When your service goes down, every second counts. The cost of downtime is staggering, with a significant percentage of outages costing organizations over $100,000, and some even exceeding $1 million. Traditional on-call tools like PagerDuty excel at telling you something is wrong, but that’s just the beginning of the story. Modern engineering teams are realizing they need more than just alerts; they need a complete incident management software solution. They're tired of alert fatigue, high costs, and the endless manual work—or "toil"—that comes with managing an incident.
This is where teams are discovering PagerDuty alternatives that offer a better way. Instead of just waking you up, these platforms guide your entire response from detection to resolution and learning. For engineers looking for a smarter, more efficient process, Rootly is the clear choice. It provides an end-to-end platform that automates workflows, centralizes collaboration, and helps you build more reliable systems.
Why Modern Engineering Teams Are Seeking PagerDuty Alternatives
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps teams are responsible for keeping systems running smoothly. As services become more complex, the limitations of older alerting tools become more apparent. Teams are actively looking for solutions that do more than just page the on-call engineer.
Problem 1: Limited to Alerting and On-Call Schedules
While PagerDuty is a strong on-call and alerting tool, that's where its core functionality often ends. An incident involves much more than just an alert; it requires investigation, communication, coordination, and follow-up.
To manage this, teams often have to patch together multiple tools—one for alerting, another for communication (like Slack), one for ticketing (like Jira), and another for documentation. This fragmented approach creates friction, slows down response times, and makes it difficult to get a clear picture of what’s happening. While PagerDuty has a strong brand, many emerging alternatives offer a more integrated experience [1].
Problem 2: Prohibitive Pricing and Complexity
As an organization grows, the cost of PagerDuty can quickly escalate. Many users find its pricing plans to be both expensive and complex, with essential features gated behind higher tiers [2]. This can force teams to either pay a premium for a robust DevOps incident management process or operate without the tools they need to be effective, making it a difficult choice for growing businesses.
Problem 3: Creates Manual Toil and Alert Fatigue
SRE toil is the repetitive, manual, and automatable work that consumes valuable engineering time but provides no lasting value. During an incident, this includes tasks like:
- Manually creating a dedicated Slack or Microsoft Teams channel.
- Paging the right responders and teams.
- Pulling in dashboards from monitoring tools.
- Constantly updating a status page for stakeholders.
This manual work is not only slow and error-prone but also a major source of engineer burnout. At the same time, a constant flood of unactionable alerts leads to alert fatigue, where engineers become desensitized and may miss truly critical notifications. Rootly is built from the ground up to eliminate these repetitive tasks; in fact, Rootly Automation converts repetitive SRE tasks to zero‑toil so your team can focus on what matters.
Rootly: The Complete Incident Management Solution Engineers Love
Rootly was designed to solve the challenges that traditional on-call platforms create. It’s an engineer-friendly platform that provides a comprehensive, automated, and streamlined approach to incident management.
A Single Platform for the Entire Incident Lifecycle
Unlike tools that only handle one piece of the puzzle, Rootly provides an end-to-end platform to manage every phase of an incident. This holistic approach ensures a smooth and consistent process from start to finish. The incident lifecycle in Rootly covers:
- Detection & Alerting: Integrates with your monitoring tools to receive alerts.
- Creating Incidents: Create incidents with a single Slack command or have them created automatically from an alert.
- Triage & Assessment: Quickly determine the severity and assign roles.
- Response & Coordination: Automate communication, delegate tasks, and run the entire response from Slack.
- Resolution: Document the fix and officially close the incident.
- Retrospectives: Automatically generate a timeline and collaborate on a blameless post-mortem to capture learnings.
- Analytics & Insights: Track key metrics like Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) to continuously improve your processes.
A Side-by-Side Comparison: Rootly vs. PagerDuty
To understand why Rootly is one of the best PagerDuty alternatives, it helps to compare them side-by-side. While PagerDuty is a strong on-call tool, Rootly is a complete incident response platform, making it one of the top incident management tools available today [3].
Feature
PagerDuty
Rootly
Core Functionality
On-call management and alert aggregation.
End-to-end incident management and automation.
Automation
Basic alerting workflows.
Powerful, no-code workflow engine to automate hundreds of manual steps (e.g., creating channels, paging teams, running scripts).
Collaboration
Requires integrations and context switching.
Native Slack integration allows teams to run the entire incident from chat.
Retrospectives
Limited or non-existent native functionality.
Built-in, automated retrospectives with rich timelines and action item tracking.
Configuration
Primarily UI-driven.
Supports Infrastructure as Code with a Terraform provider for GitOps workflows.
What’s Included in the Modern SRE Tooling Stack?
A reliable system isn't built with a single tool; it's supported by an integrated stack where each component has a specific job. Understanding where Rootly fits helps clarify its role as the central hub for your entire response effort. A modern SRE tooling stack includes several core components [4].
The core components of the stack include:
- Observability & Monitoring: These are your eyes and ears. Tools like Datadog, Prometheus, and Grafana help you see what’s happening inside your systems.
- Incident Management & Response: This is where Rootly shines. It acts as the central command center, taking signals from your monitoring tools and orchestrating the entire human response.
- Communication & Collaboration: Real-time communication is critical. Most engineering teams live in Slack or Microsoft Teams, which Rootly integrates with natively.
- Project & Issue Tracking: Once an incident is over, the follow-up work begins. Rootly connects with tools like Jira and Linear to create and track action items.
As one of the key SRE tools reliable engineering teams use, Rootly ties this entire stack together, ensuring a seamless flow of information from detection to long-term fix.
How Rootly Drives Real-World Improvements for Engineering Teams
Adopting Rootly isn't just about getting a new tool; it's about transforming your incident management process to achieve tangible results. Effective incident management software helps organizations log, prioritize, and resolve disruptions that impact IT service delivery [5].
Drastically Reduce Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR)
Rootly’s automation and streamlined workflows help teams resolve incidents faster. By automatically creating channels, inviting the right responders, and pulling in relevant context from other tools, Rootly eliminates administrative overhead. This allows engineers to immediately focus on diagnosing and fixing the problem instead of getting bogged down in process.
Eliminate Toil and Prevent Engineer Burnout
Repetitive manual work is a leading cause of engineer burnout. The Rootly automation engine tackles SRE toil head-on by turning manual checklists into automated workflows. This has a massive positive impact on team morale and retention, as engineers can spend more time on engaging, high-value projects that improve system reliability and drive innovation.
Foster a Culture of Blameless Learning
The most important outcome of any incident is learning how to prevent it from happening again. Rootly helps foster a culture of blameless learning by making retrospectives easy and effective. The platform automatically generates a complete incident timeline, pulling in every message, command, and key event. From there, your team can easily document what happened, identify contributing factors, and track action items to ensure that valuable lessons lead to real improvements. You can learn more about how Rootly handles retrospectives and the incident lifecycle.
Conclusion: Stop Paging, Start Resolving with Rootly
While PagerDuty remains a capable tool for on-call alerting, modern engineering teams need more. They require a comprehensive incident management platform that automates toil, facilitates seamless collaboration, and helps them learn from every incident.
Rootly is the definitive PagerDuty alternative built for today's SRE and DevOps teams. It empowers engineers to move beyond simple alerting and build more resilient systems. If you're looking for one of the best oncall software for teams, it's time to consider a solution that manages the entire incident lifecycle.
Ready to see the future of incident management? Book a demo with Rootly today.