PagerDuty is a well-known, established player in the incident management and on-call alerting space. However, as technology and team workflows evolve, many organizations are exploring PagerDuty alternatives that offer more modern features. Choosing the right incident management platform is critical to protecting revenue and customer trust, especially when the average cost of downtime can exceed $300,000 per hour [1].
This article will compare the top PagerDuty competitors, focusing on alert management, on-call software features, and explaining why Rootly is a leading choice for modern engineering teams.
What is PagerDuty?
PagerDuty is a platform for real-time incident response. Its core functionalities include reliable alerting, on-call scheduling, and escalations. As a market pioneer, its strengths lie in enterprise reliability and extensive integrations. However, some users find its interface cumbersome and its pricing complex, which has led teams to seek more modern alternatives [2].
Why Teams Are Looking for PagerDuty Alternatives
Engineering teams are searching for the best PagerDuty alternatives for several common reasons that highlight a shift in what modern organizations need from an incident management tool.
- High Cost and Complex Pricing: PagerDuty's pricing can be high, especially for larger teams needing advanced features. This can make it less accessible for organizations looking to scale efficiently [3].
- Focus on Alerting Over Lifecycle Management: PagerDuty’s strength is in alerting and on-call notifications. Modern teams, however, require tools that manage the entire incident lifecycle—from detection and coordination to resolution and learning.
- Need for Deeper Automation: While PagerDuty has automation, competitors often offer more intuitive and powerful workflow automation. This is key to reducing manual work like creating incident channels, notifying stakeholders, and pulling in the right responders.
- Desire for Integrated Collaboration: Teams want tools that are deeply embedded in their primary communication channels, like Slack, to streamline response without constantly switching between different applications.
A Comparison of the Top PagerDuty Competitors
1. Rootly: The Automation-First, Full-Lifecycle Platform
Rootly is a leading PagerDuty alternative designed for modern engineering and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams who want to build more reliable systems.
- End-to-End Incident Management: Rootly manages the complete incident lifecycle, not just alerting. It guides teams through every phase, including detection, response, resolution, and learning, for a more consistent and efficient process.
- Powerful Workflow Automation: Rootly’s core strength is its ability to automate dozens of repetitive tasks. Workflows can automatically create Slack channels, page on-call responders, invite stakeholders, assign roles, and generate retrospectives, which significantly reduces manual effort.
- Deep Collaboration Integrations: Rootly provides a native experience within Slack, allowing teams to manage incidents entirely within the communication hub where they already work.
- Actionable Analytics and Retrospectives: The platform places a strong emphasis on learning from incidents. It offers customizable retrospective templates and provides insightful analytics on key metrics like Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR), helping teams identify patterns and prevent future failures.
Best for: Teams wanting to mature their reliability practices with a focus on automation and continuous improvement.
2. Opsgenie: The Atlassian-Integrated Alternative
As part of the Atlassian ecosystem, Opsgenie is a strong PagerDuty and Opsgenie alternative, particularly for teams already using Atlassian tools.
- Strengths: Opsgenie is known for its robust on-call management, user-friendly scheduling, and deep integration with Jira and other Atlassian products [4]. This makes it a natural choice for organizations that rely on Atlassian for project management.
- Weaknesses: While excellent for on-call management, it may not have the advanced automation or full-lifecycle features of newer platforms, and many essential features require higher-tier plans [5].
Best for: Organizations heavily invested in the Atlassian suite that need a solid on-call and alerting solution.
3. incident.io: The Slack-Native Competitor
incident.io is an incident management tool built directly within Slack, designed to make incident response feel like a natural part of a team's daily communication.
- Strengths: Its greatest advantage is its seamless Slack integration. Declaring incidents, coordinating response, and communicating updates can all be done without leaving Slack, which simplifies the process for teams who live in that environment.
- Weaknesses: Its deep reliance on Slack might be a limitation for organizations that use multiple communication tools or require complex, cross-platform automation.
Best for: Slack-centric teams looking for a simple and streamlined way to standardize incident response.
4. Splunk On-Call (formerly VictorOps): The Observability-Driven Option
Splunk On-Call is a PagerDuty alternative that's part of the broader Splunk observability platform.
- Strengths: The tool focuses on collaboration with real-time alerting and an AI-driven engine for event routing and noise reduction [6].
- Weaknesses: The tool is most powerful when used within the Splunk ecosystem. This might not be ideal for teams seeking a best-of-breed, standalone incident management solution that can integrate with various tools [7].
Best for: Teams already using Splunk for logging and monitoring who want an integrated on-call solution.
Feature Comparison: Top On-Call Platforms
This table offers a high-level alert management software comparison to help you see how these tools stack up.
Feature
Rootly
PagerDuty
Opsgenie
incident.io
End-to-End Lifecycle Management
✅ Comprehensive
❌ Alert-focused
❌ Alert-focused
❌ Limited
Workflow Automation
✅ Advanced & Codeless
✅ Basic to Advanced
✅ Basic
✅ Basic
Slack Integration
✅ Native & Bi-directional
✅ Basic
✅ Basic
✅ Native & Core
Retrospectives & Analytics
✅ Advanced
✅ Basic to Advanced
✅ Basic
✅ Basic
On-Call Scheduling
✅ Comprehensive
✅ Comprehensive
✅ Comprehensive
✅ Basic
- For a more detailed breakdown, check out a full comparison of top incident management tools.
How to Choose the Best On-Call Software for Your Team
When you compare on-call platforms, use this checklist to see which solution is the best fit for your team.
- Automation and Workflows: Does the tool automate manual tasks like setting up channels, paging responders, and updating stakeholders?
- Integrations: How well does it connect with your existing stack, such as monitoring, observability, ticketing, and chat tools?
- Collaboration and Communication: Does it centralize communication and make it easy for responders and stakeholders to stay informed?
- Post-Incident Learning: Does the platform offer robust features for creating retrospectives (postmortems) and tracking analytics to prevent future incidents?
- Scalability and Cost: Will the platform support your team as it grows, and does its pricing model align with your budget?
Conclusion: Why Rootly Stands Out Among PagerDuty Alternatives
While PagerDuty laid the foundation for incident response, the needs of modern teams have evolved beyond basic alerting. Today’s top incident management tools must do more than just wake someone up—they need to automate processes, streamline collaboration, and drive continuous improvement.
Rootly is the superior choice for engineering teams focused on improving reliability through automation, collaboration, and learning. It addresses the entire incident lifecycle, not just a small part of it, making it one of the top incident management tools available. By empowering engineers to not only resolve incidents faster but also learn from them, Rootly helps organizations build more resilient systems.
Ready to see how Rootly can transform your incident management? Book a demo to get started.