December 2, 2025

Best PagerDuty Alternatives for Enterprise Teams in 2026

While PagerDuty has long been a standard for incident management, many enterprise teams are now seeking alternatives. This shift is driven by common frustrations with high costs, platform complexity, and the need for more flexible, modern features [2]. The landscape of incident management has evolved, placing a greater emphasis on automation, deep collaboration within platforms like Slack, and structured post-incident learning. This guide compares the top PagerDuty alternatives for 2026, helping enterprise teams find an incident management platform that better fits their needs for reliability and efficiency.

Why Enterprise Teams Are Exploring PagerDuty Alternatives

The decision to look for a different on-call software solution often stems from several primary pain points. As customer expectations for uninterrupted services rise, organizations are re-evaluating whether their current tools are overly complex or costly for their specific needs [5].

Cost and Pricing Complexity

PagerDuty’s pricing can become a significant financial burden for large enterprise teams, especially when essential features are only available in higher-tier plans. This complexity makes it difficult for organizations to predict their total cost of ownership, prompting many to seek alternatives with more transparent and scalable pricing models that don't penalize growth [4].

Need for Deeper Automation and Integration

There is a growing demand for platforms that automate repetitive tasks throughout the entire incident lifecycle. Modern teams expect tools that integrate seamlessly into their existing workflows, especially within collaboration hubs like Slack or Microsoft Teams. The goal is to reduce manual toil so engineers can focus on resolution, not administrative tasks.

Gaps in Modern Incident Management Capabilities

Some legacy platforms focus heavily on alerting but may lack robust features for other critical phases of incident management. Modern enterprise incident management solutions prioritize capabilities like automated retrospectives, actionable analytics, and integrated status pages. These features are essential for helping teams learn from incidents and systematically improve reliability over time.

Top PagerDuty Alternatives for Enterprise Teams

This curated list of the best PagerDuty alternatives highlights platforms with unique strengths tailored to different enterprise needs.

1. Rootly: The All-in-One Incident Management Platform

Rootly is a comprehensive, modern alternative designed to manage the entire incident lifecycle from a single, integrated platform. It goes beyond simple alerting to provide a complete solution for building a more reliable system.

  • End-to-end automation: Use powerful workflows to automate hundreds of manual steps, from paging the right responders to creating and populating retrospectives.
  • Deep collaboration: A native Slack and Microsoft Teams integration allows teams to manage incidents entirely within their chat client, keeping communication centralized and efficient.
  • Powerful on-call management: Rootly includes robust on-call scheduling, multi-layered escalations, and flexible notification rules to ensure alerts always reach the right person.
  • Actionable insights: Track key reliability metrics like Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) and Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) with analytics dashboards that turn incident data into improvement opportunities.

Best for: Enterprise engineering and SRE teams looking for a mature, automated, and fully integrated reliability platform.

2. Opsgenie: For Atlassian-Centric Teams (with a Caveat)

Opsgenie is a well-known PagerDuty alternative, especially recognized for its on-call scheduling and tight integration with the Atlassian ecosystem (Jira, Confluence). However, it now comes with a significant risk for long-term planning.

Atlassian is discontinuing Opsgenie as a standalone product. Sales will end in 2025, with a complete shutdown scheduled for 2027 [6]. This has created an urgent need for Opsgenie alternatives, as current users must plan for migration to a new platform.

Best for: Teams already invested in Atlassian who need a short-term solution while actively planning their migration to a more permanent tool.

3. Zenduty: Strong Multi-Team Automation

Zenduty is a solid alternative focused on incident response automation for SRE and multi-team operations [1]. It offers robust alerting, escalation policies, and task templates to help automate response playbooks. As teams search for Opsgenie alternatives, Zenduty also positions itself as a capable replacement with a quick migration path [7].

Best for: Teams that need to coordinate incident response and communication across several departments.

4. Squadcast: For Cloud-Native SRE Teams

Squadcast is a modern alert management software comparison favorite built around Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles. It unifies on-call management, incident response, and status pages in one intuitive platform. With an API-first approach, it's a strong choice for teams operating in cloud-native environments. It is also a frequently mentioned alternative for teams migrating away from Opsgenie [8].

Best for: SRE and DevOps teams seeking an intuitive, reliability-focused platform.

5. xMatters (by Everbridge): For Complex Enterprise Communication

xMatters is an enterprise-grade platform designed for large organizations with complex operational workflows. Its key strength lies in automating communication flows to ensure stakeholders receive the right information at the right time during an incident. However, its power comes with a steeper learning curve compared to more streamlined platforms [3].

Best for: Large, complex organizations where workflow and communication automation are the highest priorities.

Feature Comparison: PagerDuty vs. Leading Alternatives in 2026

When you compare oncall platforms, it's important to look at the features that matter most to your team's workflow. This table provides a high-level incident management platform comparison.

Feature

PagerDuty

Rootly

Opsgenie

Squadcast

On-Call Scheduling & Escalations

Yes (Core Feature)

Yes (Core Feature)

Yes (Core Feature)

Yes

Incident Automation (Workflows)

Limited (Add-on required for advanced)

Yes (Core Feature, highly customizable)

Limited

Yes

Slack/MS Teams Integration

Yes

Yes (Native, full incident lifecycle management)

Yes

Yes

Automated Retrospectives

No (Manual process)

Yes (Core Feature, fully automated)

No

No

Service Catalog

Yes

Yes (Core Feature with dependency mapping)

Yes

Yes

Status Pages

Yes (Add-on feature)

Yes (Core Feature, highly customizable)

Yes

Yes

Pricing Model

Per-user, tier-based with add-on costs

Per-user, tier-based, all-inclusive

Per-user, tier-based

Per-user, tier-based

How to Choose the Right Incident Management Platform

Selecting the right tool requires a careful evaluation of your team's specific needs. For a detailed breakdown, you can review an incident management platform showdown to see how various tools stack up. Follow these steps to make an informed decision.

1. Evaluate Your Current Incident Management Maturity

Assess your current process. Are you simply managing alerts, or do you have a structured response and learning framework? The right tool should not only match your current maturity level but also provide a clear path to improvement.

2. Map Your Integration Requirements

List all the critical tools in your stack, including monitoring (Datadog, New Relic), ticketing (Jira, ServiceNow), and communication (Slack, MS Teams). The best PagerDuty alternative will offer seamless, bi-directional integrations that keep data in sync and workflows connected.

3. Prioritize Automation to Reduce Toil

Identify the manual, repetitive tasks that consume your engineers' time during an incident. The best-in-class platforms can automate these steps, such as creating a dedicated Slack channel, assigning incident roles, posting status updates, and scheduling a retrospective. A platform like Rootly provides a comprehensive overview of these automated steps across the incident lifecycle.

4. Analyze Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

Look beyond the per-user monthly fee. Consider hidden costs, the price of necessary add-ons (like status pages or advanced analytics), and the productivity cost of manual work that a more automated platform could eliminate. A tool with transparent, all-inclusive pricing often provides better long-term value.

Conclusion: Modernize Your Incident Response Beyond PagerDuty

The best oncall software for teams in 2026 goes beyond basic alerting. Modern enterprise teams need an integrated and automated incident management experience that helps them resolve issues faster and build more resilient systems.

While PagerDuty was a pioneer, platforms like Rootly now offer a more comprehensive, integrated, and cost-effective solution for organizations focused on reliability and continuous improvement. For enterprises looking to automate their response, empower their teams in Slack, and learn from every incident, Rootly stands out as the ideal PagerDuty alternative.

Ready to see how Rootly can transform your incident management process? Book a demo to learn more.