PagerDuty is a well-known name in the world of on-call management and alerting. For years, it has been a go-to tool for letting engineers know when something is wrong. However, the world of software is constantly evolving, and so are the needs of the teams that build and maintain it. Today, simply being paged about a problem isn't enough. Engineering teams are looking for more modern, comprehensive solutions.
The incident management landscape has shifted. It's no longer just about alerts; it's about managing the entire lifecycle of an incident, from the first sign of trouble to the final retrospective where you learn how to prevent it from happening again. This article will explore why many teams are searching for PagerDuty alternatives and introduce Rootly as a leading choice for modern incident management software.
Why Teams Are Searching for PagerDuty Alternatives
Organizations are increasingly exploring the market for tools that go beyond basic alerting. Several common factors drive this search.
- High Costs and Complex Pricing: A major pain point with PagerDuty is its pricing structure. While it might seem affordable at first, costs can escalate quickly as teams grow and need more advanced features. In fact, essential capabilities can push the price to over $41 per user per month [2]. This complexity makes it difficult for teams to predict their expenses.
- A Focus on Alerting, Not Full-Cycle Management: PagerDuty excels at alerting, but that’s only one piece of the puzzle. Effective incident management involves coordinating a response, communicating with stakeholders, and learning from what happened. Legacy tools can be less effective at managing this entire process, leaving gaps that slow teams down.
- Lack of Native Collaboration: During a high-stakes incident, every second counts. Many older tools require engineers to constantly switch between their alerting app, a chat platform like Slack, and their ticketing system. This context-switching creates friction and delays resolution time.
- Market Shifts and the Opsgenie Factor: Atlassian's decision to shut down Opsgenie by 2027 is causing many teams to re-evaluate their incident management stack [8]. This industry shift has created an opportunity for organizations to look for
Opsgenie alternativesand find better, more integrated solutions than what they had before.
Rootly: A Modern, End-to-End Incident Management Platform
Rootly is a comprehensive platform built for today's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps teams. It’s more than just an alerting tool; it’s a complete solution designed to manage the entire incident lifecycle from a single place. This unified approach reduces the mental overhead on your team and helps everyone work together to resolve issues faster.
Rootly guides your team through every phase of an incident:
- Detection & Alerting: Integrates with your existing monitoring tools to catch issues.
- Creating and Triaging Incidents: Automatically starts an incident response process.
- Coordinating a Response: Brings the right people and information together in one place.
- Resolving the Incident: Provides the tools to fix the problem and restore service.
- Running Retrospectives and Learning: Automates the creation of post-incident reviews to capture lessons learned.
By consolidating these steps, Rootly helps you manage the entire incident lifecycle without forcing responders to juggle multiple applications. Its powerful, no-code Workflows automate repetitive tasks like creating dedicated Slack channels, paging responders, updating status pages, and creating follow-up tickets, freeing up your engineers to focus on solving the problem.
How to Compare On-call Platforms: Rootly vs. PagerDuty
When you compare oncall platforms, it's important to look beyond just alerting. This table highlights the key differences between a traditional tool like PagerDuty and a modern platform like Rootly.
Feature
PagerDuty
Rootly
Core Function
On-call & Alerting
Full Incident Management
Collaboration
Primarily email/SMS alerts
Native Slack & Microsoft Teams integration
Automation
Basic runbooks
Customizable, no-code Workflows
Retrospectives
Add-on feature with limited automation
Integrated and automated with customizable templates
Pricing Model
Complex, per-user tiers
Transparent, feature-rich plans that scale with your needs
On-Call Scheduling and Alerting
PagerDuty has strong brand recognition in the on-call market, which has made it a default choice for many companies over the years [1]. It’s known for reliable alerting and scheduling.
Rootly builds on this foundation by integrating with over 100 monitoring and alerting tools, including Datadog, Prometheus, and Grafana. It centralizes alerts from all your systems and uses customizable rules to automatically initiate the correct incident response process, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks. This is a key part of the modern SRE tooling stack.
Incident Response and Collaboration
PagerDuty's workflow often forces responders to jump between tools to get the full picture. An alert comes in, and the engineer has to open a separate chat window to coordinate with the team and another system to view system dashboards.
Rootly’s approach is fundamentally different. It brings the incident response workflow directly into the tools your team already uses, like Slack or Microsoft Teams. Responders can declare an incident, loop in subject matter experts, view timelines, and execute tasks without ever leaving their chat client. This seamless experience keeps everyone on the same page and accelerates resolution.
Retrospectives and Analytics
Learning from incidents is critical for improving system reliability. PagerDuty treats retrospectives (or post-mortems) as an add-on, but it's a core, integrated part of the process in Rootly.
Rootly automatically generates a retrospective document after every incident, complete with a timeline, key metrics, and a list of participants. You can use customizable templates to ensure consistency and automatically track action items to make sure improvements are actually made. In addition, Rootly provides powerful analytics for tracking key SRE tools for incident tracking metrics like Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) and incident frequency, giving you the data you need to build more resilient systems.
What to Look For in Modern SRE Tooling
As you evaluate top incident management tools, it’s helpful to have a framework. Here is a simple checklist for finding the best oncall software for teams based on what modern reliability practices demand [3].
- Does it integrate deeply with your communication tools (Slack, Teams)? Your team shouldn't have to leave their primary workspace to manage an incident.
- Can it automate repetitive tasks? Look for features that automatically create channels, invite responders, and update stakeholders.
- Does it help you learn from incidents? Integrated retrospectives and action item tracking are non-negotiable for continuous improvement.
- Is the pricing transparent? Your costs should be predictable and scale fairly as your team grows.
- Does it support the entire
DevOps incident managementlifecycle? A modern tool should handle everything from detection to resolution and learning, not just alerting.
Conclusion: Move from Simple Alerting to Intelligent Incident Management
While PagerDuty is a competent tool for alerting, modern site reliability engineering tools demand a more integrated, collaborative, and automated platform. The goal is no longer just to wake someone up; it's to give them the context and tools they need to solve problems quickly and prevent them from recurring.
Rootly provides a complete incident management software solution designed for this new era. By centralizing communication, automating toil, and embedding learning into your process, Rootly helps teams resolve incidents faster and build more resilient systems.
Ready to see how Rootly can streamline your incident response? Book a demo or start your free trial today.