In today's digital-first world, the reliability of your systems is non-negotiable. On-call and incident management software plays a critical role in maintaining that reliability. For years, PagerDuty has been a leader in the on-call and alerting space, becoming a staple for many engineering teams. However, as systems grow in complexity, a question arises: is a traditional, alert-focused approach still sufficient? Many DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams are finding that the answer is no. They are now seeking more comprehensive, integrated solutions and are increasingly switching to powerful PagerDuty alternatives like Rootly.
What is PagerDuty? A Look at the Incumbent
PagerDuty is an incident response platform primarily known for its on-call scheduling and alerting capabilities. Its core function is to receive alerts from monitoring systems and ensure the right person is notified through various channels like phone calls, SMS, and push notifications. As one of the original SRE tools for incident tracking, it has long been a go-to for waking up engineers when something breaks.
Common Pain Points: The Limitations of a PagerDuty-Only Approach
While PagerDuty excels at alerting, its limitations become clear when teams try to manage the entire incident lifecycle. These shortcomings are the primary reasons engineering teams start looking for a more modern incident management software solution.
Limited to Alerting, Not the Full Incident Lifecycle
PagerDuty’s strength is in the notification phase of an incident. However, modern incident management is a far broader process that includes detection, coordination, communication, resolution, retrospectives, and learning.
Relying only on PagerDuty for DevOps incident management forces teams to piece together a fragmented toolchain. They get an alert in PagerDuty, but then must switch to Slack for communication, Jira for ticketing, and a separate document editor for writing retrospectives. This constant context switching creates friction and slows down response times.
Inflexible Workflows and Automation Constraints
While PagerDuty offers workflow automation, many teams find it rigid and constrained. For example, some integrations have documented performance limitations; Statuspage can experience significant delays once the number of connected PagerDuty services exceeds 800 [7].
Furthermore, PagerDuty's own workflow automation has hard system limits that can hinder complex automation needs. These include caps on the number of actions that can be started per second, the number of fields per instance, and the size of data tables [8]. This contrasts with platforms designed from the ground up for flexible, large-scale automation, which offer a more streamlined approach to incident response [2].
Fragmented Experience and Constant Context Switching
The typical workflow for an on-call engineer using a PagerDuty-centric stack is inefficient:
- Receive an alert in the PagerDuty app.
- Switch to Slack to declare an incident and coordinate with the team.
- Switch to Jira to create follow-up tickets.
- Switch to a document editor to manually compile a retrospective.
This constant context switching increases the cognitive load on responders during already stressful situations. It fragments the incident timeline and makes it difficult to capture all relevant data for post-incident analysis.
Introducing Rootly: The Unified Incident Management Platform
Rootly is a modern, comprehensive solution designed to address these shortcomings. It's not just another alerting tool; it's an end-to-end incident management software built to streamline the entire process from detection to learning.
One Platform for the Entire Incident Lifecycle
Rootly manages the full incident lifecycle within a single, consistent interface, eliminating the need for tool-hopping. The platform seamlessly handles every phase of an incident:
- Detection & Creation: Automatically create incidents from alerts.
- Triage: Assign severity, roles, and priorities.
- Response & Coordination: Manage communication and actions in one place.
- Resolution: Track progress and confirm fixes.
- Retrospectives: Automate the creation of post-incident reviews.
- Analytics: Gain insights to improve reliability.
This unified approach ensures all incident data is captured in one place, providing a single source of truth for your team. You can explore how Rootly covers the entire incident lifecycle in detail.
Powerful, Flexible Automation to Eliminate Toil
Rootly features a powerful and flexible workflow engine that automates the repetitive, manual tasks that slow teams down. You can build code-free workflows to automatically:
- Create dedicated Slack channels and Zoom bridges.
- Invite the right responders based on service dependencies.
- Assign incident roles and tasks.
- Pull in metrics from observability tools.
- Create and populate retrospective documents.
This level of automation frees up engineers to focus on what matters: resolving the incident. By handling the administrative overhead, Rootly's automation significantly improves response times and reduces human error [3].
Native On-Call and Scheduling
Rootly On-Call is a full-featured, native module that can serve as a direct replacement for PagerDuty's core functionality. As one of the best oncall software for teams, Rootly allows you to manage schedules, rotations, escalation policies, and multi-channel notifications directly within the platform. By consolidating on-call management into your primary incident response tool, you can simplify your SRE tooling stack and reduce vendor sprawl. You can get started with Rootly On-Call to see how it consolidates these critical functions.
Head-to-Head: Compare On-call Platforms Rootly vs. PagerDuty
While user reviews show PagerDuty is a highly-ranked tool with strong user satisfaction, the industry's focus is shifting from pure alerting to comprehensive incident management [4]. The question is no longer just "Who do we wake up?" but "How do we resolve this faster and learn from it?"
Here's a direct alert management software comparison:
Feature
Rootly
PagerDuty
Core Functionality
Full Incident Management & On-Call
On-Call & Alerting
Automation
Flexible, code-free workflows across the lifecycle
Limited, more rigid workflows focused on alerting
Collaboration
Native, Slack-first experience
Relies on integrations, requires context switching
Retrospectives
Integrated and automated
Requires external tools and manual data gathering
Cost-Effectiveness
All-in-one platform offers better value
Can become expensive with add-ons and user tiers
Can Rootly Replace PagerDuty Completely?
Yes. With the addition of Rootly On-Call, organizations can consolidate their tooling and use Rootly as a wholesale replacement for PagerDuty. This simplifies the tech stack, reduces costs, and provides a single, unified platform for all incident-related activities.
For teams looking to transition gradually, Rootly also offers a robust PagerDuty integration. This allows you to augment your existing PagerDuty setup by using Rootly to automate incident creation, sync status updates, and streamline the response process while still using PagerDuty for alerts.
Conclusion: Upgrade Your Incident Management with Rootly
PagerDuty is an excellent alerting tool, but modern reliability practices demand more. A unified platform that manages the entire incident lifecycle is essential for reducing resolution times and building more resilient systems.
Teams are switching to Rootly for its comprehensive lifecycle management, powerful automation, and seamless collaboration experience that saves time and reduces stress. As one of the top incident management tools, it provides a cost-effective solution for modern engineering teams looking to move beyond simple alerting [5].
Ready to see why Rootly is the PagerDuty alternative of choice for leading SRE teams? Book a demo today and upgrade your incident management.