Why Engineers Choose Rootly Over PagerDuty for Reliability

Looking for PagerDuty alternatives? See why engineers choose Rootly. Go beyond alerts to automate the entire incident lifecycle and improve reliability.

For over a decade, PagerDuty has been a foundational tool for incident management. It solved the critical problem of getting the right alert to the right person, establishing itself as a market leader in the on-call space [7]. If you need to wake an engineer up at 3 a.m., PagerDuty does that job exceptionally well.

But modern reliability challenges demand more than just alerts. Today's complex, distributed systems mean the real work of resolving an incident—collaborating, investigating, and learning—begins after the notification. Relying on a tool built primarily for alerting leads to fragmented workflows, manual toil, and context switching. This friction contributes to high operational costs and alert fatigue, driving many teams to search for effective PagerDuty alternatives [8].

Engineers are choosing Rootly because it addresses the complete incident lifecycle. It's a comprehensive reliability platform built on a different philosophy: that incident management is a cohesive workflow, not just a series of alerts. For teams looking to move beyond simple notifications, Rootly beats PagerDuty as the leading alternative by providing a unified command center for resolving and learning from incidents.

From Alert-Centric to Incident-Centric Workflows

The fundamental difference between PagerDuty and Rootly lies in their approach. PagerDuty is alert-centric, while Rootly is incident-centric. This distinction shapes the entire user experience and has a significant impact on team efficiency.

PagerDuty: The Alerting and Escalation Engine

PagerDuty excels at its core function: receiving signals from monitoring tools and routing them to on-call engineers according to schedules and escalation policies [2]. Its workflow is optimized for notification delivery.

Once an engineer acknowledges an alert, however, the heavy lifting begins. Using a specialized alerting tool means the subsequent steps—creating a dedicated Slack channel, launching a video call, or opening a Jira ticket—are often manual processes that happen outside of PagerDuty [4]. This forces responders to juggle multiple tools during a high-stress situation, slowing down the response and increasing the risk of error.

Rootly: The Command Center for Your Entire Incident

Rootly orchestrates the entire response process from a central, collaborative environment. By building the workflow where teams already work, it eliminates context switching and manual coordination.

The experience is native to Slack, transforming it from a chat tool into a powerful incident command center [3]. When an incident is declared, Rootly's automation kicks in instantly:

Creates and names a dedicated incident channel.
Invites the correct on-call responders and stakeholders.
Starts a video huddle and begins transcribing it.
Creates and updates tickets in project management tools like Jira.
Pulls relevant graphs and logs from observability platforms like Sentry.

This automated, integrated approach ensures consistency and allows engineers to focus on what matters: diagnosing and resolving the issue. It's why there's a better PagerDuty alternative—and it's Rootly.

Reducing Toil and Improving Engineer Well-being

Tool choice has a direct impact on the human side of operations. A fragmented process creates hidden costs that contribute to burnout, while a unified platform can give valuable time back to engineers.

The Hidden Costs of a Fragmented Process

A workflow centered around manual tasks and disconnected tools creates significant administrative overhead. During an incident, engineers should be focused on resolution, not on process administration. This manual toil, combined with the cognitive load of switching between PagerDuty, Slack, Jira, and Confluence, makes a stressful situation even worse.

Furthermore, a system focused only on alerts can quickly become noisy. Constant, low-context notifications lead to alert fatigue, a condition where engineers become desensitized and may miss or ignore critical warnings [6].

How Rootly Gives Time Back to Engineers

Rootly is designed to reduce toil and actively support on-call health. As an AI-native platform, it uses automation to handle repetitive tasks and provide intelligent suggestions, freeing up engineers for high-value work. This approach has been shown to dramatically improve key metrics; Rootly itself uses Sentry to help its team reduce Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) by 50% [5].

Rootly's philosophy extends beyond just managing schedules. It provides analytics on on-call load, alert frequency, and interruptions, empowering teams to identify hotspots and make data-driven decisions to improve their on-call rotations. This focus on preventing burnout is a key reason why Rootly comes out on top when choosing a PagerDuty alternative.

Learning and Improving: The Post-Incident Lifecycle

True reliability isn't just about resolving incidents faster; it's about learning from them to prevent future failures. This is where the post-incident process becomes critical.

Generating Retrospectives vs. Living Documents

In a traditional workflow, creating a retrospective is another manual, after-the-fact task. Reporting in PagerDuty often focuses on quantitative metrics like MTTA and MTTR, while the qualitative story of "what happened" and "why" must be pieced together from memory and disparate chat logs.

Rootly transforms this process. From the moment an incident is declared, it automatically captures every command, chat message, attached graph, and automated action in a comprehensive timeline. This data is used to generate a rich, data-backed retrospective that serves as a single source of truth. The document is a living record of the incident, making it easy for teams to conduct blameless post-mortems and extract actionable follow-ups. These powerful features make a clear case for choosing Rootly over PagerDuty.

Conclusion: The Clear Choice for Modern Reliability

While PagerDuty remains a capable alerting tool, modern engineering teams need a platform that supports the entire incident lifecycle. The challenges of building and maintaining resilient systems demand more than just notifications.

Engineers choose Rootly for its unified workflow, powerful automation that reduces toil, and deep focus on learning and improving engineer well-being. It moves teams from a reactive, alert-centric model to a proactive, incident-centric one. For organizations serious about building sustainable on-call practices and improving system reliability, Rootly is the best PagerDuty alternative for modern engineering teams.

Ready to build a more reliable future? Book a demo to see how Rootly automates the entire incident lifecycle.