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For engineering and operations teams, on-call responsibilities are a non-negotiable part of maintaining reliable systems. Choosing the right on-call software is crucial for minimizing downtime, ensuring rapid incident response, and preventing engineer burnout. Modern on-call management has evolved far beyond simple pagers and manual call lists. Today's tools offer comprehensive platforms that automate scheduling, streamline alerting, and integrate directly into incident response workflows [8]. This guide compares the best on-call software engineering teams are actually using in January 2026.

What Is On-Call Management Software?

On-call management software is a system built to automatically alert the correct person or team when a technical issue or system failure occurs. Its primary objective is to ensure critical alerts are never missed and are acted upon swiftly, regardless of the time of day.

Automated Alerting: The software acts as a decision engine, ingesting alerts from monitoring systems and routing them to the right on-call engineer based on predefined schedules and escalation policies. For instance, Rootly On-Call serves as a decision engine for routing alerts to the right people.
Structured Scheduling: These tools eliminate the need for manual coordination by managing on-call schedules, team rotations, and escalations.
Improved Response: By automating processes and ensuring clear communication, these platforms significantly improve collaboration, reduce mean time to resolve (MTTR), and lessen team stress [4].

Key Features to Compare in On-Call Software

When evaluating the best oncall software for teams, certain features are non-negotiable. Look for tools that offer flexibility, intelligence, and seamless integration.

On-Call Schedules & Rotations

Flexible scheduling is the foundation of any effective on-call system. Your software should support the unique ways your team operates.

Look for features like multi-person rotations, layered coverage (primary, secondary, tertiary), and time-zone awareness for distributed teams.
The ability to support different schedules for business hours versus after-hours is essential for work-life balance.
Easy management of temporary overrides, shift swaps, and on-call handoffs is critical for real-world flexibility. Rootly provides a deep level of control for managing schedules effectively.

Escalation Policies

Escalation policies are the automated rules that dictate who gets notified if the primary on-call engineer doesn't acknowledge an alert within a set time. This feature acts as a safety net, preventing alerts from being dropped and reducing alert fatigue on any single individual. Your software should allow for multi-step escalation chains that can page different users, entire teams, or even other on-call schedules.

Alerting and Notifications

A modern on-call tool must provide robust and varied notification channels to ensure alerts get seen.

Multiple Channels: Support for phone calls, SMS messages, mobile push notifications, Slack alerts, and emails is standard.
Intelligent Delivery: The best tools offer intelligent delivery options, such as using persistent phone calls for high-urgency alerts that can override a phone's Do Not Disturb (DND) settings, while using passive Slack messages for low-urgency notifications.

Integrations and Incident Management

On-call management doesn't exist in a vacuum. The software you choose must integrate seamlessly with your team's existing monitoring tools (like Datadog or Prometheus) and communication hubs (like Slack or Microsoft Teams). More importantly, integrating your on-call tool with a dedicated incident management platform allows on-call activities to flow naturally into the broader response workflow. This creates a single pane of glass for managing incidents from detection to resolution.

A Comparison of the Best On-Call Software for Teams

The right tool depends on your team's specific needs, but some platforms stand out for their comprehensive features and modern approach [2].

Rootly is a comprehensive, modern platform that unifies on-call management with end-to-end incident response. It's designed to streamline the entire process, from alert to resolution and learning.

Unified Platform: Rootly combines On-Call Schedules, Escalation Policies, Live Call Routing, and Heartbeats for proactive failure detection within its broader incident management platform.
Centralized Workflow: By integrating on-call natively, Rootly eliminates the need to switch between different tools, reducing cognitive load on responders.
Modern Alternative: Rootly can serve as a complete replacement for legacy tools, allowing teams to centralize everything in one platform instead of stitching together separate solutions for alerting and incident management.

PagerDuty

PagerDuty is a long-standing market leader in on-call management and alerting. It is a popular and powerful choice for many organizations [2].

Robust Features: The platform offers mature capabilities for scheduling, escalations, and a vast library of integrations with hundreds of tools.
Tradeoff: While it has some incident management capabilities, many teams find they still need a more centralized and powerful solution to manage the entire incident lifecycle effectively, which can lead to a fragmented toolchain.

Squadcast

Squadcast is an on-call management and incident response platform designed to improve reliability for SRE and DevOps teams.

SRE-Focused: Its features are built around improving key reliability metrics. Squadcast helps teams visualize schedules, create custom escalation policies, and reduce Mean Time To Acknowledge (MTTA) and MTTR [1].
Incident Management: It offers tools to streamline incident response by automating tasks and centralizing communication.

Grafana OnCall

Grafana OnCall is an open-source on-call management tool that is popular with teams already heavily invested in the Grafana observability ecosystem.

Developer-Centric: It provides developer-friendly workflows for routing, grouping, and notifying on-call engineers.
Risk: Crucially, Grafana has announced that Grafana OnCall will enter maintenance mode and be archived on March 24, 2026. This makes it a risky choice for any team looking for a stable, long-term solution [7].

Hypercare

Hypercare offers on-call scheduling software designed specifically for the unique needs of healthcare teams.

Healthcare-Specific: Features include real-time schedule management for clinical staff, consolidated rosters, and secure messaging to improve coordination in a hospital setting [5].
Caveat: Its specialized nature makes it less suitable for general-purpose software engineering or IT operations teams who need integrations with different toolsets.

How to Choose the Best On-Call Software for Your Team

Choosing the right platform requires a clear understanding of your team's needs and workflows [3].

Start by evaluating your team's size, structure, and existing toolchain. Ask the following questions:

Does it integrate with our essential monitoring and communication tools?
How flexible are the scheduling and escalation options? Can they support our complex rotations?
Does it offer a unified platform for both on-call scheduling and incident management, or will we need to buy and manage two separate tools?
What is the total cost of ownership, including any add-ons for essential features like incident response or SSO?

A tool like Rootly allows you to map different teams to specific schedules, escalation policies, and Slack channels, ensuring alerts always reach the right people without manual intervention.

Conclusion: The Future is a Unified On-Call Platform

While many tools can handle on-call scheduling, the most effective approach for modern engineering is a unified platform [6]. Combining on-call management with incident response streamlines workflows, reduces the cognitive load on responders, and provides richer data for continuous improvement.

For teams looking to consolidate their toolchain and adopt a more efficient, reliable, and integrated process, Rootly offers a leading solution. By bringing on-call scheduling into a comprehensive incident management platform, you can empower your teams to respond faster and build more resilient systems.

Ready to see how a unified platform can transform your on-call process? Get started with Rootly On-Call.

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