PagerDuty vs Rootly: Which On-Call Automation Saves Time

In today's fast-paced digital world, on-call management is more challenging than ever. Teams grapple with alert fatigue, complex manual coordination during incidents, and the staggering cost of downtime. For years, PagerDuty has been the established, traditional tool for on-call alerting, notifying teams when something breaks. However, a modern approach is needed—one that goes beyond simple notifications. Rootly enters the scene as a contemporary, AI-powered, end-to-end incident management platform, designed to automate the entire response lifecycle and save your team its most valuable asset: time.

A Quick Look at PagerDuty vs. Rootly

Understanding the fundamental differences between these two platforms is key to choosing the right one for your team.

What is PagerDuty?

PagerDuty is a well-known solution that primarily focuses on IT alerting and on-call scheduling. Its main function is to ensure the right people are notified when an issue arises. It holds a significant market position, ranking as a top solution in the IT Alerting and Incident Management category [2]. However, its core strength remains in notification rather than comprehensive incident resolution.

What is Rootly?

Rootly is a comprehensive incident management and on-call platform that automates the entire incident lifecycle, from the initial alert to the final retrospective. Unlike tools that only handle alerting, Rootly provides an end-to-end solution that integrates directly into your existing workflows, particularly within Slack. This allows teams to manage incidents without context switching, fostering seamless collaboration and faster resolution.

Head-to-Head Comparison: On-Call Automation and Features

When evaluating PagerDuty and Rootly, the differences in functionality, user experience, and cost become clear. Rootly is built as a complete solution, whereas PagerDuty often requires expensive add-ons for full incident management capabilities.

Feature

PagerDuty

Rootly

Core Functionality

Focuses on alerting, on-call scheduling, and escalations. Incident management features are often separate add-ons.

A complete platform including on-call scheduling, alerting, automated workflows, retrospectives, and an integrated AI assistant.

User Experience (UI/UX)

The interface can feel dated and unintuitive, making configuration complex.

A modern, guided, and easy-to-navigate interface that simplifies schedule configuration and overrides.

Pricing Model

Complex pricing with frequent upsells, per-alert fees, and add-on costs that can lead to surprisingly high bills [5].

Straightforward and cost-effective pricing that includes more features at a fraction of the cost, with no hidden fees.

How Rootly’s AI Capabilities Save SRE Teams Time

A key differentiator for Rootly is its powerful AI, which acts like an experienced engineer embedded directly into your incident response process. Rootly AI is designed to automate cognitive tasks, reduce manual toil, and accelerate resolution.

What are Rootly’s key AI capabilities for noise reduction?

Alert fatigue is a major contributor to engineer burnout. Rootly’s AI tackles this by automatically grouping related alerts and analyzing historical data to reduce noise. The Incident Summarization feature intelligently analyzes past incidents to provide crucial context. This prevents unnecessary escalations for known or low-impact issues, allowing engineers to focus on creating clear action items and resolving what truly matters.

How does Rootly’s AI recommend next steps during active incidents?

During a live incident, every second counts. Rootly’s AI analyzes incoming data in real-time to suggest concrete mitigation and resolution steps based on similar past incidents. Teams can also use the Ask Rootly AI feature, an interactive assistant available in Slack. This assistant can answer questions, generate summaries, and help responders complete tasks, effectively serving as an expert guide throughout the incident and helping define immediate tasks and follow-ups.

Can Rootly’s AI prioritize incidents based on historical impact data?

Yes. By analyzing data from past incidents, Rootly AI helps teams accurately predict the potential business impact of a new incident. The Incident Summarization feature automatically detects similarities with historical events, highlighting how they were resolved, who was involved, and what the outcome was. This data-driven insight allows teams to prioritize resources effectively and communicate impact to stakeholders with confidence.

Why SRE Teams Switch from PagerDuty to Rootly

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams are increasingly moving away from traditional tools like PagerDuty for more integrated and efficient solutions. Here’s why Rootly is becoming the platform of choice.

To Escape the "Expensive Phone Call"

Many teams find themselves using PagerDuty for its original purpose—as an "expensive phone call" that simply triggers an alert. The actual collaboration and resolution work happens elsewhere, typically in Slack, forcing engineers to constantly switch contexts. Rootly provides a unified, Slack-native platform where teams can manage the entire incident from declaration to resolution without ever leaving their primary communication tool. As one user noted, Rootly is designed for cross-functional teams, breaking down the silos that tools like PagerDuty can create.

For Faster Resolution and Less Toil

Manual tasks during an incident are time-consuming and error-prone. Rootly automates the tedious work, such as creating incident channels, pulling in the right responders, and notifying stakeholders. This automation is a game-changer, helping teams resolve incidents up to 80% faster [6]. By eliminating toil, Rootly frees up engineers to focus on high-value problem-solving.

To Partner with an Innovative and Reliable Platform

While PagerDuty's development can seem stagnant, Rootly is committed to rapid innovation. This is demonstrated by initiatives from Rootly AI Labs, which focuses on cutting-edge research in reliability engineering [7]. Furthermore, Rootly practices what it preaches by using Sentry to maintain its own high standard of reliability, reducing its own Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) by 50% [8]. This commitment to excellence is reflected in user satisfaction, with Rootly earning a higher score than PagerDuty on third-party review sites like TrustRadius [1].

Can Rootly Replace PagerDuty?

Yes, Rootly can serve as a complete replacement for PagerDuty. With the Rootly On-Call feature, you get robust scheduling, escalations, and alerting in a single platform. Rootly even offers a seamless, automated migration process that pulls over your existing schedules and escalation policies from PagerDuty.

For teams not yet ready to make a full switch, Rootly offers a deep and flexible PagerDuty integration. You can continue using PagerDuty for alerts while leveraging Rootly to automate the rest of your incident response. With Rootly's powerful workflow engine, you can automate paging to PagerDuty, sync incident status, and much more, creating a powerful, hybrid incident management stack.

Conclusion: Stop Wasting Time on Manual Incident Tasks

The choice between PagerDuty and Rootly comes down to your team's goals. If you need a traditional alerting tool, PagerDuty gets the job done. But if you want to build a modern, efficient, and data-driven incident response practice, the choice is clear.

Rootly is an AI-powered platform that automates the entire incident lifecycle, offering massive time savings, reduced costs, and less toil for your engineers. For teams looking to move beyond basic alerts and truly optimize their on-call and incident response process, Rootly provides the path forward.

Ready to see how much time you can save? Book a demo with Rootly today.

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