PagerDuty pioneered the on-call alerting space, and for years, it was the go-to tool for waking up engineers when things went wrong. But in today's complex cloud-native world, is just waking someone up enough? Modern engineering teams aren't just looking for a replacement for their alerting tool; they're looking for a significant upgrade. The best PagerDuty alternatives don't just handle alerts—they manage the entire incident lifecycle.
That's where Rootly comes in. It’s the modern, all-in-one incident management software designed to help DevOps and SRE teams resolve issues faster and build more resilient systems.
The Soaring Costs and Complexity of Modern Incidents
As technology stacks evolve with microservices, serverless functions, and multiple cloud providers, the nature of incidents has become far more complex. A single issue can cascade across dozens of services, making it difficult to diagnose and resolve. This complexity comes with a steep price tag.
Downtime isn't just an inconvenience; it's a direct hit to revenue and reputation. For over 90% of mid-size and large enterprises, a single hour of downtime costs more than $300,000 [6]. For a significant portion of those companies—16% to be exact—a major outage costs over $1 million [7]. The incident response market is projected to grow substantially, signaling an urgent need for better tools to manage these costly events [1].
Why Teams are Looking for PagerDuty Alternatives
While PagerDuty is a household name in on-call scheduling and alerting, many teams find its capabilities stop short of what's needed for effective DevOps incident management. This leads them to search for more comprehensive solutions that address common pain points:
- Alert-centric, not incident-centric: PagerDuty excels at sending notifications, but the actual work of coordinating the response, communicating with stakeholders, and resolving the issue happens elsewhere.
- Fragmented Workflows: Engineers are forced to jump between PagerDuty, Slack, Jira, and Confluence, manually copying and pasting information. This context switching slows down response and increases the chance of human error.
- Alert Fatigue: Without sophisticated grouping and noise reduction, on-call teams can be flooded with a storm of notifications, making it impossible to separate the signal from the noise.
- Limited Post-Incident Learning: The process of creating retrospectives, analyzing what went wrong, and tracking action items is often disconnected from the incident itself, making it hard to learn and improve.
- High Cost: As teams scale, the per-user pricing of a tool that only solves one part of the problem becomes difficult to justify.
Introducing Rootly: Your All-in-One Incident Management Platform
Rootly is the solution to this fragmentation. It’s a unified platform designed to manage the entire incident lifecycle, from the first alert to the final retrospective. Its core philosophy is built on three pillars: automating toil, fostering collaboration, and facilitating learning.
Instead of just alerting you, Rootly provides a command center to orchestrate the entire response. You can automate repetitive tasks, keep stakeholders informed, and capture critical data for post-mortems, all in one place. This integrated approach allows teams to manage every aspect of an incident's lifecycle faster by streamlining every step, from detection and triage to resolution and analytics. Rootly is the complete incident management software built for the demands of modern SRE and DevOps workflows.
Compare Oncall Platforms: Rootly vs. PagerDuty
When you compare oncall platforms, it's crucial to look beyond alerting. The right tool should empower your team throughout the incident, not just at the beginning. Here’s a clear comparison of Rootly and PagerDuty.
Feature Breakdown
Feature
PagerDuty
Rootly
Scope
Primarily an on-call and alerting tool.
An end-to-end incident management platform, including on-call, alerting, response orchestration, and retrospectives.
Workflow Automation
Basic event rules and webhooks for alerts.
Hundreds of automated workflow triggers for creating channels, inviting responders, updating status pages, and assigning roles—all without code.
AI-Powered Capabilities
Focuses on alert grouping and noise reduction.
Leverages AI for intelligent workflow automation, post-incident analysis to identify patterns, and suggests preventive actions.
Collaboration
Notifies users to go to other platforms like Slack.
Natively integrates with Slack, allowing teams to run entire incidents—from declaration to resolution—within their chat client.
Retrospectives
A separate, often manual process disconnected from the incident timeline.
Automatically generates comprehensive retrospectives with a full timeline, key metrics, and integrated action item tracking.
Rootly's use of AI-powered SRE platforms does more than just manage alerts; they are designed to cut toil by up to 60% by automating the mundane tasks that bog down engineers during a crisis.
Can Rootly Replace PagerDuty?
Yes. With Rootly On-Call, you get best-in-class scheduling, escalations, and alerting, allowing you to replace PagerDuty entirely and consolidate your tooling.
For teams who aren't ready to switch everything at once, Rootly offers a deep, two-way integration with PagerDuty. You can leverage Rootly's powerful incident management workflows while still using PagerDuty for alerting. This integration allows you to import services, automatically page the right people from Rootly, and keep incident status synced across both platforms.
What’s Included in the Modern SRE Tooling Stack?
The conversation around site reliability engineering tools has matured. A modern stack is no longer about a single silver-bullet tool but an integrated ecosystem where data and workflows move seamlessly. The key layers of this stack include:
- Observability: Tools like Datadog and Grafana that help you see what’s happening across your systems.
- Intelligence & Automation: This is where Rootly sits. It acts as the central hub to understand the issue, coordinate the response, automate workflows, and learn from incidents.
- Collaboration: Chat platforms like Slack where your team communicates and collaborates in real-time.
- Ticketing: Project management tools like Jira for tracking follow-up work and long-term action items.
Rootly is the connective tissue that ties these layers together, acting as the "operating system" for your organization's reliability.
Conclusion: Upgrade from Alerting to True Incident Management
The nature of incidents has evolved, and your tools must evolve too. While PagerDuty and other Opsgenie alternatives are effective at alerting, modern SRE and DevOps teams need a comprehensive platform that supports them through the entire response process.
Choosing the right incident management software is an investment in reliability, reduced toil, and faster resolution times. By consolidating workflows, automating manual tasks, and providing data-driven insights, Rootly empowers your organization to move beyond simple alerting and embrace true incident management. It's not just another option; it's the best oncall software for teams aiming to build more resilient and efficient systems.
Ready to see how you can transform your incident response? Book a demo with Rootly today and discover what a true end-to-end incident management platform can do for you.