Best On-Call Software for Teams: Boost Reliability & Speed

On-call teams—including Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), DevOps, and IT Ops—are the frontline defenders of system uptime. Their ability to respond quickly to incidents is critical for maintaining service availability and ensuring a positive customer experience. However, these teams often face significant challenges, including overwhelming alert fatigue, pressure to resolve issues instantly, and the need for seamless coordination across departments [3].

This article will review the best on-call software available today. We'll explore the key features that help teams manage schedules, respond faster, and ultimately improve overall system reliability.

What is On-Call Management Software?

On-call management software is a specialized tool designed to automate and streamline how teams handle on-call responsibilities. It helps manage schedules, notify the right people during an incident, and coordinate the entire response effort from detection to resolution.

Core functions of on-call software include:

• On-Call Scheduling: Creating and managing fair, flexible, and transparent schedules for team members.
• Alerting & Notifications: Automatically notifying the correct on-call person through various channels like SMS, push notifications, phone calls, and email to ensure alerts are never missed.
• Escalation Policies: Defining rules that automatically escalate an alert to the next person or team if it isn't acknowledged or resolved within a specific timeframe.
• Incident Response Coordination: Providing centralized tools and workflows to manage an incident, track progress, and communicate with stakeholders.

The primary benefits of using this software are clear: reduced Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA) and Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR), less downtime, and decreased team burnout. For example, some platforms are designed to help businesses respond to incidents up to 90% faster [5].

Key Features to Look for in On-Call Software

When evaluating different tools, it's essential to look for features that align with your team's specific needs and existing workflows.

Smart Scheduling and Rotations

Effective on-call software must provide flexible scheduling that can handle complex rotations, multiple time zones, and holidays. Look for features like schedule overrides, which allow for last-minute changes, and the ability for team members to easily swap shifts. A well-designed schedule considers historical incident data to ensure the right expertise is available when needed [4].

Reliable Alerting and Escalation

The most basic function of on-call software is to make sure alerts reach the right person. Look for multi-channel notification options to guarantee delivery. More advanced platforms go beyond simple alerting by offering features like alert noise reduction, grouping related alerts to provide context, and allowing for custom escalation policies. The trend is moving away from simple alerting toward comprehensive incident management to filter noise and automate responses effectively [8].

Integrations with Your Tech Stack

On-call software shouldn't operate in a silo. It must integrate seamlessly with the tools your team already uses every day. Key integration categories include:

• Monitoring & Observability: Datadog, Grafana, Sentry, New Relic
• Communication: Slack, Microsoft Teams
• Ticketing & Project Management: Jira, ClickUp

Platforms like Rootly integrate with observability tools to detect incidents and automatically trigger paging and notifications, creating a unified workflow.

Incident Collaboration and Automation

During a high-stakes incident, clear communication and teamwork are paramount. Look for features that facilitate real-time collaboration, such as automated "war room" creation in Slack, access to predefined runbooks or playbooks, and real-time status updates for stakeholders. Automation is key to removing cognitive load and eliminating manual, error-prone tasks. For instance, Rootly serves as a central hub for real-time collaboration and automates manual tasks, allowing engineers to focus on resolving the problem.

Post-Incident Analysis and Reporting

Learning from every incident is crucial for building more resilient systems. The best on-call software includes features to support post-incident analysis. This includes automatically generating post-incident timelines, capturing key data points and conversations, and providing analytics on incident trends and team performance metrics like MTTA and MTTR.

Comparison of the Best On-Call Software in 2025

Now, let's review the top on-call management tools available, highlighting their strengths, ideal use cases, and pricing.

Tool

Best For

Key Features

Starting Price (per user/mo)

Rootly

Comprehensive, automated incident management native to Slack & Teams

Workflow automation, retrospective generation, integrations, on-call scheduling

Contact for pricing

PagerDuty

Large enterprises with mature DevOps

Advanced analytics, AIOps, extensive integrations [2]

$21 [6]

Opsgenie

Teams invested in the Atlassian ecosystem

Deep Jira integration, robust scheduling, alert management [7]

$9.45 [6]

Squadcast

SRE and DevOps teams focused on reliability management

SLO tracking, status pages, incident response workflows [3]

Contact for pricing

Connecteam

Service-based businesses needing all-in-one employee management

General staff scheduling, time tracking, internal communication [1]

Free plan available

1. Rootly

• Best for: Teams looking for a comprehensive, automated incident management platform native to Slack and Microsoft Teams.

Rootly is more than just an on-call tool; it’s a complete incident management solution. Its powerful automation engine, Workflows™, can automate hundreds of manual steps, from creating communication channels to assigning roles and pulling in diagnostic data. Rootly manages the entire incident lifecycle, from detection and paging to resolution and retrospectives. With deep integrations and customizable incident properties, it adapts to your organization's unique processes, making it a powerful choice for teams aiming to standardize and accelerate their response.

2. PagerDuty

• Best for: Large enterprises with complex needs and a mature DevOps culture.

PagerDuty is a well-established leader in the on-call management space, known for its reliability and extensive feature set [2]. It offers advanced analytics, AIOps capabilities to help reduce alert noise, and a massive library of over 700 integrations. Its robust platform is designed to handle the complex operational demands of large-scale enterprises.

3. Opsgenie (by Atlassian)

• Best for: Teams heavily invested in the Atlassian ecosystem (Jira, Confluence).

As an Atlassian product, Opsgenie's biggest strength is its seamless integration with Jira Service Management [7]. This creates a unified experience for alerting, on-call scheduling, and issue tracking. It offers robust capabilities for managing schedules and routing alerts, making it a natural choice for teams that live inside Jira.

4. Squadcast

• Best for: SRE and DevOps teams focused on reliability management.

Squadcast is designed to bridge the gap between on-call management and broader reliability goals [3]. It combines on-call scheduling and incident response with features like public status pages and Service Level Objective (SLO) tracking. This makes it a good option for teams whose primary mandate is to measure and improve system reliability.

5. Connecteam

• Best for: Service-based businesses needing an all-in-one employee management app.

Connecteam is a broader tool that includes on-call scheduling as part of a larger suite of features for managing a mobile workforce [1]. It offers time tracking, internal communication, and task management. While it can handle on-call schedules, it's less focused on the specific needs of technical incident response and is better suited for general staff management.

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

To make an informed decision, consider the following questions:

• What is your team's size and maturity? A small team may only need simple scheduling, while a large enterprise might require AIOps and advanced analytics.
• What does your existing tech stack look like? Prioritize tools that offer seamless, pre-built integrations with your essential monitoring, communication, and ticketing systems.
• What is your primary goal? Are you just trying to fix a broken scheduling process, or do you want to implement a full-scale, automated incident management program?
• What is your budget? Compare pricing models, including per-user fees versus usage-based pricing, to find a solution that fits your financial constraints.

Conclusion: Streamline Your Response for Better Reliability

The right on-call software is essential for transforming incident response from a chaotic, manual process into a streamlined and automated workflow. While the best tool ultimately depends on your team's specific needs, moving beyond basic alerting to adopt a modern incident management platform is a critical step toward boosting reliability and speed.

Platforms like Rootly provide a comprehensive, end-to-end solution that automates manual work, fosters collaboration, and embeds learning into your culture, helping you resolve incidents faster and build more resilient services.

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