On-call management is a critical practice for maintaining system reliability and ensuring a high-quality customer experience. While PagerDuty is a well-known name in the space, its limitations in cost, usability, and features often become apparent as teams grow. For many, it acts as little more than a "very expensive phone call," failing to provide the integrated incident response capabilities that modern organizations need [4]. This article explores the best oncall software for teams, focusing on what it takes to scale effectively beyond basic alerting.
The Limitations of Traditional On-Call Tools like PagerDuty
Users of legacy on-call tools often encounter common pain points that can slow down incident response and frustrate engineering teams. These challenges include:
- Prohibitive Costs: High costs and complex pricing structures often make these tools difficult to justify, especially for growing teams.
- Poor Usability: Many teams find the user interface to be dated, hard to configure, and not built around a human-centric approach to incident management [5].
- Lack of Integrated Collaboration: These tools are often disconnected from collaboration hubs like Slack, forcing teams to use workarounds and switch between platforms to manage incidents effectively.
- Siloed Functionality: Traditional on-call software is often confined to engineering departments, creating a disconnect between teams during an incident and requiring awkward workarounds, like modeling teams as services, to fill functional gaps.
What to Look for in Modern On-Call Software for Teams
To select an on-call tool that can support a scaling organization, you should prioritize features that go beyond simple paging. Key criteria include:
- Integrated Incident Management: The tool should cover the entire incident lifecycle, from the initial alert to automated retrospectives and stakeholder communication.
- Seamless Collaboration: It needs to integrate natively with the platforms where your teams already work, like Slack, to create a unified command center for incidents.
- Ease of Use for All Teams: The software should feature a modern, intuitive UI that is simple enough for non-engineers to use, which helps break down organizational silos.
- Flexible and Human-Centric Scheduling: Look for features like automated schedule gap detection, simple overrides for last-minute changes, and fair, automated rotation cycles.
- Transparent and Scalable Pricing: The pricing model should be straightforward and predictable, without hidden per-alert fees or expensive surprise upsells.
A Closer Look at the Best On-Call Software: Rootly
Rootly stands out as a top PagerDuty alternative, offering a complete, end-to-end platform for on-call management and incident response. It is designed for collaboration, ease of use, and scalability, directly addressing the key limitations of traditional tools. Seeing a direct PagerDuty vs. Rootly comparison clarifies these differences.
More Than Just Paging: A Unified Incident Response Platform
Rootly On-Call acts as the decision engine that determines who should respond to an alert, how urgently, and through which communication channels. The primary goal is to ensure every critical signal reaches the right person immediately with zero manual coordination. To see how this works in practice, you can get started with the platform. Rootly unifies the entire incident workflow, from alert to resolution and retrospective, providing a single source of truth.
Key Components of a Robust On-Call System
Rootly's on-call solution is built on several core features that create a resilient and efficient response process.
- On-Call Schedules: Schedules form the foundation of on-call responsibility. Rootly supports multi-person rotations, layered coverage for primary and secondary responders, and time-zone-aware planning for distributed teams. This makes managing complex on-call schedules straightforward.
- Escalation Policies: Rootly automatically escalates unacknowledged alerts to the next person or level in the hierarchy. This prevents dropped alerts and reduces pager fatigue by ensuring accountability.
- Multi-Channel Notifications: Responders can receive notifications through various channels, including voice, SMS, push notifications, Slack, and email. Rootly intelligently selects the right channel based on urgency and user preferences.
- Paging Teams and Individuals: With Rootly, you can page entire teams, specific individuals, or services directly. This eliminates the need for complex workarounds when managing teams during an incident.
- Advanced Features: Rootly also includes advanced capabilities like Live Call Routing, which turns inbound phone calls into pages, and Heartbeats, which proactively monitor systems to detect silent failures.
Why Teams Choose Rootly Over PagerDuty
Feature
Rootly
PagerDuty
Collaboration
Slack-native for seamless collaboration in one place.
Requires switching between platforms, fragmenting communication.
Usability
Guided, intuitive UI designed for both technical and non-technical users.
Often described as dated, complex, and unintuitive.
Scheduling
Advanced, human-centric features like schedule gap detection and seamless overrides.
Basic scheduling that can be rigid and difficult to manage.
Value
An end-to-end platform with more features and transparent pricing.
Higher costs for fewer integrated features, with potential for surprise fees.
This combination of modern functionality and superior value is why leading teams at companies like Canva, Replit, and Wealthsimple choose Rootly.
Other PagerDuty Alternatives to Consider
For a balanced perspective, it's worth knowing other tools in the market.
- Opsgenie: A popular choice for teams heavily invested in the Atlassian suite, as it offers strong integrations with tools like Jira [7].
- Xurrent: This alternative focuses on SRE best practices and provides dynamic escalations tailored for fast-growing technology teams [1].
- Squadcast: Another solution designed for SRE and DevOps teams, Squadcast aims to streamline incident response and improve reliability workflows [8].
Conclusion: Scale Your On-Call Management with Rootly
As teams scale, their on-call needs evolve beyond basic alerting. They require a comprehensive, user-friendly, and cost-effective platform that supports collaboration and streamlines the entire incident management lifecycle.
Rootly provides an all-in-one solution that integrates on-call scheduling and alerting directly into a complete incident management platform. Its modern, Slack-native approach fosters collaboration, breaks down team silos, and empowers organizations to build a more resilient and efficient on-call culture.
For teams looking to move beyond the limitations of PagerDuty, Rootly is the ideal choice for building a scalable and robust on-call practice. See how the platforms stack up in our PagerDuty vs. Rootly comparison.