For Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and platform teams, effective on-call management is the backbone of system reliability. Ineffective on-call processes can lead to common challenges like alert fatigue, team burnout, inconsistent incident response, and the high cost of downtime. Having the right battle-tested SRE tooling is crucial for building resilient systems and a sustainable on-call culture. This article compares the best on-call software for teams, helping you choose a solution that streamlines workflows and improves reliability.
What to Look for in Modern On-Call Software
The best on-call software extends far beyond simple paging; it operates as an intelligent routing and automation engine. When evaluating options, teams should look for several key criteria.
Flexible On-Call Scheduling & Rotations
Modern engineering teams require schedules that can handle real-world complexity. Look for software that provides robust and flexible scheduling features.
- Support for daily, weekly, and custom rotations.
- Layered schedules with primary and secondary responders, plus simple shift overrides for last-minute changes.
- Time-zone awareness to seamlessly manage globally distributed teams.
- The ability to nest schedules to create complex escalation paths for different services or teams.
With a platform like Rootly, you can easily create and manage schedules that fit your organization's unique structure.
Intelligent Alerting & Escalation Policies
The goal of alerting is to reduce noise and ensure critical alerts are never missed. Essential alerting features include:
- The ability to define multi-level escalation policies that automatically page different users or teams if an alert isn't acknowledged.
- Rules to dynamically adjust an alert's urgency based on its content or source.
- Multi-channel notifications (SMS, voice call, push, Slack) with user-defined preferences.
A robust on-call system is designed to combat alert fatigue, a significant challenge for modern teams [3]. The right tools ensure that responders only receive actionable, high-signal alerts, which is a core component of an effective on-call setup.
Seamless Integration with Your Toolchain
On-call software doesn't operate in a silo; it must connect seamlessly with your existing toolchain to be effective. Critical integrations include:
- Monitoring Tools: Ingest alerts from platforms like Datadog, Grafana, and Prometheus.
- Collaboration Hubs: Deep integration with Slack or Microsoft Teams, allowing teams to manage incidents where they already work.
- Incident Management Platforms: A native connection between on-call and incident response workflows to automate incident creation, assemble responders, and track metrics.
Integrating on-call schedules directly into the broader incident lifecycle creates a cohesive response process from start to finish.
Actionable Analytics and Reporting
Data is essential for improving on-call health and performance. Your software should provide clear analytics on key metrics to track, including:
- Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA) and Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR).
- On-call load distribution across team members to prevent burnout.
- Alert noise and frequency by service to identify problem areas.
- Escalation trends that highlight gaps in documentation or training.
These data-driven insights are critical for streamlining incident response and maintaining team readiness [5].
Top On-Call Software for SRE & Platform Teams: A Comparison
While several excellent tools exist, the best choice depends on your team's specific needs and existing ecosystem. Here’s a look at some of the top options available in 2026, evaluated against the criteria above.
Rootly: The Unified Platform for On-Call and Incident Management
Rootly is the ideal solution for teams seeking a single, integrated platform to manage reliability from alert to retrospective. It combines powerful on-call management with a full-featured incident response platform.
- Unified Workflow: Rootly consolidates on-call schedules, escalation policies, and a complete incident management platform in one place, eliminating the need for separate tools.
- Deep Automation: Use Workflows to automate repetitive tasks like creating Slack channels, notifying stakeholders, pulling in on-call responders, and generating retrospective documents.
- Built for Teams: The platform allows different groups to own their schedules and escalation policies, mapping them directly to the services and Slack channels they manage, which fosters autonomy and ownership.
- Live Call Routing & Heartbeats: Advanced features like live call routing turn phone calls into pages, and heartbeats proactively monitor system health to detect silent failures.
PagerDuty: The Established Leader in Alerting
PagerDuty is a market veteran known for its powerful and reliable alerting capabilities.
- It offers an extensive library of over 700 integrations.
- Its alerting and escalation engine is mature, robust, and trusted by thousands of companies.
- As a separate product, it can sometimes create a disjointed experience when paired with a different incident management tool, requiring more configuration to achieve a seamless workflow [4].
Opsgenie (by Atlassian): Best for Jira-Centric Teams
Opsgenie is a strong contender, particularly for teams heavily invested in the Atlassian ecosystem.
- It provides seamless integration with Jira, Bitbucket, and other Atlassian products.
- The platform includes strong scheduling and alerting features comparable to other market leaders.
- Its primary focus is on connecting development and operations workflows within the Atlassian suite, making it a natural fit for Jira shops [6].
Squadcast: A Modern SRE-Focused Alternative
Squadcast is a newer platform designed from the ground up with SRE and DevOps principles in mind.
- It includes built-in features like Service-Level Objective (SLO) tracking and status pages.
- The platform aims to provide a streamlined and intuitive user experience.
- It's a good choice for teams looking for a modern, all-in-one reliability platform that emphasizes SRE best practices [1].
How to Choose the Right On-Call Software for Your Team
Use this simple framework to help you make a decision.
- 1. Identify Your Primary Pain Point: Is it scheduling complexity, alert fatigue, or a disjointed incident response process? Different businesses have different scheduling needs [2]. Choose a tool that excels at solving your biggest problem.
- 2. Evaluate Your Existing Ecosystem: How well does the tool integrate with your monitoring (Datadog), communication (Slack), and ticketing (Jira) systems?
- 3. Consider a Unified vs. Best-of-Breed Approach: Decide if you prefer a single, integrated platform like Rootly or piecing together separate tools for on-call, incident management, and status pages.
- 4. Run a Proof-of-Concept (POC): Have a small team trial your top one or two choices. Test setting up a schedule, configuring an escalation policy, and handling a test alert to see how it feels in practice.
Conclusion: Beyond Paging—Toward a Healthier On-Call Culture
Choosing the right on-call software is a strategic decision that directly impacts team health, system reliability, and customer trust. Modern tools have moved beyond simple paging to offer intelligent automation and integrated workflows that reduce toil and improve response times.
Platforms like Rootly are purpose-built to unify these capabilities, helping teams reduce downtime and foster a more sustainable on-call culture. By centralizing alerting, scheduling, and incident management, you can empower your teams to resolve issues faster and more efficiently.
Explore Rootly's battle-tested SRE tooling to see how an integrated platform can transform your on-call and incident response processes.