The Opsgenie Exit Plan: How Rootly Became the Go-to Alternative

A few months ago, Atlassian announced the end-of-life for Opsgenie, the alerting solution it acquired in 2018. That decision immediately put all Opsgenie’s customers on a race to figure out what to do. If they followed Atlassian’s planned migration, customers would have to choose between Jira Service Management (JSM) and Compass, unrelated products on top of which Atlassian built escalation policies to offer as replacements for Opsgenie.

However, engineering teams soon realized that both options represent a significant downgrade in incident management capabilities. Most teams are now looking for Opsgenie alternatives to evaluate before the forced migration comes.

In this post, I outline:

• Why now is the right time to evaluate Opsgenie alternatives.
• Features to look out for when evaluating an Opsgenie alternative.
• The limitations of Atlassian’s migration proposal for its customers.
• How the migration from Opsgenie to Rootly looks.

Opsgenie End-of-Life: Why Teams Can't Wait

Escalation policies and alerts impact how your team works. In my experience working with dozens of SRE teams, when an organization adopts a new alerting solution, leaders evaluate not only features but how well the tool adapts to their engineering workflows.

Atlassian’s decision to discontinue Opsgenie as a standalone product is more than a routine migration. Neither JSM nor Compass offers comparable capabilities to a dedicated incident management solution, which means there’s no smooth path forward for existing Opsgenie customers.

With the sunset date approaching, teams are racing to make a decision before they’re forced into a downgrade. JSM’s incident management features are limited and significantly more expensive.

The better option? Migrate to a purpose-built Opsgenie alternative that actually improves your operational workflows.

The JSM Migration Trap

Atlassian’s plan to move Opsgenie functionality into JSM and Compass introduces several major issues for teams that take incident response seriously:

• Architecture Mismatch: JSM is a ticketing system with alerting layered on top, not a purpose-built incident management platform.
• Feature Loss: Core Opsgenie capabilities are either missing or stripped down in JSM.
• Vendor Lock-in: Teams get pulled deeper into the Atlassian ecosystem with fewer ways out.
• Operational Risk: Tight migration timelines pressure teams to accept less capable tools without fully evaluating better alternatives.

Why the Deadline Matters

The clock is ticking. Teams don’t want to scramble at the last minute. Or worse, compromise on functionality.

Key drivers behind the urgent search for a replacement include:

• Platform Discontinuation: Opsgenie is going away, and the gap needs to be filled now.
• JSM’s Limitations: What Atlassian is offering simply isn’t enough for real-world incident management.
• Continuity Risk: Teams can’t afford any dip in reliability during the transition.
• No Innovation: Opsgenie won’t see new features, it’s already on its way out.
• Complex Migration: Rebuilding in JSM means lost workflows and heavy reconfiguration.

Rootly: The Superior Opsgenie Alternative

Rootly is the clear choice for teams that aren’t willing to accept JSM’s limitations and want to actually improve how they manage incidents. It’s built from the ground up for modern engineering teams — not adapted from legacy systems — and solves the exact problems Opsgenie customers are now facing.

Why Rootly Outperforms Other Opsgenie Alternatives

Enterprise-Grade RBAC and Security

Rootly gives teams precise control with deep role-based access controls across the entire platform. It’s built for organizations that care about security, compliance, and operational clarity, no workarounds needed.

Slack and MS Teams Native

Respond directly from Slack or MS Teams, with no need to context-switch, which reduces MTTR. Rootly handles the full incident lifecycle natively (alerts, escalations, updates, and coordination) all in the tools your team already uses.

Modern On-Call, Built-In

Rootly goes beyond basic alerting:

• Delay paging to reduce noise
• Heartbeat checks for service health
• Dynamic escalation logic
• Round-robin scheduling with Slack sync
• Time zone awareness and drag-and-drop schedule editing
• Shadow rotations without hacks
• And much more...

Flexible, Powerful Workflow Orchestration

‍Rootly's highly customizable automations handle complex routing scenarios, automatically create tickets in SNOW or JIRA with custom field mapping, and enable self-healing actions via an extensible HTTP client. Teams can configure automated responses like pinging controllers to restart servers when receiving specific alert types, going far beyond basic notification systems.

Terraform and API-First

Manage everything as code. Schedules, escalations, workflows: all configurable via Rootly’s Terraform provider and robust APIs. Infrastructure as code means consistent, repeatable operations.

AI-Native Incident Intelligence

Rootly's AI capabilities automate root cause analysis, generate postmortem summaries, and provide proactive troubleshooting tips. The AI co-pilot pulls data from all connected tools to automate status updates and deliver probable root cause analysis, significantly reducing triage time compared to manual processes in other platforms.

Rootly's Competitive Advantages Over Other Alternatives

Fast, Intuitive UI

Built for engineers and non-engineers alike. A single view for all your alerts, preferences, and on-call pay. Page a team manually without spinning up an incident. Clean, simple, fast.

