PagerDuty was a pioneer in the on-call and alerting space, establishing itself as a go-to tool for many organizations. However, the landscape of DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) has evolved. Today, many teams are actively searching for PagerDuty alternatives that offer more than just alerting. This shift is driven by high costs, platform complexity, and the growing need for an integrated, all-in-one solution for modern DevOps incident management. Users often find PagerDuty's plans complex and lacking flexibility, prompting them to seek alternatives that offer better support and integrations [6].
This article will compare the top incident management tools and demonstrate why Rootly is the most powerful and comprehensive choice for engineering teams looking to upgrade their reliability stack in 2026.
Why Teams Are Searching for PagerDuty Alternatives
The reasons for migrating away from PagerDuty go beyond simple cost savings. Modern engineering teams require a platform that supports the entire incident lifecycle, from initial detection to long-term learning and improvement.
- Complex and Expensive Pricing: PagerDuty's pricing model is a significant pain point for many organizations. Essential features are often gated behind expensive, higher-tier plans, making it difficult for teams to scale without unpredictable costs [8]. As your team grows, you shouldn't be penalized with prohibitive per-user fees.
- Fragmented Incident Management: PagerDuty excels at alerting and on-call, but the broader incident management software workflow feels disjointed. Critical processes like running the incident, communicating with stakeholders, and writing retrospectives often require separate tools or clunky add-ons, creating data silos and operational friction.
- Lack of Modern, Integrated Workflows: Modern responders live in collaboration tools like Slack. While PagerDuty offers an integration, it can feel like a bolt-on rather than a native experience. Teams want to manage incidents end-to-end within their primary communication hub without the constant context switching that hinders response efficiency.
- The Need for a Unified Platform: There is a clear demand for a single platform that handles the entire incident lifecycle seamlessly. This includes everything from alert aggregation and on-call paging to automated response workflows, real-time collaboration, and integrated learning loops. A truly unified platform ensures data consistency and operational coherence across all phases of an incident.
Comparing Top On-Call and Incident Management Platforms
When you compare oncall platforms, it's crucial to look beyond just alerting. A modern solution must provide robust capabilities across the entire incident lifecycle. Here’s how the leading platforms stack up.
Feature
Rootly
PagerDuty
Opsgenie
All-in-One Platform
✅ Yes, fully integrated
❌ No, primarily alerting & on-call
❌ No, primarily alerting & on-call
On-Call Management
✅ Yes, native scheduling & alerting
✅ Yes, core feature
✅ Yes, core feature
Slack-Native UI
✅ Yes, fully native experience
🟨 Limited, requires context switching
🟨 Limited, requires context switching
Workflow Automation
✅ Extensive no-code automation engine
🟨 Basic, requires add-ons
🟨 Basic, requires add-ons
AI-Powered Features
✅ Yes, for summaries & insights
🟨 Limited AI capabilities
🟨 Limited AI capabilities
Integrated Retrospectives
✅ Yes, auto-generated from incident data
❌ No, requires manual effort or add-ons
❌ No, requires manual effort or add-ons
Cost-Effectiveness
✅ Transparent, all-inclusive pricing
❌ Complex tiers with hidden costs
❌ Complex tiers with hidden costs
Rootly: The All-in-One Incident Management Platform
Rootly is the modern, comprehensive platform engineered to manage the entire incident lifecycle from a single hub. It's the clear choice for teams who want to stop juggling tools and adopt a proactive, automated approach to reliability.
- Rootly’s powerful, no-code workflow automation engine eliminates manual toil. It automates hundreds of tasks, such as creating dedicated Slack channels, inviting the right responders, starting a Zoom bridge, and keeping status pages updated, so your team can focus on what matters.
- The platform offers a seamless, native Slack integration that allows teams to declare, manage, and resolve incidents without ever leaving their primary workspace. This command-center approach centralizes all communication and actions for maximum efficiency.
- With full on-call scheduling, escalations, and alerting, Rootly is a true PagerDuty replacement. You can consolidate your tooling stack and manage everything in one place, whether you choose to replace or integrate with PagerDuty.
- Built-in features for retrospectives and analytics create a powerful feedback loop for continuous improvement. Incident data is automatically pulled into a post-mortem template, and analytics dashboards track key metrics without requiring a separate tool.
