In today's digital world, maintaining system reliability is essential for business success. Effective incident management allows engineering teams to detect, respond to, and resolve technical outages faster. For many years, PagerDuty has been a key player in this field, known for its on-call management and alerting. However, as technology evolves, the need for more integrated site reliability engineering tools has paved the way for modern alternatives.
Rootly stands out as a comprehensive, modern incident management software that offers a powerful and complete solution. This article compares Rootly and PagerDuty, helping DevOps and SRE teams decide which of the top incident management tools is right for their needs.
What is PagerDuty? An Overview
PagerDuty is an established digital operations management platform, primarily known for its strong on-call scheduling and alerting features. It helps teams detect and respond to incidents by routing alerts from monitoring systems to the correct on-call engineers through various channels.
Core Functionality
PagerDuty's main job is to help teams spot and react to incidents. It connects with monitoring systems to catch alerts and then sends them to the correct on-call engineers. Its extensive list of integrations has made it a central point for managing alerts.
Market Perception and Pricing
While PagerDuty is a powerful tool, some users raise concerns about its pricing model. The cost can add up quickly as teams expand, and important features like advanced workflows are often part of more expensive plans or add-ons [7]. User reviews often praise its structured approach to on-call schedules but also note that the pricing can be complex [6].
What is Rootly? A Comprehensive Incident Management Platform
Rootly is an enterprise incident management solution built to handle the entire incident lifecycle from one place. It goes beyond simple alerting to offer a complete command center for detection, response, resolution, and learning.
End-to-End Incident Lifecycle Management
Rootly centralizes all incident-related activities, creating a single source of truth that covers every stage of an incident:
- Detection: Connects with monitoring tools to declare incidents automatically.
- Response: Automates tasks and centralizes communication to help teams respond quickly.
- Retrospectives: Simplifies learning from incidents with automated timelines and data collection.
- Analytics: Offers insights into key metrics to help improve reliability over time.
This complete approach means Rootly manages the entire incident management process from the first alert to the final review.
Native On-Call and Automation
Rootly includes Rootly On-Call, a built-in on-call management solution with schedules, escalation policies, and live call routing. This feature is paired with a powerful workflow automation engine that eliminates the manual, repetitive tasks that can slow down responders. Teams can get started with ease, creating automated playbooks that coordinate people, tools, and processes for a faster, more consistent response.
Feature-by-Feature: Rootly vs. PagerDuty
When you compare oncall platforms, it's important to look at the entire incident management process, not just alerting.
Incident Response and Automation
- PagerDuty: Focuses mainly on the alerting and notification part of an incident. While it has some response features, they are not as deeply integrated as a dedicated platform.
- Rootly: Offers a complete, Slack-native incident response experience where engineers already work. It automates tedious tasks like creating incident channels, inviting responders, and building post-mortem timelines [1]. With over 70 integrations, Rootly's customizable workflows can connect your entire toolchain, from Jira and Zoom to GitHub and Zendesk [5].
On-Call Scheduling and Alert Management
- PagerDuty: This is PagerDuty's core strength, with robust features for on-call scheduling, complex escalation rules, and multi-channel notifications.
- Rootly: Offers
Rootly On-Call, a native and full-featured on-call solution that competes directly with PagerDuty. It provides everything teams need, including schedules, rotations, escalations, and live call routing, making it one of the best oncall software for teams. For those not ready to switch, Rootly provides a deep integration with PagerDuty, allowing teams to use Rootly for advanced incident management while PagerDuty handles paging.
Retrospectives and Learning
- PagerDuty: Provides basic post-mortem reporting, but the process is largely manual and separate from the incident response itself.
- Rootly: Features a dedicated and automated retrospective process. It automatically creates a full incident timeline, capturing key decisions, chat messages, and metrics. This simplifies blameless reviews and tracking follow-up actions to improve long-term reliability.
Pricing and Total Cost of Ownership
- PagerDuty: Its pricing starts at $25 per user/month and can increase quickly as teams grow [8]. Many features crucial for a mature DevOps incident management process are often available only in higher-priced plans.
- Rootly: Offers a more transparent, all-in-one pricing model. By combining incident management, on-call scheduling, status pages, and retrospectives in one platform, it provides a better total cost of ownership. Rootly is often listed among the top PagerDuty alternatives that help organizations lower costs while reducing Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) [4].
Why Teams are Choosing Rootly as a PagerDuty Alternative
The market is changing. As older tools like Opsgenie are phased out, many teams are looking for modern Opsgenie alternatives that do more than just send alerts [3]. Here's why they're choosing Rootly.
- Unified Platform: Rootly brings the entire incident lifecycle into one place, removing the need to manage and connect separate tools for alerting, communication, and retrospectives.
- Modern, Developer-Friendly Experience: Its Slack-native workflow lets developers manage incidents in the tool they use every day, reducing context switching and enabling faster collaboration.
- Superior Automation and Customization: The no-code workflow engine allows teams to automate their response plans to match their specific needs, ensuring speed and consistency.
- Cost-Effective Solution: By consolidating multiple tools into a single platform, Rootly offers significant value and a more predictable cost structure for growing teams [2].
Can Rootly Completely Replace PagerDuty?
Yes, Rootly is designed to be a complete replacement for PagerDuty. With the launch of Rootly On-Call, the platform now covers all the essential features teams rely on PagerDuty for—including on-call schedules, escalations, and an alert management software comparison—while adding a top-tier incident management layer.
For teams not ready for a full switch, Rootly offers a flexible transition. You can leverage Rootly for superior incident management while continuing to use PagerDuty for paging. The deep PagerDuty integration ensures a smooth workflow, letting you update your incident response process at your own pace.
Conclusion: Making the Right Choice for Your Team
While PagerDuty is a strong tool for on-call alerting, the landscape of DevOps incident management has evolved. Today's teams need an integrated platform that simplifies collaboration, automates manual work, and encourages continuous improvement.
As one of the best PagerDuty alternatives, Rootly offers a more integrated, automated, and cost-effective solution for teams looking to mature their incident management practices. It is the modern, all-in-one platform for site reliability engineering.
Ready to see how a unified platform can help you reduce MTTR and improve reliability? Book a demo of Rootly to see the difference for yourself.