PagerDuty is a well-known name in incident management, practically synonymous with on-call alerts. However, many modern engineering teams are now looking for PagerDuty alternatives that offer a calmer, more controlled, and more effective way to handle outages. The traditional approach, often marked by alert fatigue, fragmented workflows, and significant manual toil, can inject chaos into an already stressful situation.
This is where Rootly comes in. As a modern incident management platform, it’s designed to solve these exact problems. Through powerful automation and deep integrations, Rootly shifts incident response from a frantic, multi-tool scramble to a streamlined process that covers the entire incident lifecycle, not just the initial page.
Why Modern SRE and DevOps Teams Are Searching for PagerDuty Alternatives
The incident management landscape has evolved. The practice has grown beyond simple on-call notifications into a core discipline of site reliability. Today, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps teams need tools that support every phase of an incident—from the first alert to the final retrospective.
This is why many teams now compare on-call platforms. They are finding that older approaches have significant gaps. Cost is a major factor, with many users reporting that essential features are often locked behind expensive plans that can exceed $41 per user per month [3]. Beyond price, teams are looking for better user interfaces, deeper integrations, and the kind of robust automation that legacy tools often don't provide. They need a central hub for reliability, not just a digital pager.
The Problem with Legacy Alert Management Software
A common issue with traditional alert management software is alert fatigue. Engineers are overwhelmed by a constant stream of noisy, non-actionable alerts, which leads to burnout and a culture where alerts are ignored. Organizations often seek out alternatives due to high costs, inadequate developer support, and limited customization options [4].
Furthermore, tools focused only on paging often lack the context needed for a quick resolution. A responder gets an alert and then must scramble between monitoring dashboards, log files, and communication tools just to figure out what's going on. This context-switching increases stress and Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR), making a tough situation even worse.
The Hidden Cost of Manual Incident Response (Toil)
SREs define "toil" as repetitive, manual work that takes up valuable engineering time without adding lasting value. During an incident, toil is everywhere. These tasks include:
- Manually creating a dedicated Slack channel.
- Paging the right responders and experts.
- Updating stakeholders in a separate channel.
- Creating Jira tickets for follow-up actions.
Each manual step adds delay and a chance for human error. This is time that your engineers could be spending on solving the problem. Rootly's automation engine is designed to eliminate this SRE toil, allowing your team to focus on what they do best.
Rootly: The Integrated Platform for Calm, Consistent Incident Management
Rootly provides a complete solution that goes beyond basic alerting to manage the full incident lifecycle. It serves as a central command center, bringing together alerts, communication, and actions into a single, streamlined workflow that lives where your team already works: inside Slack.
From Noisy Alerts to Actionable Incidents
Rootly integrates with over 100 tools you already use, including Datadog, Grafana, and even PagerDuty itself, to bring all your alerts into one place. From there, its workflow engine takes over. It can automatically triage incoming signals, combine duplicate alerts, and create a formal incident only when a real issue is detected. This intelligent filtering cuts through the noise, so when your on-call engineers get a page, they know it's for a real problem. This is a key part of managing the entire incident lifecycle, from detection to resolution.
Automating the Entire Response Process
The real strength of Rootly is its ability to automate the repetitive tasks that create so much friction during an incident. The workflow engine can manage hundreds of steps automatically. For example, when an incident is declared, Rootly can:
- Create a dedicated Slack channel and a Zoom bridge for collaboration.
- Page the correct on-call teams based on service ownership.
- Assign incident roles like Commander and Communications Lead.
- Post automated status updates to stakeholder channels or a public status page.
- Generate a detailed retrospective document and create associated Jira tickets.
This automation ensures that best practices are followed every time and frees your responders to focus their energy on fixing the issue.
A Strong Contender Among Opsgenie Alternatives
The search for better tools isn't limited to PagerDuty. With Opsgenie scheduled to cease operations on April 5, 2027, many teams are now looking for Opsgenie alternatives [6]. Rootly is an ideal replacement, offering a significant upgrade over Opsgenie's features. Its all-in-one incident management capabilities, flexible integrations, and powerful automation provide a modern and more effective platform for teams needing a new solution.
Compare On-call Platforms: Rootly vs. PagerDuty
When you evaluate top incident management tools, it's important to understand the core differences between platforms.
Alerting and On-Call vs. Full Incident Management
- PagerDuty: Excels at on-call scheduling and routing alerts. It's a very effective tool for making sure the right person gets notified at the right time.
- Rootly: Is a full-lifecycle incident management platform. While it integrates with PagerDuty for alerting, its main strength is managing the entire response process after an alert is triggered.
Many of the most reliable engineering teams use Rootly and PagerDuty together: PagerDuty handles the "wake-up call," and Rootly provides the command center to run the incident in a calm and organized way.
Collaboration and Communication
- PagerDuty: Often requires responders to switch between the PagerDuty app, Slack, and other tools to collaborate and find information. This creates friction and slows things down.
- Rootly: Centralizes the entire incident response process inside Slack. Responders can declare incidents, run automated workflows, view data, and communicate without leaving their chat client.
Automation and Retrospectives
- PagerDuty: Offers some automation, but it can be complex to set up and limited in what it can do.
- Rootly: Provides an intuitive, no-code workflow builder that lets teams automate hundreds of tasks, from creating channels to filling out retrospectives. It automatically generates a detailed timeline and pre-populates retrospective documents, making it easy to learn from every incident. Other platforms are also competing on features and pricing, which shows how active the market for incident management software has become [2].
What’s Included in the Modern SRE Tooling Stack?
So, what belongs in a complete toolkit for SREs focused on incident tracking and reliability? A modern stack has several layers, each playing a key role.
- Monitoring & Observability: Tools like Datadog and Prometheus are your eyes and ears. They provide the data needed to detect that a problem exists.
- Logging: Platforms like Splunk or the ELK Stack allow for deep investigation to help you find the root cause of an issue.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Tools such as Terraform and Ansible ensure your environments are consistent, which reduces errors caused by configuration changes.
- Incident Management: This is the central hub that organizes your team's response. It connects with all other parts of your toolchain to turn data into action.
Rootly serves as the essential incident management layer that ties your entire SRE toolkit together. Having a strong set of SRE tools is fundamental to building reliable systems.
Conclusion: Choose a PagerDuty Alternative Built for Control and Calm
While PagerDuty is a great tool for on-call alerting, it can contribute to the chaotic, manual firefighting that modern SRE and DevOps teams want to move away from. The future of incident response isn't about louder alarms; it's about smarter, calmer, and more automated processes.
Rootly stands out as one of the best PagerDuty alternatives because it offers a fundamentally different approach. It's a solution built on automation, integration, and a controlled process that takes place right inside Slack. By choosing Rootly, teams don't just resolve incidents faster—they create a cycle of continuous improvement, turning every incident into a chance to become more resilient.
Ready to transform your incident response? Book a demo of Rootly today.