Why Rootly · The switching guide
Why teams switch to Rootly
AI-native on-call, incident response, AI SRE, retrospectives, and status pages, for your engineers and the agents they work with.
Why teams switch to Rootly
On this page
Someone is on call tonight. When they are paged at 3 a.m., Rootly's AI is already investigating the alerts; it knows who owns the service, what changed, how dependencies are affected, and how similar failures were fixed previously, and it shows the evidence for every claim it makes. Your engineers make the calls to mitigate and resolve the incident. Every incident Rootly runs, from the initial page to the retrospective, makes the next one less likely.
Here is what changed for teams who switched, in their own case studies.
- 89%fewer after-hours pages, PandaDoc
- 40%reduction in time to resolve, KnowBe4
- 86%reduction in repeat incidents, Prolific
- 68%lower on-call tooling costs, Poll Everywhere
Why teams switch
Most teams outgrow their incident tool rather than choose to leave it. Here are three teams, each on a different tool, explaining what made them switch.
“incident.io got us started, but the moment I tried to mature us past survival mode, it became a ceiling.”
“I regret not making the decision to switch earlier, instead of waiting until Opsgenie came to an end.”
“Before Rootly, incident response was all effort and no system. Threads scattered across Slack, ownership was implicit, and we spent too much time coordinating instead of resolving.”
The reasons repeat: workarounds for anything the tool did not anticipate, basic features moved behind the next pricing tier, AI you have to go and ask rather than AI that works the incident with you, and coordination still happening outside the tool that paged you. Here is what changed when these teams moved.
Teams who switched to Rootly, and one result from each case study.
| Team | Replaced | Result |
|---|---|---|
| PandaDoc | Opsgenie (end of life April 2027) | 64% lower MTTR |
| KnowBe4 | PagerDuty | 40% reduction in time to resolve |
| Prolific | incident.io | 64% reduction in time to resolve |
| Poll Everywhere | PagerDuty | 60% fewer unnecessary wake-ups / secondary rollovers. |
| Auror | Jeli, PagerDuty, and Freshstatus | 84% reduction in time to close |
| Motive | Opsgenie (end of life April 2027) | 15–60+ minutes reduced to seconds for incident setup |
| UNiDAYS | PagerDuty | Hours → minutes to produce an incident timeline |
| Capa | incident.io | < 1 day to production ready |
| Reactiv | incident.io | 2 days to fully live |
| Caribou | Five separate tools | 200+ engineering hours saved |
“I've deployed Rootly at two companies now, because I know what great incident management looks like and this is it.”
Who runs Rootly
From startups of thirty people to NVIDIA, DoorDash, and Canva, the same platform runs incidents at companies whose customers notice every minute of downtime.
Read every customer story, with the numbers each team measured themselves.
AI that does the work and shows it
Everyone can call the same models. What separates a purpose-built platform is the harness and tools built around several models, by the people who understand incident management and reliability the best. Rootly AI leverages a sophisticated harness, knowledge graph, memory, and model called Atlas. Atlas enables Rootly AI to understand production the way your most experienced engineers do, and it remembers what every incident teaches so the next one is less likely to occur. That's the real reliability metric to track.
It starts before you do
- It knows your production. Your services, what depends on what, who owns it, and what just changed, drawn from the tools you already run.
- It remembers what you learn. Each investigation leaves behind what helped, so the next responder starts where the last one finished. Your team can edit or remove anything it remembers, and a memory alone is never offered as proof.
- It picks up the alert. Investigation rules let AI SRE start the moment an alert fires, so the first responder opens a working theory, not a blank page. Agents run the bridge, draft every update, collect all the context, proactively nudge, and write the retrospective.
It shows how it knows
- Agents that check its work. Before it gives an answer, separate agents test it: did the change happen before the failure, does it explain the failure, or is it a coincidence?
- Ruled out, with reasons. Every possible cause it rejected stays on the page with the reason, and every claim links to the deploy, log line, or past incident it is based on.
- Honest confidence. Fixed rules score the evidence; the AI model does not grade itself. When the evidence is not strong enough, it says so instead of guessing.
It works inside the lines you set
- Asks before it acts on severity, status pages, pull requests, and resolution.
- Acts with your permissions. It can do only what the person who approved the action can do, and the audit log names them. Connectors to your tools are read-only, and an investigation never delays a page.
- Takes direction in plain language. Instructions tell AI and every agent what to check first; you can choose which alerts it investigates on its own, and how to tailor its output for your organization.
“The AI is what surprised me the most. I tell it in plain language what I want done or ask it for information to help resolve the issue faster. That is the ease of use and the efficiency we have gained from Rootly.”
It can be wrong, most often when the cause lives in a system with no connector, and it will tell you when it does not know. See the agents at work, or read how Rootly AI knows what it knows.
Built for your AI agents too
Your coding agents write and merge code all day without knowing your incident history. They can't tell that the service they're refactoring caused an outage in March. Rootly has that history, and its MCP server lets those agents look it up before they make the change.