PagerDuty: The Traditional On-Call Leader
PagerDuty is the established incumbent in on-call scheduling and alerting. Its platform is robust and highly reliable for its core function: notifying the right person quickly when a system fails. With downtime costing companies an average of $9,000 per minute, reliable alerting is a critical function [2].
However, its weaknesses become apparent when teams try to manage the entire incident response process. The incident response capabilities are less mature than its alerting features, and achieving a complete workflow often requires purchasing expensive add-ons or integrating other site reliability engineering tools.
Opsgenie: The Atlassian Alternative
As part of the Atlassian suite, Opsgenie is a strong contender and a common choice for teams heavily invested in tools like Jira and Confluence, but many still seek Opsgenie alternatives. Its strengths lie in flexible on-call scheduling and alert routing.
Similar to PagerDuty, its primary focus is on alerting and on-call management. While it includes incident management features, they aren't as deeply integrated or automated as Rootly's. This leaves your response teams to manually bridge the gap between getting an alert and resolving the underlying issue. Many other alternatives also exist, each with different strengths in areas like pricing transparency and noise reduction [7].
What’s Included in the Modern SRE Tooling Stack?
Modern reliability engineering requires more than just an alerting tool; it demands a cohesive set of systems that automate processes, provide deep insights, and facilitate learning. The modern SRE tooling stack is built around a central incident management hub that connects monitoring, communication, and analytics. With outages costing many organizations over $100,000, investing in a robust stack provides a clear and immediate return.
From Alerting to Action: Automated Incident Response
The paradigm has shifted from manual runbooks and checklists to automated, event-driven workflows. Instead of an on-call engineer manually working through a list of tasks, a modern incident management platform orchestrates the initial response.
- Rootly's workflows automatically create a dedicated Slack channel, invite responders from the on-call schedule, assign incident roles, and spin up a video conference bridge the moment an incident is declared.
- This automation is critical for reducing Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR). It frees up your engineers from administrative overhead so they can focus on diagnostics and remediation.
- With a vast ecosystem of incident response tools available, having a central hub like Rootly that automates and orchestrates them is essential for efficiency and consistency [5].
Learning and Improvement: Integrated Retrospectives (Post-mortems)
Post-incident reviews are the cornerstone of a blameless culture and a key driver for improving system reliability. However, this process is often disconnected and manual, leading to missed opportunities for improvement.
- Rootly automates this crucial step by generating a retrospective document pre-populated with data captured directly from the incident timeline. This includes the full chat log, a timeline of key events, metric charts, and action items.
- This is a stark contrast to tools where retrospectives are an afterthought, requiring engineers to manually copy and paste information from multiple sources into a separate document.
- By integrating retrospectives, Rootly ensures that follow-up action items are tracked to completion, turning hard-won lessons into concrete reliability improvements.
Data-Driven Decisions: Comprehensive Analytics
You can't improve what you don't measure. High-performing teams rely on data to understand incident trends, identify hotspots, and justify engineering investments.
- It is essential for teams to have tools that provide robust analytics to make informed decisions [3]. Rootly provides comprehensive analytics out-of-the-box, tracking key reliability metrics like MTTR, Mean Time to Detect (MTTD), and incident frequency by service, severity, or customer impact.
- These dashboards allow engineering leaders to spot trends, pinpoint services that need attention, and measure the effectiveness of reliability initiatives—all without needing a separate business intelligence tool or a data analyst.
Conclusion: Move Beyond Paging with Rootly
While PagerDuty remains a capable tool for the best oncall software for teams, the demands of modern incident management have outgrown its alert-centric model. Today's SRE and DevOps teams need a unified platform that handles the entire incident lifecycle, not just a single piece of it.
Rootly is the strongest of the PagerDuty alternatives because it delivers a complete, integrated, and automated solution. By combining on-call management, automated incident response, native Slack collaboration, and built-in retrospectives, Rootly provides a single pane of glass for reliability. The benefits are clear: lower total cost of ownership, reduced operational complexity, and, most importantly, faster incident resolution.
To see how Rootly can help your team move beyond basic paging and build a more resilient engineering culture, explore our comprehensive incident management platform.