Rootly vs. PagerDuty

PagerDuty is a legacy paging tool, it notifies a person when something breaks. Rootly is an all-in-one incident management platform that covers the entire lifecycle: on-call and alerting, incident response and coordination in Slack or Teams, AI SRE investigation, retrospectives, and status pages. The core distinction is PagerDuty handles a page. Rootly handles the page and everything that happens after; coordination, resolution, communication, and learning — in a single platform with no add-ons required.

Yes. PagerDuty's base license looks competitive, but core capabilities are gated behind expensive add-ons like AIOps for alert grouping (~$699/mo), PagerDuty Advance (~$415/mo), and Status Pages (~$89/mo), and over $14,400/year in add-ons before you've covered the full lifecycle. Rootly includes every major feature on every plan, regardless of team size. There's no separate SKU for AI, status pages, or alert grouping.

Yes. In PagerDuty's model, users who never receive pages still count as licensed seats. This inflates cost as organizations grow. Rootly offers a free user tier for non-pageable stakeholders, people who need visibility into incidents but never carry a pager don't consume a paid license.

No. PagerDuty only pages Services, not teams or users directly. Organizations build workarounds like fake "Nobody" users and shim paging services to route alerts to a team. It's a widely shared frustration among PagerDuty customers at scale. Rootly pages teams, users, schedules, and Slack channels natively, with no workarounds required.

PagerDuty's data model conflates alerts and incidents, there's no clean native way to promote an alert into a coordinated incident without forcing non-incident statuses into the incident object. Engineers adapt with workarounds, and terminology bleeds across teams. Rootly treats alerts and incidents as distinct objects: an alert can be acknowledged and resolved, or escalated into a fully coordinated incident with roles, comms, and a retrospective.

Yes. PagerDuty migration support is handled for you. Rootly scopes your current configuration; schedules, escalation policies, integrations, routing rules, and executes the migration end to end with a tailored plan including post migration support and training. Most teams are fully live within a week.

Rootly covers the full on-call experience natively; schedules, escalation policies, shadow rotations, cover requests, holiday calendars, live call routing, and on-call pay tracking, with a mobile app built for fast acknowledgment and resolution. Rootly also pages teams, users, and Slack channels directly, where PagerDuty requires shim services to route to a team. Both handle core scheduling and escalation; Rootly removes the workarounds PagerDuty customers accumulate over time.

PagerDuty's AI capabilities are gated behind paid add-ons like AIOps for alert grouping and PagerDuty Advance; while focusing primarily on noise reduction. Rootly AI is included and works across the full incident lifecycle from investigating the moment an alert fires; runs parallel hypothesis checks, surfaces root cause with confidence scores and visible reasoning; drafts stakeholder updates, transcribes incident calls, and generates retrospectives.

The most common reasons are add-on costs that compound at renewal, non-pageable users consuming paid seats, paging workarounds that require specialized institutional knowledge, and the fact that coordination, communication, and follow-up still happen outside PagerDuty in most deployments. DoorDash, for example, fully displaced PagerDuty with Rootly, replacing both their internal incident bot and paging bot, with no specialized tool knowledge required. Teams switch when they realize paging is necessary but not sufficient, and they're paying for and maintaining workarounds to cover the rest.

Yes. Rootly runs the full incident lifecycle natively in both Slack and Microsoft Teams, declaring incidents, coordinating response, running workflows, updating stakeholders, and closing retrospectives, without switching to a separate interface. PagerDuty's coordination and communication typically happen outside the platform, in Slack and docs, with the page as the entry point.

Rootly guarantees 99.99% uptime. PagerDuty publishes 99.9%. The difference matters: 99.9% allows for up to roughly 9 hours of potential downtime per year, while 99.99% reduces that to under one hour. When your systems are down, your incident platform needs to be the most reliable thing in your stack.