PagerDuty has long been a popular tool in the incident management space. As a pioneer, it helped define the category of on-call alerting. However, the demands of modern site reliability engineering (SRE) and DevOps have evolved significantly. Today, many teams are searching for the best PagerDuty alternatives because they face challenges with its pricing, complexity, and feature limitations.
This is where Rootly comes in. It’s a modern, comprehensive solution designed to address these pain points, serving as a superior alternative for your team's incident management needs.
The Challenges with PagerDuty: Why Teams Actively Seek Alternatives
While PagerDuty has been a dominant name, its position is being challenged as more users encounter several common frustrations with the platform. These issues often lead engineering teams to look for more flexible and cost-effective incident management software.
1. Confusing and Expensive Pricing
A significant reason teams look for PagerDuty alternatives is its pricing model. PagerDuty uses a complex tiered system where many essential features are locked behind more expensive plans or require costly add-ons [3]. This can lead to unexpected costs and make budgeting difficult.
Many industry guides that compare on-call platforms echo this sentiment, pointing out that PagerDuty's pricing model can be a major hurdle for teams that need a comprehensive solution without a bloated price tag [6]. As of 2026, this pricing structure feels out of step with market trends that favor transparency and value.
2. Operational Limits and Constraints
Growing teams can find themselves restricted by PagerDuty's operational limits. For example, the platform imposes constraints on workflows, including the number of actions that can run concurrently and the total number of tasks an instance can have [2]. These limits can impact performance and scalability as your organization's needs expand.
Furthermore, specific integrations can have their own limitations or become deprecated, forcing teams to invest time and resources into migrating to new solutions. For instance, the PagerDuty Sink Connector for Confluent Cloud is set to be deprecated by March 31, 2026, requiring users to find and implement an alternative before the deadline [5].
3. A Focus on Alerting, Not End-to-End Management
PagerDuty began as an alerting and on-call tool, and this legacy is still evident in its platform design. While new features have been added over time, they can feel disconnected rather than parts of a single, cohesive system.
Although it’s highly rated for IT alerting, modern DevOps incident management demands a more integrated approach that covers the entire incident lifecycle from start to finish [7]. Some user reviews also reflect a desire for greater flexibility, such as longer acknowledgment times for ongoing issues, which points to a need for more than just basic alerting [8].
Introducing Rootly: A Truly Unified Incident Management Platform
Rootly is the solution to the challenges presented by legacy tools like PagerDuty. It is a modern, end-to-end incident management platform built to help teams resolve incidents faster and more efficiently.
Rootly unifies the entire incident lifecycle, from initial detection and on-call alerting to response coordination, retrospectives, and analytics. Instead of juggling multiple tools, your team gets a single command center to manage everything. You can explore how Rootly handles the full incident lifecycle to see how this unified approach works in practice.
The key phases Rootly manages include:
- Detection & Alerting
- Incident Creation
- Triage & Assessment
- Response & Coordination
- Resolution
- Retrospectives
- Analytics & Insights
Compare On-Call Platforms: Rootly vs. PagerDuty
A direct comparison highlights why Rootly stands out among top incident management tools.
On-Call Scheduling and Alerting
- PagerDuty: Offers established and well-known capabilities in on-call scheduling and alert routing. This remains a core function of their platform.
- Rootly: Rootly On-Call acts as a more intelligent and integrated decision engine. It unifies all the essential components for reliable paging—schedules, escalation policies, notification rules, and live call routing—into one seamless system. The goal is simple: ensure every critical signal reaches the right person immediately with zero manual effort. You can get started with Rootly's on-call features to learn more.
Workflow Automation and Integration
- PagerDuty: Provides workflow automation, but as mentioned, it comes with potential system limits that can hold teams back [2].
- Rootly: Features a powerful and native codeless workflow engine. Rootly Workflows can automate hundreds of manual steps, such as creating Slack channels, inviting responders, updating status pages, and generating retrospectives. This automation is a core part of the platform, not an expensive add-on, creating a seamless experience during a stressful incident. This automation is fundamental to how you can manage incidents in Rootly.
Platform Scope and Value
- PagerDuty: Remains primarily an alerting tool that has expanded its feature set over time, resulting in a complex pricing model with many add-ons.
- Rootly: Was designed from the ground up as a complete platform. It offers a single solution for the entire incident lifecycle with transparent, predictable pricing. This makes Rootly one of the best PagerDuty alternatives for teams of any size who are looking for more value out-of-the-box.
What’s Included in the Modern SRE Tooling Stack?
Modern SRE and DevOps teams need more than just alerts. Relying on separate, isolated tools for on-call management, status pages, and retrospectives creates friction and slows down incident response.
A modern SRE tooling stack should integrate these key capabilities:
- Alerting & On-Call Management: Reliably routing alerts to the right person at the right time.
- Incident Response: A central command center, often within Slack or Microsoft Teams, for coordinating the response.
- Automation: Eliminating manual, repetitive tasks to reduce human error and cognitive load.
- Status Pages: Communicating incident status with both internal and external stakeholders.
- Retrospectives: A structured process for learning from every incident to improve system reliability.
- Analytics: Measuring key metrics like Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) and identifying incident trends.
Rootly brings all of these essential site reliability engineering tools together into one cohesive platform, eliminating the need to patch together multiple solutions.
Why Rootly is the Best On-Call Software for Teams
Teams are choosing Rootly over PagerDuty and other Opsgenie alternatives for several key reasons.
A Single, Natively Integrated Platform
Rootly isn’t just an on-call tool; it’s a full incident management software solution. The tight integration between on-call schedules, incident response workflows, status pages, and retrospectives eliminates context switching and streamlines the entire process, from alert to resolution and learning.
Powerful and Flexible Automation
Rootly's codeless automation engine empowers teams to standardize their incident response processes without writing a single line of code. This powerful feature reduces human error, decreases the cognitive load on responders during stressful situations, and significantly lowers MTTR.
Transparent Pricing and Unbeatable Value
Unlike PagerDuty’s complex tiers and hidden costs, Rootly offers straightforward pricing that provides more functionality and value for the investment. This makes it a more cost-effective and predictable choice for growing organizations looking for powerful SRE tools for incident tracking.
Conclusion: Go Beyond Alerting with a Better PagerDuty Alternative
While PagerDuty was a foundational tool for incident response, the landscape has changed. Its pricing complexity, operational limits, and alert-centric design no longer meet the needs of modern engineering teams.
Rootly offers a superior choice by providing a unified, automated, and cost-effective platform built for the entire incident lifecycle. It's time to move beyond simple alerting and embrace a comprehensive solution that helps your team build more reliable systems.
Ready to see the difference? Get started with Rootly to learn how you can streamline your incident management process today.