuty [3].
Fostering a Blameless, Learning-Oriented Culture
The work isn't finished when the incident is resolved. Rootly's automated retrospectives make it easy to analyze what happened without assigning blame. The platform's analytics help teams track metrics like MTTR and incident frequency, identify patterns, and proactively improve system reliability over time.
The Best PagerDuty Alternatives: Where Does Rootly Stand?
The market for incident management software includes several other Opsgenie alternatives and PagerDuty alternatives.
- Opsgenie: Strong in alerting and on-call, similar to PagerDuty.
- incident.io: Also Slack-native, with a strong focus on collaboration.
- Better Stack: Offers an integrated solution with logging and monitoring.
While there are many options to consider when looking for SRE tools [4], Rootly is unique in providing a mature, end-to-end platform. It can fully replace PagerDuty while adding significant value across the entire incident lifecycle, from initial alert to final retrospective.
Conclusion: Upgrade Your On-Call with a True Incident Management Platform
PagerDuty is an effective alerting tool, but modern on-call teams need more. They require a comprehensive platform to automate response, centralize tooling, and build a robust culture of learning.
Rootly is the superior choice for these teams. It can serve as a wholesale replacement for PagerDuty, offering more functionality and value by upgrading your on-call process from a simple notification system to a true incident management command center.
Ready to see the difference for yourself? Book a demo or start a free trial to see how Rootly can transform your incident response.