- Rootly inside your AI. An open-source MCP server lets Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, Gemini CLI, Claude Desktop, or any AI that speaks MCP query incidents, on-call, past fixes, and just about anything else within Rootly. Plugins for Claude Code and Cursor add commands like
/rootly:respondand/rootly:oncall. - Your tools inside Rootly. Connect your own MCP server and choose exactly which of its tools Rootly AI can call.
- Built for automation. A CLI, a Terraform provider, and a REST API, so your configuration can live in code.
“The Rootly MCP server bridges the gap between what Rootly knows about an incident and the context our own AI already has. Incidents move to completion faster; it is simply less work because it goes and does it for you.”
One platform for the whole incident
Most teams arrive with a pager, a Slack bot, a status page tool, people investigating manually, and a retrospective template in a doc. Rootly replaces all four tools and helps your people by running the investigation; every part works from the same incident record, which is also what the AI reads.
- On-Call. Schedules, escalations, shadow rotations, coverage requests, and on-call pay, paging teams, users, and Slack channels directly. 99.99% uptime with redundant telephony.
- Incident Response. Declare, coordinate, and resolve in Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Google Chat, with the channel, roles, and responders set up for you. Status pages and the AI agents come with it.
- AI SRE. Investigates across your code, telemetry, and past incidents, and hands you a probable root cause with the evidence under it.
- Retrospectives. Drafted from all the context: the timeline, the call transcript, and the Slack channel, with action items tracked to closed.
- Catalog and Insights. Ownership and dependencies attached to every incident, and the metrics that show what to fix next.
- Mobile. The same agent on iOS and Android, so a page at dinner does not need a laptop.
“We were committed to running incidents in Slack. Rootly gave us the structure and automation we were missing, without forcing responders into another tool when time mattered most.”
What users say on G2
Two things come up again and again in Rootly's reviews: engineers adopt it without training, and the AI actually helps. Six lines from those reviews, each with its star rating and a link to the review it came from.
“The UI is intuitive enough that engineers adopt it without much training, which isn't always true of similar tools.”
“Before Rootly, our incident response was scattered across ad-hoc Slack threads, manual paging, and someone frantically trying to reconstruct a timeline after the fact for the postmortem.”
“Most importantly, Rootly treats me the same way they would a Fortune 500.”
“On the AI side, Rootly’s AI stands out as one of the best incident management options currently available on the market.”
“I really like the way Rootly has implemented AI into the workflow because it's very intuitive. Rootly is super easy to use, and even before the new AI implementations, which are awesome, it was easy to jump in.”
“Rootly's MCP feature is great as it helps us analyze the data effectively. Additionally, the initial setup was pretty straightforward; we were live within two weeks.”
Rootly's G2 awards from the past year, newest first:
Fall 2026
How Rootly compares
Each comparison sticks to claims you can verify, and links to the full comparison with its sources.
Rootly vs. PagerDuty
PagerDuty pages a person. Rootly covers on-call, incident response, AI SRE, retrospectives, and status pages in one platform, at about half the price, with a contract buyout.
- Typically about half the cost, with AI agents and status pages included rather than sold as add-ons.
- Contract buyout: Rootly buys out up to 12 months of a remaining PagerDuty contract, so you do not pay for both tools while you move.
- Pages teams, users, schedules, and Slack channels directly, with no shim services or placeholder users.
- A free tier for stakeholders who need to follow incidents but never carry a pager.
- 99.99% guaranteed uptime, against the 99.9% PagerDuty publishes.
Read the full PagerDuty comparison, last verified October 10, 2026.
Rootly vs. incident.io
incident.io gets teams started quickly, and the teams below say so. What they also say is that it became a ceiling once they needed to customize, mature their process, or grow, and that the answer was usually the next pricing tier.
- Prolific outgrew it and cut repeat incidents by 86%. Capa was production-ready on Rootly in under a day.
- Reactiv was fully live in two days, and CTSO Central in under two.
- Workflows change without code, every customer gets a named customer success partner, and the AI is the same in Slack, Teams, web, and mobile.
Read the incident.io comparison.
Rootly vs. Opsgenie
Atlassian stopped selling Opsgenie in June 2025 and ends it in April 2027. How Rootly maps to Opsgenie schedules and escalations, and how the migration is done for you.
- Schedules, rotations, and escalation policies map one to one, so your team keeps working the way it does today.
- The migration is done for you: a read-only audit first, then the work done alongside your team.
- Jira and Confluence stay connected. Leaving Opsgenie does not mean leaving the tools around it.
Read the full Opsgenie comparison, last verified September 15, 2026.
Rootly vs. Jira Service Management
JSM is a service desk that records incidents as tickets. Rootly runs the incident: ownership-based paging, response in Slack or Teams, AI investigation, and generated retrospectives.
Read the full Jira Service Management comparison, last verified September 15, 2026.
Rootly vs. Datadog
Keep Datadog for monitoring. Rootly runs on-call, incident response in Slack or Teams, AI investigation across every tool in your stack, and status pages, independent of the tools it watches.
