In modern technology, ensuring digital services are reliable is non-negotiable. When incidents occur—and they always do—a robust incident management process distinguishes a minor glitch from a catastrophic outage. For Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps teams, having the right site reliability engineering tools is essential for detecting, responding to, and resolving issues quickly.
While PagerDuty is a well-known tool for on-call alerting, many teams are exploring PagerDuty alternatives that better align with their specific needs, workflows, and budgets. The incident and emergency management market is projected to grow to $250.01 billion by 2034, underscoring the critical importance of these platforms [2].
This article will compare oncall platforms, examining three of the best PagerDuty alternatives: Rootly, Opsgenie, and xMatters, to help you determine the best fit for your team.
Why Teams Look for PagerDuty Alternatives
Engineering and SRE teams often seek alternatives to PagerDuty as their needs evolve beyond basic alerting. They are looking for more comprehensive incident management software that addresses common pain points.
- Cost: PagerDuty's pricing structure can become costly, particularly as teams scale and add more users or require advanced features.
- Feature Gaps: Teams may need more sophisticated capabilities that aren't PagerDuty's primary focus, such as advanced workflow automation, native post-incident learning tools, or integrated status pages.
- Workflow Preferences: There's a growing desire for a more collaborative, chat-centric approach. Many teams want a tool that lives within Slack, centralizing the entire incident lifecycle in one place instead of forcing context-switching between different applications.
- Complexity: Some organizations find PagerDuty's configuration and setup to be overly complex for their needs, prompting them to search for a more intuitive and streamlined solution.
Head-to-Head: Comparing the Top PagerDuty Alternatives
To help you find the best oncall software for teams, this section provides a detailed comparison of Rootly, Opsgenie, and xMatters across the key criteria for DevOps incident management.
Feature
Rootly
Opsgenie
xMatters
Best For
End-to-end incident management & automation in Slack
Advanced on-call scheduling & alerting
Enterprise-scale critical communications
On-Call & Alerting
Native scheduling and alerting, plus deep integrations
Best-in-class, highly flexible scheduling & escalations
Strong multi-channel notification capabilities
Workflow Automation
Powerful, no-code runbooks for the entire incident lifecycle
Good for alerting-related automations
Enterprise-grade workflow builder for complex processes
Integrations
100+ deep integrations with modern developer tools
Wide range of integrations, focused on monitoring tools
Extensive, especially with enterprise ITSM and comms tools
Post-Incident Learning
Automated timelines, metrics, and customizable postmortems
Basic incident tracking and reporting
Reporting focused on communication and response times
Rootly: The Modern Command Center
Rootly is a comprehensive incident management platform built for teams that prioritize automation, collaboration, and learning. It serves as a central command center, orchestrating the entire incident response process from declaration to resolution and retrospective.
Key features include:
- End-to-end incident orchestration: Manage the full lifecycle of an incident, from automatically creating dedicated Slack channels to inviting responders and generating postmortems.
- Deep, native Slack integration: Teams can run the entire response—assigning roles, pulling data from other tools, and communicating with stakeholders—without leaving their primary chat client.
- Powerful workflow automation: Use no-code runbooks to automate hundreds of repetitive tasks, such as creating Jira tickets, starting a video call, and updating status pages.
- Robust post-incident features: Automatically generate timelines, create customizable postmortem templates, and access analytics to track reliability metrics and drive improvements.
While Rootly offers its own powerful on-call solution, it also integrates seamlessly with other providers. This allows teams to combine Rootly's command center with their existing PagerDuty setup, providing ultimate flexibility. For a broader view of how it compares to other platforms, see this incident management platform showdown.
Opsgenie: The Alerting Specialist
As an Atlassian product, Opsgenie is a strong contender and a common destination for teams seeking Opsgenie alternatives to PagerDuty. It is widely recognized for its powerful and flexible alerting and on-call scheduling capabilities.
Its strengths include:
- Flexible and robust on-call management: Create intricate on-call schedules, rotations, and escalation policies that can be tailored to any team structure.
- A wide range of integrations: Connect with hundreds of monitoring and ticketing tools to centralize alert management and reduce notification fatigue.
- Good for alert-centric teams: It's an excellent choice for organizations whose primary challenge is managing a high volume of alerts and ensuring the right person is notified quickly.
While Opsgenie excels at alerting, its capabilities for end-to-end incident response and post-incident learning are not as extensive as purpose-built platforms. The good news is you don't have to choose. Rootly integrates with Opsgenie, allowing teams to leverage Opsgenie's best-in-class alerting to trigger Rootly’s comprehensive incident response workflows.
xMatters: Enterprise-Grade Communications
xMatters, now an Everbridge company, is a platform focused on enterprise-scale communication and workflow automation during critical events. Its strength lies in ensuring messages reach the right people, no matter the circumstances.
Its features include:
- Strong multi-channel communication: Deliver targeted notifications via a person's preferred method, including SMS, voice calls, email, and mobile app push notifications.
- "Adaptive Incident Management": Dynamically engage different teams across an organization and automate resolution steps in complex environments.
- Best suited for large organizations: It is an ideal solution for large, complex enterprises that need to coordinate responses across many departments beyond just engineering, such as IT, security, and business operations.
The tradeoff is that its focus is much broader than just SRE tools for incident tracking. This can make it overly complex and less tailored for engineering teams that need a dedicated solution for managing technical incidents efficiently.
What’s Included in the Modern SRE Tooling Stack?
The landscape of SRE and DevOps incident management tools has evolved significantly beyond simple alerting. The market is trending toward integrated solutions that cover the entire incident lifecycle, with distinct components for communication, simulation, and end-to-end management [4].
A key part of this evolution is the growing importance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation. Leading platforms are incorporating AI to reduce manual triage, suggest resolutions, and automate communication to speed up resolution. This trend is visible across the broader IT Service Management (ITSM) market, where leaders like ServiceNow are recognized for their AI applications [7].
A modern SRE tooling stack includes several key components:
- On-call and alerting
- A centralized incident command center (like Rootly)
- Workflow automation (runbooks)
- Status pages
- Post-incident analysis and learning tools
Conclusion: Which On-Call Software is Best for Your Team?
Choosing the right PagerDuty alternative depends entirely on your team's priorities, size, and existing toolchain.
- Opsgenie is the ideal choice for teams that need best-in-class on-call scheduling and a powerful solution for an alert management software comparison.
- xMatters is the right pick for large enterprises with complex, cross-departmental communication requirements during critical events.
- Rootly is the best PagerDuty alternative for modern engineering teams focused on automating the entire incident lifecycle, fostering deep collaboration in Slack, and using data to continuously improve reliability.
The best incident management software will integrate seamlessly into your workflow and empower your team to resolve issues faster. To see how Rootly measures up against a wider array of top incident management tools, explore our complete Incident Management Platform Showdown.
Ready to see how Rootly can streamline your incident response? Book a demo to learn more.