Multi-cloud Redundancy

Rootly is the only alerting solution built on top of a multi-cloud architecture and an isolated control plane. When GCP or AWS have outages, Rootly comes out unaffected.

Next-level On-Call Experience

Automated handoffs. Live call routing. Multiple SMS and phone providers as failover — so one provider going down doesn’t take your alerting with it. And not every alert becomes an incident.

Smarter Escalation Policies

Build policies using teams, services, or Slack channels. Page escalation policies directly. Use templates like "Follow the Sun" for global teams. All from a modern, guided UI.

Override Management Made Easy

Create overrides for a single schedule or multiple, full or partial timeframes — self-serve and flexible. Maintain full coverage without compromising on control.

Seamless Migration and Hands-On Support

Rootly handles migration in minutes: schedules, policies, configs, and users all carried over via automation. The team — former Opsgenie and PagerDuty folks — has helped over 50,000 users make the switch.

Understanding Other Opsgenie Alternatives

Looking at other tools helps clarify why so many teams are moving to Rootly.

The JSM Downgrade Problem

While Atlassian positions JSM as the natural successor to Opsgenie, teams quickly discover that JSM fundamentally remains a ticketing system with basic alerting capabilities. This architectural mismatch creates several critical issues:

• Reduced Incident Management Capabilities: JSM lacks many sophisticated features that made Opsgenie valuable for serious incident response
• Operational Complexity: Teams end up requiring additional tools to fill JSM's gaps, increasing complexity rather than reducing it
• Performance Limitations: JSM's ticketing-first architecture creates bottlenecks during high-stress incident scenarios
• Limited Customization: JSM's rigid framework prevents the flexible workflows that effective incident management requires

Legacy Platform Constraints

Older platforms like VictorOps or xMatters feel clunky and require a lot of setup to do what Rootly does out of the box. UX, flexibility, and reliability fall short.

Niche Solutions

Some tools like FireHydrant or BetterStack serve narrow use cases. That may work early on, but as your team grows, you’ll hit limits. Rootly scales with you.

Migrating from Opsgenie to Rootly

Teams moving off Opsgenie consistently report faster, smoother transitions with Rootly, especially compared to JSM or patchwork alternatives. Here’s why the switch is straightforward:

Seamless Integration Process

Rootly automates the migration: schedules, escalation policies, configs, users, and integrations, all transferred in minutes.

Easy to Learn, Easy to Use

The UI is built to get out of your way. Most teams are fully up to speed in days, not weeks.

Expert Help, Built In

Our migration specialists provide hands-on assistance throughout the whole process (onboarding, setup, config): no guesswork required. We’ve done this at scale, you’re in good hands.

Case Study: How Motive moved from Opsgenie to Rootly

Motive powers the physical economy by offering a full range of products to support fleets ranging from a couple of vans to tens of thousands of light and heavy vehicles.

Even before Atlassian’s sunset notice, Motive had already moved from Opsgenie to Rootly  because the features were simply better. On-call scheduling in Slack used to mean custom bots and manual hacks. Now, it’s seamless. The team handles shifts, escalations, and incidents right inside Slack, no duct tape required.

Why Rootly Is the Obvious Choice

Opsgenie’s shutdown is a disruption, but also a chance to level up. While JSM and Compass barely covers the basics, Rootly gives teams a real upgrade in how they manage incidents.

Real Operational Impact

Teams using Rootly resolve incidents faster, communicate more clearly, and learn more from every response. These aren’t minor gains, they’re measurable improvements that drive better outcomes.

Built for What’s Next

Rootly ships fast and focuses on real-world problems. We’re not just maintaining legacy features: we’re building what modern teams need as systems grow more complex.

No Scaling Surprises

Whether you're 10 engineers or 10,000, Rootly scales with you. No need to bolt on extra tools or re-architect as you grow.

Why Rootly > JSM

This isn’t just about replacing Opsgenie. It’s about avoiding a step backward. JSM is a ticketing system, not an incident management platform. Teams that switch to Rootly don’t just swap tools. They move to a better way of working.

Rootly’s automation, intelligence, and advanced workflows turn incident response from a reactive chore into a strategic advantage. That’s what sets it apart from alternatives that just keep the lights on.

Don’t Settle. Level Up.

The deadline is coming. Teams that move early avoid chaos and avoid getting boxed into JSM.

Rootly makes the switch painless. The results speak for themselves: faster incident response, better comms, simplified post-mortems. No clunky migrations. No trade-offs.

Whether you're scaling a startup or running mission-critical systems, Rootly has what you need: power, reliability, and constant improvement. Other tools keep you afloat. Rootly moves you forward.

Don’t let Opsgenie’s sunset push you into a downgrade. Choose the platform that turns incident management into a strength, not a struggle.