Unplanned downtime is more than a technical headache; it's a massive financial drain. For Global 2000 companies, downtime costs approximately $400 billion annually, with lost revenue alone accounting for an average of $49 million per company [1]. This underscores the critical need for effective incident management. For years, teams have relied on established players like PagerDuty, Opsgenie, and xMatters for on-call software. However, these are often legacy solutions with significant drawbacks.
While these tools are common, they fall short of meeting the demands of modern site reliability engineering (SRE) and DevOps teams. This article explains why the best PagerDuty alternative isn't another legacy tool, but a modern, comprehensive solution: Rootly.
The Problem with Legacy On-Call Tools like PagerDuty
Many teams are searching for PagerDuty alternatives because legacy tools no longer fit the needs of modern DevOps incident management. They were built for a simpler time and create pain points that slow down resolution.
Just an Expensive Phone Call
PagerDuty is primarily an alerting tool—an expensive phone call that tells you something is broken. While it excels at waking people up, it provides little support for the rest of the incident lifecycle. Comprehensive incident management software features are often basic or locked behind costly add-ons.
Rootly, in contrast, offers a complete platform for the entire incident. It goes beyond paging by providing integrated tools to automate communications, run retrospectives, and centralize collaboration within a single platform.
Siloed Collaboration and a Dated UX
Effective incident response demands seamless collaboration, yet PagerDuty forces teams to switch to other tools like Slack to communicate, wasting valuable time. Its UI feels dated and unintuitive, creating silos where only engineering teams can comfortably use it. This often leads to clumsy workarounds, like modeling non-technical teams as services just to keep them in the loop.
Rootly features a modern, intuitive UI designed for cross-functional collaboration and offers seamless Slack integration, allowing teams to manage incidents where they already work.
Stagnant Innovation and Frustrating Pricing
PagerDuty's feature development has stagnated, leaving teams without the modern tools they need. This is often paired with a frustrating pricing model filled with consistent upsells and price hikes that strain budgets.
Rootly is committed to continuous innovation and provides transparent pricing. It delivers more robust features for half the cost of PagerDuty without hidden fees.
Why Opsgenie and xMatters Also Fall Short
Other popular oncall platforms like Opsgenie and xMatters also have limitations that make them poor choices for teams looking to modernize their SRE tools for incident tracking.
Opsgenie: A Basic Option with an Expiration Date
Opsgenie is a basic on-call management tool that lacks the robust features of a complete incident management platform [2]. More importantly, Atlassian has announced the end-of-life for Opsgenie, making it a risky choice for long-term planning. For teams seeking Opsgenie alternatives, it's easy to migrate to Rootly On-call for a future-proof solution.
xMatters: Another Piece in a Fractured Toolchain
xMatters is another point solution focused on alerting. While it handles notifications, it doesn't offer a unified platform for the entire incident lifecycle. Relying on xMatters leaves teams with a fractured toolchain, forcing them to piece together multiple products for a complete workflow.
Introducing Rootly: The Modern, All-in-One Solution
Rootly is the answer to the problems posed by legacy tools, making it one of the top incident management tools today. It provides a single, unified platform designed for modern engineering teams.
!Rootly UI dashboard showing incident details, tasks, and team collaboration features.
A Unified Platform for the Entire Incident Lifecycle
Rootly is a true end-to-end incident management platform. Key capabilities include:
- Automating communications
- Running data-driven retrospectives
- Ensuring seamless collaboration
- Tracking incidents effectively
Rootly consolidates the entire workflow into one platform, eliminating the need to juggle multiple tools and allowing your team to focus on faster resolution.
Designed for How Modern Teams Work
Rootly's user-friendly, modern UI is easy for both engineering and non-technical teams to use. Its native Slack integration lets users manage incidents without leaving their primary communication tool. It also offers human-centric on-call scheduling features, including:
- Paging teams, individuals, or services directly.
- Native Shadow Rotations for easy onboarding.
- Schedule Gap Detection to ensure coverage.
- An On-Call Pay Calculator to simplify compensation.
Transparent Pricing and Continuous Innovation
Rootly’s pricing is simple and straightforward, with no hidden fees. It delivers more features at half the cost of PagerDuty.
As Scott K., a Staff Software Engineer at Replit, says, "The pace of shipping features at Rootly is insane. If you need something, they’ll build it. You can see the progress of requested features on their public roadmap."
Compare On-Call Platforms: PagerDuty vs. Opsgenie vs. Rootly
When you compare oncall platforms, it's clear that legacy tools only address part of the problem. Rootly provides a complete solution. This alert management software comparison draws data from industry analyses [3].
Feature
Rootly
PagerDuty
Opsgenie
End-to-End Incident Management
✅
💰 Add-on
❌
Modern UI/UX
✅
❌
🆗
Slack-Native Collaboration
✅
❌
❌
Transparent Pricing
✅
❌
🆗
Schedule Gap Detection
✅
❌
❌
On-Call Pay Calculator
✅
❌
❌
Integrations
70+
700+
500+
While PagerDuty and Opsgenie list more integrations, Rootly focuses on deep, native integrations with the tools modern teams rely on.
What’s Included in the Modern SRE Tooling Stack?
What’s included in the modern SRE tooling stack? An effective ecosystem includes several key components:
- Observability and Monitoring (e.g., Datadog, New Relic)
- Alerting and On-Call Management (e.g., Rootly On-Call)
- Incident Response and Collaboration (e.g., Rootly)
- Status Pages
- Retrospectives and Post-mortems
Rootly acts as the central hub that integrates these components, creating a single pane of glass for incident management. It can also integrate with legacy tools like PagerDuty, allowing for a smooth, phased transition.
Why Teams are Switching to Rootly
Teams are switching to Rootly to escape the fragmented and expensive workflows of legacy platforms.
Seamless Migration from PagerDuty
Rootly’s automated migration pulls over schedules, escalation policies, and users from PagerDuty. A dedicated team of experts, including former PagerDuty employees, ensures a seamless transition.
Customer Testimonials
"Having a managed solution allows our engineers to focus on our product. We’re not in the business of building an internal incident management tool."
— Joanne H., Engineering Manager, Canva
"Rootly is the source of truth for our incident data. It enables us to standardize our process and automate tedious tasks, which has led to faster resolution times."
— Colin F., Staff Engineer, Webflow
"With Rootly, we went from spending several minutes spinning up an incident to just seconds."
— Matthew M., Senior SRE, Upstart
Conclusion: Stop Paging, Start Resolving with Rootly
Legacy alert management software like PagerDuty and Opsgenie are outdated, expensive point solutions. Modern DevOps incident management demands a unified, collaborative, and intuitive platform.
Rootly is the best PagerDuty alternative, providing a complete, innovative solution at a fraction of the cost. It's the best on-call software for teams looking to move beyond simple alerting and resolve incidents faster.
Ready to upgrade your incident management? Book a demo or start a free trial of Rootly today.