PagerDuty has long been a fixture in the incident management software market. However, as technology evolves, the needs of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps teams have outgrown simple alerting. Many are now searching for the best PagerDuty alternatives due to common pain points like high costs, operational complexity, and a lack of features beyond basic notifications [1]. This article will compare oncall platforms and show why Rootly is the top choice for modern engineering teams.
What’s included in the modern SRE tooling stack?
A modern SRE tooling stack is an integrated ecosystem for reliability, not just a single alerting tool. When evaluating top incident management tools, teams should look for several key components. An effective solution must go beyond simply waking someone up. Teams need a comprehensive toolkit that helps them resolve issues faster and learn from every incident. A modern toolkit includes various SRE tools that the most reliable engineering teams use to manage system health effectively.
A complete DevOps incident management platform should include:
- Automation: Reduce manual toil and streamline response workflows from declaration to resolution.
- Collaboration: Integrate deeply with chat platforms like Slack to keep teams aligned without context switching.
- End-to-End Lifecycle Management: Provide support from detection and alerting through resolution and learning.
- Analytics and Insights: Offer data-driven tools for tracking key metrics like Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) and Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) to improve processes.
- Cost-Effectiveness: Feature transparent pricing that doesn't penalize teams for adding responders or essential features.
A Comparison of Leading On-Call and Incident Management Platforms
To understand the current landscape of site reliability engineering tools, let's compare PagerDuty, Opsgenie, and Rootly.
Feature
Rootly
PagerDuty
Opsgenie
Primary Function
End-to-End Incident Management
Alerting & On-Call Management
Alerting & On-Call Management
Workflow Automation
Extensive & Codeless
Basic; Add-on costs
Moderate
Slack/Teams Integration
Native ChatOps; Full Incident Mgmt
Basic Notifications & Actions
Basic Notifications & Actions
Integrated Retrospectives
Yes, with Action Item Tracking
Limited; Manual Process
Limited; Manual Process
Long-Term Viability
Actively Developed & Supported
Established but slow innovation [2]
Being Discontinued [3]
PagerDuty: The Legacy Alerting Tool
PagerDuty's primary function is as an alert management software that excels at notifying on-call engineers. However, its pricing structure can become prohibitively expensive as teams scale, with essential features often locked behind higher-tier plans costing $41 or more per user per month [4]. Furthermore, many users feel its feature set hasn't kept pace with modern DevOps incident management practices, focusing more on alerting than on comprehensive resolution workflows [2].
Opsgenie: The Discontinued Alternative
Opsgenie has been a common PagerDuty competitor, particularly for teams in the Atlassian ecosystem. However, Atlassian is discontinuing Opsgenie, with a full shutdown scheduled for April 5, 2027 [3]. This forces current users to find Opsgenie alternatives and manage a complex migration that carries risks of data loss and feature gaps. Its impending shutdown makes it an unreliable long-term choice for any team building a sustainable reliability practice [5].
Rootly: The Modern, End-to-End Platform
Rootly is a comprehensive platform designed for the entire incident lifecycle, not just alerting. It moves beyond simple notifications to provide a cohesive command center for response and resolution. Its key differentiators include:
- Seamless Automation: Automate repetitive tasks like creating Slack channels, paging responders, updating status pages, and generating retrospectives.
- Native ChatOps: Allows teams to manage the entire incident from within Slack or Microsoft Teams, reducing context-switching.
- Full Lifecycle Coverage: Rootly guides teams from detection and triage through response, resolution, and learning, covering every aspect of an incident's journey.
- Integrated Retrospectives: Turns every incident into a learning opportunity with built-in retrospective templates and automated action item tracking.
Why Rootly is the Best PagerDuty Alternative
For teams seeking the best oncall software for teams, Rootly is superior to PagerDuty and other alternatives for several key reasons.
From Alerting Tool to Incident Management Platform
PagerDuty focuses on routing alerts, but resolving an incident efficiently requires collaboration, automation, and context. Rootly provides this complete response process. While other PagerDuty alternatives exist, they often present as point solutions rather than a fully integrated platform that handles the entire incident lifecycle [6]. Rootly's strength is its ability to serve as a single pane of glass for the entire response.
Unmatched Workflow Automation and Collaboration
Rootly's workflow engine automates dozens of manual steps, saving engineers critical time during an incident. The ability to manage incidents directly in Slack, where teams already collaborate, is a game-changer. For example, you can automatically create a dedicated incident channel, invite the right on-call teams, pull in monitoring dashboards, and post automated updates to a status page without ever leaving your chat client.
A Focus on Learning and Continuous Improvement
Effective SRE tools for incident tracking must also facilitate learning. Rootly’s built-in retrospectives and analytics help teams identify patterns, track follow-up actions, and ultimately improve system reliability. This focus on continuous improvement is a core tenet of SRE and goes far beyond the capabilities of traditional on-call tools. Rootly provides a structured process for post-incident reviews, turning valuable data into actionable insights.
Making the Switch to a Better Incident Management Process
Migrating from PagerDuty or Opsgenie to Rootly is straightforward. Rootly integrates with the same monitoring and alerting sources your team already uses, such as Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, and Sentry, ensuring a smooth transition. The platform is designed to seamlessly ingest alerts and initiate automated workflows. You can review Rootly's documentation to see how easily alerts are managed and incidents are created. This migration is an opportunity to fundamentally improve your incident management process with powerful automation, not just replicate old workflows in a new tool.
Conclusion: Move Beyond Paging and Start Resolving Faster
Legacy tools like PagerDuty are focused on alerting, but modern reliability challenges require a comprehensive incident management software. With Opsgenie being discontinued, now is the perfect time for teams to re-evaluate their tooling and adopt a platform built for the future.
Rootly is the clear choice for its end-to-end automation, deep collaboration features, and dedicated focus on continuous improvement. It empowers teams to not only respond to incidents but to resolve them faster and learn from them more effectively.
Ready to transform your incident response? Book a demo of Rootly today and see how you can move beyond simple alerting.