Why Teams Move from Opsgenie to Rootly for Automation

Looking for Opsgenie alternatives? See why teams are upgrading to Rootly for end-to-end incident automation that goes beyond basic alerting.

Atlassian is sunsetting its standalone Opsgenie product, forcing many engineering teams to find a new home for their incident management [3]. While Opsgenie was a capable tool for on-call scheduling and alert routing, modern reliability practices demand much more than simply notifying the right person. Effective incident management in 2026 is about orchestrating the entire response process with automation.

This migration isn't just a forced change—it's an opportunity to upgrade. Teams are choosing Rootly over other Opsgenie alternatives because they need more than an alerting tool. They need a platform built for end-to-end automation that reduces manual work, accelerates resolution, and helps prevent engineer burnout.

Opsgenie's Limits in a Modern Incident Response World

Opsgenie excels at its core competency: reliable on-call scheduling and alert aggregation. It ensures that when something breaks, the right engineer gets paged. But the real work of incident response only begins after the alert fires. This is where Opsgenie's alert-centric design shows its limits.

Alert-Centric, Not Incident-Centric: The platform's model revolves around alerts, not the complete incident lifecycle. Its automation is mostly confined to filtering and routing notifications, leaving the rest of the response process manual.
Manual Toil by Default: After an alert fires, an engineer using Opsgenie typically must manually create a Slack channel, find and invite stakeholders, locate the correct runbook, start a video call, and document the timeline. Each step adds cognitive load and delays resolution.
A Clunky Migration Path: The recommended migration to Jira Service Management (JSM) is seen by many as a complex and inadequate replacement for a dedicated incident platform [1]. JSM is a general-purpose ticketing system, not a tool built for the speed and collaboration that high-severity incidents demand [2].

How Rootly Is Built for End-to-End Automation

Rootly is designed from the ground up to automate the entire incident lifecycle, picking up where alert-centric tools stop. Instead of just telling you there's a problem, Rootly helps you solve it faster by orchestrating the complete response.

Automate the Entire Response with Workflows

Rootly’s no-code workflow engine lets you codify your incident response playbooks, ensuring critical steps execute automatically and consistently. This eliminates guesswork and manual errors under pressure.

For example, a workflow can trigger when a high-severity alert is received from Datadog:

Create & Configure: Rootly automatically creates a dedicated Slack channel, like #inc-2026-02-20-api-high-error-rate.
Assemble Team: It pages the on-call SRE via Rootly's Slack-based on-call management and invites a predefined user group to the channel.
Assign Roles & Tasks: It assigns the Incident Commander role and posts an initial task checklist from a dynamic runbook.
Establish Communication: It spins up a Zoom meeting and pins the link in the channel for immediate access.
Prepare for Learning: It creates a postmortem document in Google Docs using your team's template.
Run Diagnostics: It executes a workflow step to query a service health check endpoint via an API call and posts the result directly into the incident channel.

This entire sequence runs in seconds, letting engineers focus immediately on investigation instead of administrative setup.

A True Slack-Native Experience

Responders work in Slack, and their incident management tool should meet them there. Rootly provides a true Slack-native experience where responders can manage the entire incident lifecycle without context-switching to a separate UI. Essential commands like /rootly new, /rootly add task, and /rootly resolve can all be run directly from Slack, keeping communication and action in one place [1].

Reduce Toil to Protect Engineers

This deep automation directly reduces toil—the repetitive, manual work that leads to engineer burnout. By automating incident coordination, timeline generation, and stakeholder communication, Rootly frees engineers to apply their expertise where it matters most: diagnostics and resolution. This focus is a key part of maintaining a healthy on-call culture, a topic explored further in this comparison of on-call platforms.

Comparing Automation: Opsgenie vs. Rootly

When evaluating Opsgenie alternatives, it's crucial to compare their fundamental approach to automation. The difference highlights a shift from reactive alerting to proactive incident orchestration.

Opsgenie's Automation

Focus: Alert lifecycle management.
Capabilities:
- Alert de-duplication and noise reduction.
- Routing alerts to the correct on-call schedule.
- Basic alert enrichment with static text or links.
- Limited post-alert actions that often require custom scripts and ongoing maintenance.

Rootly's Automation

Focus: Full incident lifecycle orchestration.
Capabilities:
- Executable runbooks built with a no-code workflow editor.
- Automated creation of communication channels (Slack, Teams), video calls (Zoom, Meet), and tickets (Jira).
- Automatic role assignment and dynamic task management based on incident type or severity.
- Real-time, automated incident timeline construction and data capture for postmortems.
- Bi-directional, integration-driven automation, like pulling metrics from monitoring tools directly into the incident channel.

For a deeper analysis of how these philosophies compare, see how Rootly wins against PagerDuty, Opsgenie, and xMatters.

Conclusion: Turn Your Migration into an Upgrade

The end of the standalone Opsgenie platform presents a strategic opportunity to modernize your incident management. It’s the perfect time to move from a reactive, alert-focused model to a proactive, automated one.

Among the available Opsgenie alternatives, Rootly stands out for teams that value speed, consistency, and their engineers' well-being [4]. The platform's deep and flexible automation is what truly sets it apart, offering a clear path to more resilient operations and a healthier on-call culture.

Ready to see how automation can transform your incident response? Book a demo or start your free trial today.