PagerDuty has long been a foundational tool in incident management, primarily for its on-call alerting capabilities. However, as engineering practices and system complexity evolve, modern teams require solutions that are more comprehensive, automated, and cost-effective. Many organizations find themselves constrained by common pain points associated with PagerDuty, including high costs for essential features, operational complexity, and a lack of deep, native workflow automation [2]. Rootly emerges as the modern, all-in-one incident management platform designed to address these challenges, making it the best PagerDuty alternative for teams aiming to build more resilient systems.
What is PagerDuty?
PagerDuty is a widely recognized platform in the DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) space, primarily known for its on-call management, alerting, and incident response services. It excels at aggregating alerts from various monitoring tools and ensuring the right on-call engineer is notified when an issue arises. Its strong brand awareness has made it a default choice for many organizations over the years [1].
Why Teams Are Looking for PagerDuty Alternatives
The search for PagerDuty alternatives is driven by the evolving needs of fast-paced, modern engineering teams who require more than just alert notifications. Key drivers include cost, scope, and automation capabilities.
1. High Costs and Complex Pricing Tiers
A significant factor for many teams is PagerDuty's pricing model. Costs can escalate quickly, especially for growing teams, as its per-user pricing adds up. Furthermore, many critical features necessary for a mature incident response process are often locked behind more expensive, higher-tier plans, forcing organizations into costly upgrades to get the functionality they truly need [2].
2. Limited Scope Beyond Alerting
While PagerDuty is proficient at alerting and on-call scheduling, its native capabilities are less comprehensive for managing the entire incident lifecycle. Modern teams need a unified platform that seamlessly supports incident coordination, stakeholder communication, automated retrospectives, and actionable analytics. A tool focused primarily on the notification phase leaves significant gaps in the overall response and learning process.
3. Lack of Deep, Natively-Integrated Automation
Today's incident response workflows demand automation that is deeply integrated into the collaboration tools where engineers already work, such as Slack or Microsoft Teams. Teams are seeking a central command center that automates repetitive tasks like creating dedicated incident channels, pulling in the right responders based on service ownership, and keeping stakeholders updated. This level of native workflow automation reduces cognitive load and minimizes the opportunity for manual error during a stressful event.
Introducing Rootly: The All-in-One PagerDuty Alternative
Rootly is a comprehensive incident management platform built to address the limitations of traditional alerting tools. It provides an end-to-end solution that helps engineering teams detect, respond, resolve, and learn from every incident.
Unlike tools that focus only on a piece of the puzzle, Rootly streamlines the entire process within a single platform. For teams looking to move away from PagerDuty entirely, Rootly can serve as a complete replacement. It offers its own robust on-call and alerting solution, Rootly On-Call, which integrates seamlessly into the broader incident management workflow. This allows organizations to consolidate their tooling, reduce costs, and manage the full incident lifecycle from a single pane of glass.
Rootly vs. PagerDuty: A Head-to-Head Comparison
To understand why Rootly is the superior choice for modern teams, let's compare the platforms across several key dimensions.
Feature
PagerDuty
Rootly
Core Functionality
Excels at on-call scheduling and routing alerts to the correct on-call engineer.
Manages the entire incident lifecycle: from automated incident creation and triage to coordinating the response, resolving the incident, and generating actionable retrospectives.
Automation
Offers some automation, but advanced workflows often require higher-tier plans or custom scripting.
Features a powerful, no-code workflow engine that automates hundreds of manual steps, such as setting up incident channels, assigning roles, and syncing tickets with Jira.
Collaboration
Often requires users to context-switch between the PagerDuty UI, Slack, and other tools, creating a fragmented experience.
Provides a seamless, Slack-native experience, allowing responders to manage the entire incident from a unified command center without leaving their primary collaboration tool.
Integrations
Provides a wide range of integrations.
Offers deep, bi-directional integrations, including a powerful one that allows teams to use Rootly and PagerDuty together or migrate smoothly. This includes importing services and viewing on-call schedules directly in Slack.
Pricing and Value
Per-user pricing model that can become costly as teams scale. Essential features are often gated behind expensive tiers.
Offers predictable, inclusive pricing that provides a more feature-rich platform, delivering superior value and a lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
A Look at Other Top Incident Management Tools
The market for incident management solutions is growing, with several PagerDuty and Opsgenie alternatives emerging to meet different needs [4].
Opsgenie
Once a popular alternative owned by Atlassian, Opsgenie is being phased out. Atlassian announced it will stop selling Opsgenie on June 4, 2025, and will shut down the service entirely on April 5, 2027 [7]. This development is forcing many teams to migrate and evaluate other top incident management tools.
FireHydrant
FireHydrant is another platform that offers an all-in-one solution for incident management, combining alerting, on-call, and incident response [6]. It focuses on helping teams establish consistent processes and automate response workflows.
Other Competitors (Squadcast, Zenduty, Xurrent)
A number of other platforms have entered the market, often focusing on providing cost-effective alternatives to PagerDuty [3]. Tools like Squadcast and Xurrent IMR aim to provide robust feature sets for on-call management and incident response at a more accessible price point [5]. While these platforms address the cost issue, Rootly stands out for its maturity, depth of automation, and seamlessly integrated user experience that covers the complete incident lifecycle.
Conclusion: Why Rootly is the Best On-Call Software for Modern Teams
While PagerDuty remains a solid tool for alert notifications, modern engineering teams require a more integrated, automated, and collaborative platform. The best on-call software for teams today is one that goes beyond just waking someone up. It must support the entire incident management process, from detection to resolution and learning.
Rootly provides this complete solution. By centralizing the incident lifecycle, reducing manual toil through its powerful workflow engine, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement, Rootly empowers teams to build more reliable software. It helps teams not only resolve incidents faster but also learn from them effectively to prevent future occurrences. For organizations looking to upgrade their incident management capabilities, Rootly is the clear choice.
Ready to see the best PagerDuty alternative in action? Schedule a demo or start a free trial of Rootly today.