For any modern business, being online and available is non-negotiable. When services go down, the impact is immediate and severe. Unplanned downtime costs the world's largest companies an estimated $400 billion annually, a figure that continues to climb [1]. This makes selecting the right incident management software a critical business decision for Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps teams.
For years, the conversation about on-call alerting has been dominated by established players like PagerDuty and its popular alternative, Opsgenie. They are powerful tools for getting alerts to the right people. However, the nature of incidents has evolved. Today's challenges demand more than just a pager; they require a comprehensive command center. While PagerDuty and Opsgenie are good at what they do, Rootly offers a more complete, modern, and ultimately superior solution for managing the entire incident lifecycle from start to finish.
The Shift in Incident Management: From Alerting to Full-Lifecycle Response
Simply knowing that something is broken isn't enough. The real challenge is fixing it quickly and ensuring it doesn't break again. This requires a shift in mindset from basic alerting to a holistic response process.
The Real Cost of Failure
The financial sting of downtime is staggering. For many large companies, it can wipe out an average of 9% of their profits [2]. These costs go beyond immediate lost revenue. They include potential regulatory fines, damage to your brand's reputation, and a loss of shareholder value [3]. In sectors like manufacturing, the cost of a single hour of downtime can run into the millions [4].
What’s included in the modern SRE tooling stack?
Incident management used to be about forwarding an alert from a monitoring system to an engineer's phone. Modern DevOps incident management, however, is a much more involved process. The best SRE tools for incident tracking must support the full incident lifecycle, which includes:
- Detection: Identifying that a problem exists.
- Creation: Formally declaring an incident.
- Triage: Assessing the impact and assigning priority.
- Response: Assembling a team and coordinating mitigation efforts.
- Resolution: Fixing the issue and confirming the system is stable.
- Retrospectives: Analyzing the incident to understand the root cause.
- Analytics: Tracking metrics to drive continuous improvement.
Rootly is a platform built to manage this entire flow within a single, unified interface, unlike tools that only focus on one or two pieces of the puzzle.
Compare On-call Platforms: Rootly vs. Legacy Tools
While many tools can handle on-call alerting, a true incident management platform provides end-to-end support. Let's compare how Rootly stacks up against alert-focused PagerDuty alternatives.
Feature
Rootly
PagerDuty
Opsgenie
On-call & Alerting
Yes
Yes
Yes
Workflow Automation
Advanced, customizable
Basic, add-on
Basic
Collaboration (Slack/Teams)
Native, full-lifecycle
Basic, alert-focused
Basic, alert-focused
Retrospectives & Learning
Automated, data-driven
Manual, separate product
Manual, limited
Analytics & Reporting
Comprehensive
Basic
Basic
All-in-One Platform
Yes
No (Point Solution)
No (Point Solution)
PagerDuty & Opsgenie: The Alert-Centric Approach
PagerDuty deserves credit for pioneering the on-call management space. It remains one of the top incident management tools for reliable alerting. Opsgenie emerged as a strong PagerDuty alternative, especially for teams heavily invested in the Atlassian ecosystem (like Jira and Confluence).
However, both platforms are fundamentally alert-centric. Their primary job is to ensure an alert gets from point A to point B. This often leads to a fragmented workflow where responders jump between different tools: PagerDuty for the alert, Slack for communication, Jira for ticketing, and another tool for documentation. This complex toolchain, which often includes other ITSM tools like ServiceNow, can create confusion during a high-stakes outage [5].
Rootly: The Integrated Command Center
Rootly takes a fundamentally different approach. Instead of just forwarding an alert, Rootly provides an integrated command center to manage the entire incident response process.
- Automation: Rootly automates dozens of tedious manual steps. When an incident is declared, Rootly can automatically create a dedicated Slack channel, invite the right on-call engineers, start a Zoom bridge, update a status page, and create a ticket.