- Separate from your monitoring, so a problem with your monitoring vendor does not take your incident platform down with it.
- On-call, response, AI SRE, status pages, and retrospectives, designed to run together.
- AI that reads Datadog as one source among many, because your incidents do not stay inside one vendor.
- Responders, leadership, and customers kept current without pulling anyone off the fix.
Read the full Datadog comparison, last verified October 22, 2026.
Built for every stage
A team of 5 and a team of 10,000 run the same platform. As you grow you turn on more controls and change the defaults, but you never have to move to a different product.
| Stage | What you get | Teams at this stage |
|---|---|---|
| Startups | Opinionated defaults that work on day one: on-call rotations, response in Slack, status pages, and a dedicated CSM. | Reactiv (30), Poll Everywhere (50) |
| Growth | The defaults still hold while you change what matters: workflows, service catalog, AI retrospectives, and communications. | Prolific (400), Canary Technologies (400), Cora (350), ROLLER (200) |
| Enterprises | Advanced RBAC, SCIM, retention and audit controls, plus an MCP server, CLI, Terraform provider, and REST API, so Rootly fits your stack. | KnowBe4 (2,500), Wealthsimple (2,000), Upstart (1,800), Superhuman (1,500), Webflow (1,500), NVIDIA, DoorDash, SoFi, SailPoint, Figma, Cisco, Okta, Dropbox |
“Every capability Rootly ships is one my team does not have to build. That is the whole value for me: We spend our time on security, not on the tooling that runs incident management.”
Switching is our job
Importing your schedules and escalation policies takes an afternoon. The real work comes after: integrations, routing rules, and getting every team comfortable, and our team does it with you. Your current tool stays live until your teams trust Rootly to page them.
- We scan and audit your environment. You share a read-only API key. We automatically audit everything from schedules, escalation policies, orchestration, automated actions, integrations, and unknown unknowns that have long been forgotten about. You get a full assessment and findings report to make informed decisions with the inventory in front of you.
- You get a tailored plan that starts with a trial. Based on the audit, we create a tailored migration plan, complete with complexity, timelines, and phases that run in parallel: account setup, alerting sources, routing, integrations, onboarding, and final go-live.
- We migrate you. We work side-by-side with two or three teams of mixed complexity first. We test everything with live traffic in a trial, then go live. We work with you to cut over the remaining teams in scheduled batches, under an hour each, fully trained end-to-end. Your current tool gets turned off when your teams trust the page.
“We moved ten years of incident tooling to Rootly in two weeks, and now the whole company can take part.”
Most teams run a pilot first. Part two covers how to run a pilot with clear pass or fail criteria: scope, length, and the questions to ask every vendor, us included. Part three walks through the migration, how it ran at DoorDash, KnowBe4, and PandaDoc, and a worksheet for what it asks of your own people.
Questions buyers ask
Is the AI included, or is it an add-on?
The AI agents are included with Incident Response: @Rootly in Slack and Teams, the AI meeting scribe, and AI-drafted retrospectives. AI SRE, which investigates root cause, is an additional product that requires Incident Response, and Enterprise includes it.
Can our own AI agents use Rootly?
Yes. Rootly's open-source MCP server works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, Gemini CLI, and Claude Desktop, and agent plugins for Claude Code and Cursor add slash commands for incident context, on-call, and retrospectives. In the other direction, a custom MCP connector lets Rootly AI call your own tools, limited to the ones you allow.
We are locked into a PagerDuty contract. Does that rule us out?
No. Rootly buys out up to 12 months of a remaining PagerDuty contract, so you do not pay for both tools while you move. A renewal signed under deadline pressure does not have to decide when you get to act.
How long does a migration take?
The audit takes hours and costs nothing. After that, teams cut over in scheduled batches of under an hour each, at a pace you set, with your current tool running in parallel until you decide to turn it off.
Will this pass our security review?
It has passed the reviews run by companies whose entire business is security. Security teams at companies like Okta chose Rootly before the rest of their organizations did, and Rootly has the deepest role-based access control (RBAC) of any incident management platform. Connectors are read-only, agents act only within the permissions of the person who approved the action, and your incident data never trains anything for another customer.
Can we turn the AI off?
Yes. You can turn each AI capability off for each team, every change is logged, and Rootly works fully without any AI.
What if we are on Opsgenie?
Atlassian stopped selling Opsgenie in June 2025 and ends it in April 2027, after which the platform becomes inaccessible and anything not exported is deleted. Rootly runs the migration for you, and your Jira and Confluence integrations stay connected.
The switching guide
- The caseWhy teams switch to RootlyWhat you get, what teams who switched say changed, and how Rootly compares.
- Part twoHow to run a pilot that gives a real answerScope, length, the exit criteria to write down first, and the questions to ask every vendor, us included.
- Part threeHow a migration to Rootly runsThe audit, the phased rollout, what we cannot promise, and what it costs your team.
- Part fourMaking the case inside your companySeven conversations a champion has to win, and how to answer each one.