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When an outage occurs, every second counts. Engineering and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams need the best tools to manage incidents effectively. PagerDuty and Rootly are two of the top incident management tools available today, but they serve different purposes and come with vastly different approaches.
This article provides a detailed comparison of Rootly vs PagerDuty for incident management. We'll break down the key differences in cost, response speed, and automation capabilities to help you decide which platform is the right fit for your team, whether you're looking for PagerDuty alternatives or choosing your first incident management solution.
What is PagerDuty?
PagerDuty is a long-standing, well-known platform primarily focused on alerting and on-call management. Its main job is to ensure the right person is notified when a technical issue arises. It's effective at routing alerts from monitoring systems to the on-call engineer.
While PagerDuty has added some incident management features over the years, they are often basic or require purchasing more expensive plans. For many teams, it functions as "a very expensive phone call," getting the message out but doing little to help resolve the actual incident. Furthermore, its pricing can be a major hurdle for many organizations, especially as teams grow and find they don't use all the advanced features they're paying for [1].
What is Rootly?
Rootly is a modern, end-to-end incident management platform built to handle the entire incident lifecycle. It goes far beyond basic alerting to provide a complete, integrated solution. With Rootly, teams can manage everything from initial detection and response to communication, retrospectives, and analytics, all in one place. This covers the full incident lifecycle from start to finish.
A key differentiator is Rootly's design for collaboration. It lives inside Slack, where your teams already communicate, removing friction and context-switching. Its powerful automation engine streamlines processes and eliminates manual toil for responders. With the introduction of Rootly On-Call, it now serves as a comprehensive replacement for PagerDuty, combining on-call scheduling and alerting with its already robust incident management capabilities. The platform also offers seamless integration with other tools, including PagerDuty, for teams looking to enhance their existing setup.
Head-to-Head Comparison: PagerDuty vs Rootly for Incident Management
Let's put these two tools in a direct showdown, comparing the aspects that matter most to response teams: cost, speed, and automation.
Feature
PagerDuty
Rootly
Core Focus
Alerting & On-Call Management
End-to-End Incident Management
Pricing Model
Per-user, tiered with add-ons
Transparent, value-based pricing
Automation
Alert routing & escalations
Extensive workflows for hundreds of tasks
User Interface
Often described as dated and complex
Intuitive, guided, and modern
Retrospectives
Basic, often requires manual effort
Automated, data-rich, and collaborative
Slack Integration
Bolt-on, can be clunky
Native, core to the entire experience
On-Call Features
Standard scheduling & escalations
Advanced features like gap detection & shadow rotations
Round 1: Cost & Pricing Models
PagerDuty Pricing
PagerDuty uses a tiered pricing structure with plans like Free, Professional, and Business [2]. Costs are calculated per user, which can escalate quickly as your team grows. Many advanced features are locked behind higher-priced tiers, leading to frequent upsells.
Organizations often face "hidden costs" that aren't apparent in their marketing materials, making budgeting unpredictable [3]. Depending on the plan and user count, annual costs can range from $5,000 to over $70,000, a significant investment for any company [4].
Rootly Pricing
Rootly offers a more straightforward and transparent approach. The goal is to make best-in-class incident response accessible to everyone. Rootly delivers more features at a fraction of the cost—often half that of PagerDuty—without surprise bills, per-alert fees, or constant upsells. This philosophy ensures you get a complete solution without breaking the bank. For a tailored quote, you can get customized pricing estimates to see exactly how much you can save [5].
Verdict: Rootly wins on cost. Its predictable and cost-effective pricing model provides a comprehensive platform without the expensive, per-user add-ons and upsells that characterize PagerDuty.
Round 2: Speed & Response Time
PagerDuty's Approach
PagerDuty is fast at one thing: paging the on-call responder. It excels at getting an alert to the right person's phone quickly, which is a critical first step.
Rootly's Approach
Rootly accelerates the entire incident lifecycle, not just the initial notification. As one user noted, "With Rootly, incident spin-up time has been reduced from minutes to seconds." This speed comes from intelligent automation that kicks in the moment an incident is declared. Rootly automatically:
- Creates a dedicated Slack channel.
- Invites the correct responders based on on-call schedules.
- Starts a video conference call (e.g., Zoom, Google Meet).
- Updates internal and external status pages.
Verdict: While PagerDuty is fast at alerting, Rootly is faster at mobilizing the team and managing the end-to-end response. By automating the crucial first steps, Rootly helps teams significantly reduce Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR).
Round 3: Automation & Workflows
PagerDuty's Automation
PagerDuty’s automation capabilities are primarily centered around alert routing and escalation policies. It's good at figuring out who to notify and when to escalate if there's no response.
Rootly's Automation
Rootly's automation is far more extensive and powerful. Its workflow engine can automate hundreds of manual tasks that responders would otherwise have to perform. For example, Rootly workflows can:
- Automatically create a retrospective document when an incident is resolved.
- Assign roles (like Incident Commander) to on-call responders.
- Send scheduled updates to stakeholder channels in Slack.
- Sync incident status two-ways with integrated tools, including PagerDuty.
Verdict: Rootly is the clear winner in automation. Its flexible workflow engine goes far beyond PagerDuty's alert-focused automation, saving teams valuable time and reducing the chance of human error.
User Experience and Innovation
When comparing the Rootly vs PagerDuty experience, user feedback tells a clear story. PagerDuty's user interface is often described as "dated, unintuitive, and hard to configure." In contrast, Rootly is praised for its "guided, intuitive, and easy to navigate" design.
This extends to feature development. Users often note PagerDuty's stagnant product development, while Rootly is known for its rapid innovation. As one user put it, "The single most impressive thing about Rootly is how fast they ship." You can find more direct user feedback in this PagerDuty vs. Rootly comparison.
Rootly also offers unique, human-centric features that PagerDuty lacks, such as:
- Native shadow rotations for easier on-call training.
- An on-call pay calculator.
- Automatic schedule gap detection.
- Vacation-aware scheduling to prevent burnout.
Final Verdict: Which Tool Is Right for You?
So, in the PagerDuty vs Rootly debate, which one should you choose?
When to Choose PagerDuty:
PagerDuty might be sufficient if your team only needs a basic on-call alerting tool. If you're not looking for a comprehensive incident management solution and your primary need is to simply notify engineers, it can get the job done.
When to Choose Rootly:
Rootly is the ideal choice for teams seeking a powerful PagerDuty alternative that offers a complete, automated, and cost-effective platform. It is the modern solution for organizations that want to standardize processes, eliminate manual work, and foster a culture of continuous improvement. If you want to manage the entire incident lifecycle efficiently and collaboratively, Rootly is built for you.
Ready to see the difference for yourself? Explore Rootly's features and book a demo today to discover how you can supercharge your incident response.