Rootly vs PagerDuty: Smarter Incident Automation Compared

In modern incident management, automation isn't just a nice-to-have; it's essential. Automation helps teams reduce manual work, respond to incidents faster, and ensure every response follows a consistent, best-practice process. But as you look for the right tool, a central question emerges: when it comes to incident automation, which platform offers a smarter, more comprehensive solution—Rootly or PagerDuty?

The landscape is also shifting. With tools like Opsgenie being sunset by 2027, many teams are re-evaluating their incident management stack and looking for a new home [1]. This article compares the automation capabilities of Rootly and PagerDuty to help your team make an informed decision and find the best fit for your needs.

What is Rootly's Approach to Automation?

Rootly's approach to automation is built around a powerful and flexible engine called Workflows. This system is designed to handle every part of your incident response, from the first alert to the final retrospective.

Core Philosophy

The core of Rootly's automation is a simple but powerful "trigger-condition-action" model. Think of it like a set of "if-then" statements for your incidents.

• Trigger: An event that starts the automation (e.g., an incident is created).
• Condition: A specific rule that must be true for the automation to run (e.g., only if the incident severity is SEV1).
• Action: The task that Rootly automatically performs (e.g., create a dedicated Slack channel).

This model allows teams to encode their exact incident response process directly into the platform. You can learn more about how these workflows function in our documentation.

Key Features

Rootly can automate the entire incident lifecycle, not just parts of it. This means you can automate common tasks like:

• Creating a dedicated Slack channel for the incident.
• Paging the correct on-call responders.
• Creating a Jira ticket to track follow-up work.
• Sending automated reminders to post status updates.

By automating these processes, teams can focus on solving the problem at hand. Rootly's Incident Workflows are designed to handle these specific, in-the-moment needs of an active incident.

What is PagerDuty's Approach to Automation?

PagerDuty's automation, known as "Workflow Automation" (which was previously a separate product called Catalytic), has a different focus. It's primarily designed to help teams standardize and automate routine, repetitive operational tasks.

Core Philosophy

PagerDuty Workflow Automation helps you build automated processes for tasks that you perform regularly. The goal is to reduce manual effort on predictable jobs, freeing up engineers for more complex work [6]. These automations are built around four main concepts: Triggers, Processes, Tasks, and Data.

Key Use Cases

PagerDuty's automation is often used for planned work or simple, repeatable actions. Common examples include:

• Automating a database upgrade process.
• Restarting a service with a single command.
• Running diagnostic checks on a system.

These are valuable for streamlining standard operating procedures [7]. However, this scope is different from the end-to-end incident management automation that deals with the chaos of an unplanned outage.

Automated Workflows Comparison: Rootly vs. PagerDuty

When comparing Rootly automation vs competitors, the differences in flexibility, ease of use, and scope become clear. Let's break down the automated workflows comparison.

Flexibility and Customization

Rootly

Rootly’s workflow engine offers deep customization. You can build complex logic with multiple triggers and conditions (e.g., run a workflow if all of these conditions are met, or if any of them are). This lets you build automation that perfectly matches your company's unique processes, instead of forcing your team into a rigid, pre-defined structure. You can even build resilient workflows by setting certain actions to Skip on Failure, ensuring that one small error doesn't stop the entire process.

PagerDuty

PagerDuty’s automation is better suited for pre-defined runbooks and standardized processes [8]. While this is effective for simple, repetitive tasks, it can be less flexible when you need to adapt to the unpredictable nature of a complex incident. The focus is more on executing a known script rather than dynamically responding to changing conditions.

Ease of Setup and User Experience

Rootly

Rootly is designed to be powerful yet easy to use. With features like Smart Defaults, teams can get started with powerful automation right away without needing a lot of initial configuration. The user interface is guided, intuitive, and modern, making it accessible even for non-technical team members who might be involved in an incident.

PagerDuty

Configuring automation in PagerDuty can be more complex. Some users find the interface less intuitive and harder to configure, which can create a barrier to adoption. This is a key difference when considering which tool will be easier for your entire team to embrace.

Scope of Automation

Rootly

Rootly automates the entire incident response lifecycle within a single, unified platform. This includes:

• Automatically declaring an incident from an alert [2] [1].
• Setting up communication channels in Slack.
• Assembling the right response team automatically.
• Guiding the team through retrospectives.
• Tracking action items to prevent future incidents.

PagerDuty

PagerDuty is primarily an alerting and on-call management tool with automation features added on. Its automation is often focused on the initial alert and separate operational tasks, rather than the collaborative process of managing an incident from start to finish. While Rootly and PagerDuty can integrate, their core focus on automation is fundamentally different.

Rootly Automation vs. Homegrown Runbooks: ROI Breakdown

Many teams start by creating their own internal scripts and manual runbooks for incident response. While this seems cost-effective at first, it comes with a hidden cost.

The Challenge of Homegrown Solutions

Building and maintaining in-house tools requires significant engineering time. Engineers who could be building your core product are instead tied up writing and debugging internal incident management scripts. As your company grows and processes change, this maintenance burden only increases.

The Rootly Advantage

Rootly provides a fully managed platform that eliminates the maintenance burden of homegrown tools. As Joanne H., Engineering Director at Canva, noted, "We no longer need to have engineers maintaining an in-house solution - we could never catch up to the number of features Rootly was shipping, and the ongoing operational load was significant."

By investing in a dedicated platform like Rootly, you free up your engineers to focus on what they do best: building great products for your customers.

Conclusion: Which Platform Offers Better Incident Automation?

So, Rootly vs PagerDuty: which offers better incident automation? The answer depends on what you're trying to automate.

Summary of Differences

• Rootly provides a flexible, end-to-end incident automation platform designed to manage the entire lifecycle of an unplanned incident.
• PagerDuty focuses on alerting and offers workflow automation for standardized, repeatable operational tasks.

Why Rootly is the Smarter Choice

For teams seeking to automate their entire incident management process with a modern, easy-to-use, and highly customizable engine, Rootly is the superior choice. It goes beyond basic alerting to become the central nervous system for your incident response, ensuring every incident is handled quickly, consistently, and effectively.

Ready to see the difference for yourself? Explore Rootly's comprehensive features and straightforward pricing to see why more and more teams are choosing Rootly to build a more resilient engineering culture.

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