Rootly vs Opsgenie: Smooth On-Call Shift Handoffs in Slack

For any Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) or operations team, the on-call shift handoff is a critical moment. A smooth transition ensures continuity, but a poor one can lead to serious problems like lost context, dropped incidents, and fragmented knowledge [6]. For the many teams that use Slack as their digital headquarters, managing these handoffs directly within the platform is essential for a fast and collaborative response.

This brings us to a comparison between two key players in the on-call space: Rootly, a modern incident management platform, and Opsgenie, a traditional on-call tool from Atlassian. This article will compare how each tool handles on-call shift handoffs inside Slack, helping you decide which is better suited for your team's workflow.

The Core Challenge: What Makes a Good On-Call Handoff?

A successful handoff is more than just saying, "You're on." The incoming engineer needs a complete picture of the system's current state. This includes transferring essential information, such as:

• The status of any ongoing incidents.
• Important context from recently resolved incidents.
• Potential issues or alerts that require close monitoring.
• Any temporary fixes or workarounds that are currently in place.

A seamless process for sharing this information is vital for reducing Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) and preventing engineer burnout. Centralizing this process in Slack is a game-changer, as it keeps critical conversations and actions in the same place where teams already collaborate.

Opsgenie's Approach to On-Call Schedules and Handoffs

Opsgenie is a well-known tool from Atlassian for managing on-call schedules. It allows teams to create daily, weekly, or custom rotations and manage them from a central team dashboard [7]. For example, you can set up a schedule where participants rotate on a daily basis, ensuring coverage is always clear [8].

While Opsgenie integrates with Slack for sending alerts and allowing some basic actions, the handoff process itself remains largely manual. Engineers typically need to type out their own summaries and context in a Slack channel, hoping they don't miss anything important. This approach lacks deep workflow automation, leaving room for human error.

Critically, Atlassian has announced the end-of-life for Opsgenie. This makes adopting it a risk and gives current users a compelling reason to explore more modern migration paths. Rootly offers a dedicated integration to help teams transition from Opsgenie and upgrade their incident management process.

Rootly's Slack-Native Solution for On-Call Management

Rootly is an AI-native incident management platform designed to run your entire on-call and incident response process directly within Slack [4]. Unlike tools that simply send notifications to Slack, Rootly’s deep integration allows you to automate the whole incident lifecycle, including the crucial on-call handoff.

Building and Managing On-Call Schedules in Rootly

With Rootly, teams can easily build and manage on-call schedules, rotations, and escalation policies from a user-friendly web app. You can add individual users or entire teams to a rotation, set clear handoff times, and define rules for weekly or custom rotations. For better organization, you can also group related schedules, making it simple to see who is on call across different services. You can learn more about how to create and manage on-call schedules in our documentation.

Executing Automated On-Call Handoffs with Rootly Workflows

Rootly's biggest advantage is its ability to automate handoff summaries using powerful, no-code workflows. Instead of manually typing notes, Rootly does the work for you.

With a simple Slack command like /rootly oncall, team members can instantly see the current on-call schedule without ever leaving their chat window. You can explore a full list of available Slack commands in Rootly.

More importantly, you can configure Rootly to automatically:

• Generate a detailed handoff report at the end of every shift, summarizing active incidents, key actions taken, and any outstanding tasks.
• Post this summary in a designated on-call channel or send it as a direct message to the incoming engineer.

This automation eliminates manual work, ensures no context is lost, and makes the handoff process consistent and reliable. Rootly’s powerful Slack integration provides endless possibilities for streamlining your workflows [2].

Handling On-the-Fly Changes with Shift Overrides

On-call life is unpredictable. Vacations, sick days, and holidays require flexibility. Rootly makes it easy to create overrides for on-call shifts, ensuring coverage is never dropped. From the web app, you can view schedules for other team members, reassign a shift to someone else, or revert an override if plans change.

Head-to-Head Comparison: Rootly vs. Opsgenie

This table provides a clear, at-a-glance comparison of how Rootly and Opsgenie handle on-call handoffs in Slack.

Feature

Rootly

Opsgenie

Slack Integration

Deeply integrated, AI-native, command-rich [1]

Basic integration for alerts and simple actions

Automated Handoffs

Fully automatable via workflows to generate and post summaries

Manual process; requires engineers to write their own handoff notes

Viewing Schedules in Slack

Yes, with /rootly oncall command

Limited; primarily managed in the web UI

Incident Management

Full lifecycle management within Slack

Primarily an alerting tool; incident response is less integrated

Platform Future

Actively developed with an AI-driven roadmap

End of life announced by Atlassian

Ease of Use

Designed for a Slack-first experience

Traditional UI, requires context switching

Why SRE Teams Switch from PagerDuty and Opsgenie to Rootly

The limitations of traditional tools are why so many SRE teams are switching from PagerDuty and Opsgenie to Rootly. The reasons go beyond just handoffs.

• Unified Platform: Rootly combines on-call scheduling, alerting, and incident management into a single platform. This reduces tool sprawl and eliminates the costs of paying for separate tools for alerting and incident response.
• True Slack-Native Workflow: With Rootly, your team can handle the entire incident lifecycle without leaving Slack. This includes creating incidents, assigning roles, running automated workflows, and managing on-call duties, which minimizes disruptive context switching [5] [1].
• Powerful Automation: Rootly’s workflow engine automates the tedious, manual tasks that bog down engineers in other tools. This includes creating incident channels, updating status pages, and, as we've seen, generating handoff reports automatically. You can even connect Rootly to other tools in your stack using services like Zapier [3].

Conclusion: The Clear Choice for Modern On-Call Teams

While Opsgenie provides basic on-call scheduling, its Slack integration isn't built for the automated, fast-paced workflows that modern teams need. With its end-of-life announced, it also represents a risky long-term investment.

Rootly emerges as the superior solution for any team that operates in Slack. It offers a unified, automated, and seamless experience that covers both on-call scheduling and end-to-end incident response. For achieving truly smooth on-call shift handoffs without the manual toil, Rootly’s deep integration and powerful workflow engine make it the definitive winner.

To see how Rootly can transform your incident management in Slack, learn more about our Slack integration.

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