Choosing the right incident management tool is a critical, high-stakes decision for any engineering team. For years, PagerDuty has been a dominant force, and when teams search for alternatives, Opsgenie is often the first name they consider. While Opsgenie is a capable tool, a more modern and comprehensive alternative exists that better fits the needs of today's fast-moving teams: Rootly.
With market shifts, including Atlassian's decision to phase out the standalone Opsgenie product for many users, teams are being prompted to re-evaluate their incident management software [1]. This is the perfect time to look beyond traditional options and discover a platform built for the entire incident lifecycle.
Understanding the Limitations of Traditional On-Call Tools
Teams are actively seeking PagerDuty alternatives because traditional tools, while effective for on-call alerting, often fall short in managing the full scope of an incident. The common pain points include:
- Focus on Alerting, Not Resolution: These tools are excellent at waking people up but offer limited support for the actual response process. Coordination, communication, and learning are often left to manual effort.
- Alert Fatigue: A constant stream of notifications without smart filtering or context can overwhelm responders, leading to burnout and missed critical alerts.
- Manual Toil: Responders still have to manually create Slack channels, pull in the right teammates, update stakeholders on progress, and document a timeline of events.
- Disconnected Lifecycle: The journey from an initial alert to a final retrospective is often disjointed. This requires juggling multiple tools and manually copying data, which is inefficient and prone to error.
Why Opsgenie Became the Go-To PagerDuty Alternative (And Why That's Changing)
For many teams, especially those already using Atlassian products, Opsgenie seemed like a logical step up from PagerDuty. It offered strong integrations with Jira and was often seen as a more cost-effective solution [4]. However, the landscape is changing, and Opsgenie's position as the top alternative is weakening for a few key reasons.
First, it is still fundamentally an alerting and on-call management tool, sharing many of the same limitations as PagerDuty. Second, Atlassian's strategy to integrate it more deeply into Jira Service Management (JSM) doesn't align with the workflows of modern DevOps incident management teams, who primarily collaborate in chat platforms like Slack [8].
Market perception reflects this shift. While Opsgenie has been a strong contender, recent data shows its mindshare is declining as more users explore platforms like Rootly, which has seen a significant increase in interest over the past year [5].
Introducing Rootly: A Modern Approach to Incident Management
Rootly is a platform built for the entire incident lifecycle, not just for sending alerts. It's designed to reduce manual work and improve collaboration right where your teams already are—in Slack or Microsoft Teams. By unifying the process from detection to learning, Rootly has established itself as one of the top incident management tools available today.
Managing the Full Incident Lifecycle Automatically
Rootly provides a true end-to-end solution that guides teams from the first alert to the final lessons learned. This comprehensive approach covers every critical phase of an incident. The platform automates workflows and centralizes communication, allowing your team to focus on resolving the issue instead of managing the process.
Here’s how Rootly supports the full lifecycle:
- Detection & Alerting: Connects with all your monitoring tools to automatically declare incidents from incoming alerts.
- Triage & Assessment: Helps you quickly understand the business impact, adjust severity, and assign roles with a single command.
- Response & Coordination: Automates creating dedicated Slack channels, brings in the right responders, and keeps stakeholders updated via status pages.
- Resolution: Triggers "on-resolve" workflows to handle cleanup tasks and ensures all necessary information is captured for review.
- Retrospectives & Learning: Automatically generates data-rich retrospectives, complete with timelines and metrics, to help you document learnings and track follow-up actions.
You can learn more about how Rootly streamlines the entire incident management process from start to finish.
AI-Powered Automation That Eliminates Toil
A key differentiator for Rootly is its powerful automation. Using flexible workflows and AI, Rootly handles the repetitive, manual tasks that slow down response times. This allows your engineers to focus on what they do best: solving problems.
Examples of what you can automate with Rootly include:
- Creating a dedicated Slack channel and inviting the on-call responders.
- Automatically posting status updates to internal and external stakeholders.
- Paging other teams or escalating an incident based on specific triggers.
- Generating a retrospective document with all timeline data and key metrics pre-populated.
This level of automation can dramatically reduce manual effort. In fact, organizations using AI-powered SRE platforms have seen a significant reduction in operational toil.
Deep Analytics for Continuous Improvement
Rootly helps teams learn from every incident and continuously improve system reliability. The platform automatically tracks key industry metrics like Mean Time to Detection (MTTD) and Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR). You can easily analyze this data by service, severity, or custom fields to identify recurring problems and systemic weaknesses. This automated data collection stands in stark contrast to the manual, time-consuming process of gathering data for post-mortems in traditional tools.
Compare Oncall Platforms: Rootly vs. PagerDuty vs. Opsgenie
To make the right choice, it helps to see a direct feature comparison. The table below breaks down the key differences between these platforms, helping you perform an alert management software comparison at a glance [6].
Feature
PagerDuty
Opsgenie
Rootly
Primary Focus
On-call scheduling & alerting
On-call scheduling & alerting
End-to-end incident management
Workflow Automation
Basic, focused on notifications
Customizable routing rules
AI-powered, full lifecycle automation
Collaboration Hub
Mobile app, email, SMS
Integrates with Jira/Atlassian
Native Slack & MS Teams integration
Retrospectives
Add-on or manual process
Manual or basic templates
Automated, data-rich retrospectives
Toil Reduction
Limited
Some automation
Core design principle
Best For
Large enterprises needing robust on-call [3]
Teams heavily invested in Atlassian [3]
SRE/DevOps teams wanting to automate response [1]
What’s Included in the Modern SRE Tooling Stack?
A robust incident management platform is just one part of the modern site reliability engineering tools ecosystem. High-performing teams build a layered stack to ensure they can monitor, detect, and resolve issues quickly and efficiently. The key categories include:
- Monitoring & Observability: Tools like Datadog, Prometheus, and Grafana provide real-time insights into system health.
- Logging: Platforms like the ELK Stack or Splunk are essential for deep-diving into application and system logs during an investigation.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Tools such as Terraform and Pulumi allow teams to manage and provision infrastructure programmatically.
- Incident Management: Rootly acts as the central nervous system that connects these tools, automating the human-in-the-loop processes during an outage.
To build a reliable system, it's crucial to select the right SRE tools for each layer of your stack.
Conclusion: Why Rootly is the True Modern Alternative
While PagerDuty and Opsgenie are powerful oncall software for teams, they represent an older paradigm focused primarily on alerting. They solve the problem of waking someone up but do little to help them once they're at their keyboard. The future of incident management lies in automation, collaboration, and continuous learning [2].
The best PagerDuty alternative isn't just another alerting tool—it's a platform that fundamentally changes how your team responds to incidents. Rootly is designed for modern engineering teams that need to manage the entire incident lifecycle, automate away manual work, and use data to build more resilient systems.
Ready to see how a modern incident management platform can transform your response process? Book a demo with Rootly today.