- Collaboration: Rootly's deep, native Slack and Microsoft Teams integrations allow teams to run the entire incident from the chat tool they use every day. There's no need to switch contexts to find information or execute commands.
- Learning: Rootly automatically builds a complete timeline of events and provides data-driven retrospectives. This helps teams conduct blameless post-incident reviews, understand what happened, and track action items to prevent recurrence.
- Unified Platform: Rootly combines on-call schedules, alerting, incident response workflows, and retrospectives into a single platform. This reduces tool sprawl, lowers costs, and provides a single source of truth for your entire reliability practice. It's why many teams consider Rootly when evaluating a full incident management platform showdown.
4 Key Reasons Rootly is the Best PagerDuty and Opsgenie Alternative
If you're looking for the best on-call software for teams, you need a solution that goes beyond basic alerting. Here’s why Rootly is the superior choice.
1. Unmatched Workflow Automation
During a high-stress incident, the last thing your engineers should be doing is manual "housekeeping." Legacy tools require responders to remember and manually perform dozens of steps. In contrast, Rootly’s powerful workflow engine automates these tasks. You can create custom workflows that trigger based on incident severity, service, or other properties, ensuring a consistent and efficient response every time. This frees up your team to focus on what matters: fixing the problem. Rootly’s automation workflows can handle everything from communication to running technical runbooks.
2. A Single, Unified Command Center
Every time an engineer has to switch between tools—from a PagerDuty alert to a Slack channel to a Jira ticket—they lose context and time. This "cognitive load" slows down response and increases the Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR). Rootly eliminates this by serving as a single source of truth. All incident information, communication, metrics, and actions are centralized in one place, giving everyone a clear and consistent view of the situation.
3. Built for Learning and Continuous Improvement
The goal of incident management isn't just to fix today's problem; it's to prevent tomorrow's. Traditional postmortems often fail because they are time-consuming to create and the resulting reports are rarely acted upon. Rootly transforms this process. Retrospectives are data-driven, automatically pulling in key metrics, timeline events, and chat logs. This facilitates a blameless analysis of what happened and why. Most importantly, Rootly allows you to create and track follow-up action items, ensuring that lessons learned translate into concrete system improvements.
4. Seamless Migration and Integration
Switching tools can be daunting, but Rootly makes it easy. Rootly integrates with your entire existing toolchain. For teams currently using Opsgenie, Rootly offers a direct integration that allows you to continue using your existing on-call schedules and alerting rules while managing the actual incident response in Rootly’s powerful platform. This provides a smooth, phased migration path. More importantly, with Atlassian announcing the end-of-life for Opsgenie, Rootly stands out as the ideal and seamless migration path for current Opsgenie users looking for a long-term, fully supported solution.
How Rootly Stacks Up Against Other SRE Tools
The market for incident management software is growing, with many tools available to help teams track and manage incidents effectively [6].
A Quick Look at the Broader Market
Beyond PagerDuty and Opsgenie, other tools like Better Stack, incident.io, and Splunk On-Call offer solutions in this space. The number of incident management software options continues to increase as businesses recognize the critical need for reliability [7]. While many of these tools are effective at alerting, Rootly differentiates itself by providing a mature, enterprise-grade platform built for the full SRE lifecycle. It's not just about tracking incidents; it's about systematically improving reliability.
Conclusion: Choose the Future of Incident Management
While tools like PagerDuty and Opsgenie are effective for alerting, modern DevOps and SRE teams require a far more comprehensive incident management platform. Alerting is just the first step. True resilience comes from a streamlined response, deep collaboration, and a commitment to continuous learning.
Rootly’s unmatched strengths in workflow automation, integrated collaboration, and data-driven learning make it the superior choice for any organization serious about reducing downtime and improving system reliability. Don't settle for legacy tools that only solve part of the problem.
Ready to see how a modern, integrated approach can transform your incident response? Book a demo or start a free trial of Rootly today.