Why Teams Switch from PagerDuty to Rootly’s Automation Edge

In today's fast-paced digital environment, maintaining system reliability is non-negotiable. For years, PagerDuty has been a foundational tool for on-call alerting and scheduling, helping teams know when things break. But as engineering organizations mature, simply being notified of an issue is no longer enough. The real challenge lies in the response. This raises a critical question: why are teams increasingly migrating from traditional alerting tools like PagerDuty to modern, automation-centric platforms like Rootly?

This article explores the key drivers behind this shift. We'll examine the limitations of manual incident response processes and highlight the significant advantages of Rootly's powerful, end-to-end automation that helps teams resolve incidents faster and more consistently.

The Pain Points of Traditional Incident Management

Teams relying on older incident response tools often grapple with common challenges that slow down resolution and lead to burnout. These pain points are a primary reason why teams switch from PagerDuty to Rootly for automation.

• Manual Toil: During a high-stress incident, engineers spend valuable time on repetitive, administrative tasks. This includes manually creating Slack channels, inviting the right responders, finding documentation, updating stakeholders, and creating follow-up tickets. Every minute spent on these tasks is a minute not spent on resolving the actual problem.
• Alert Fatigue: A constant stream of alerts without intelligent grouping or automated context quickly leads to burnout. Responders become desensitized, increasing the risk of missing a critical issue that requires immediate attention.
• High Costs and Feature Bloat: Traditional platforms can be expensive, with complex pricing models that charge extra for essential automation features. Teams often find themselves paying a high price for a bloated feature set they don't fully use [8]. Many necessary features, such as advanced workflows and alert grouping, are only available as costly add-ons [7].
• Siloed Processes: Relying on a patchwork of disconnected tools for alerting, communication, ticketing, and postmortems creates information silos. This fragmentation forces responders to constantly switch contexts, making it difficult to maintain a clear, unified view of the incident and slowing down the entire resolution process.

How Rootly Outperforms with an Automation-First Approach

Rootly was built from the ground up to eliminate manual work through powerful, no-code automation, directly addressing the pain points of traditional tools. This is how Rootly outperforms traditional incident response tools.

The Power of Workflows

At its core, Rootly features a flexible workflow engine that automates the entire incident lifecycle. These workflows trigger predefined actions based on incident events like creation, a change in severity, or a status update. This means you can standardize your response process and let automation handle the rest.

Examples of automated tasks include:

• Creating and archiving dedicated Slack channels.
• Paging the correct on-call teams and individuals.
• Assigning incident roles like Commander and Comms Lead.
• Posting automated status updates to stakeholders in Slack or on a status page.
• Generating comprehensive retrospectives with all incident data pre-populated.

You can learn more about how to structure these automations by exploring Rootly’s incident workflows.

Centralizing the Toolchain

Rootly acts as a central hub that connects your entire incident management ecosystem. Instead of forcing you into a rigid process, Rootly adapts to your tools and ways of working. The Rootly API provides unmatched flexibility, allowing you to create custom automations and integrate with any in-house tool. This enables you to build a scalable response engine perfectly tailored to your organization's needs.

From Alert to Resolution

With Rootly, automation begins at the very first signal. Rootly can ingest alerts from PagerDuty, Datadog, or any other monitoring tool to automatically declare an incident and kick off the entire response process [2]. This hands-off approach ensures that every incident follows a consistent, best-practice process from the moment it's detected, minimizing human error and accelerating response times.

A Direct Comparison: Rootly's Automation vs. PagerDuty

To understand the shift, it's helpful to directly contrast the automation capabilities of both platforms.

PagerDuty's Role

PagerDuty excels at its core competency: on-call scheduling and reliable alert notifications. It's an excellent tool for letting you know there's a problem. However, while PagerDuty has expanded into incident management, its features often require manual intervention or rely on separate, costly add-ons for more advanced automation. As a result, it functions more as a powerful pager than a comprehensive response platform. Rootly, in contrast, is a complete incident management platform.

Rootly’s Automation Edge

Rootly doesn't just send alerts; it orchestrates the entire response from start to finish. By integrating with PagerDuty, Rootly enhances its alerting capabilities with a powerful automation layer. Teams can use Rootly's workflows to trigger actions using PagerDuty's infrastructure, such as automatically paging the on-call engineer for a specific service, inviting them to the incident Slack channel, and assigning them a role based on predefined logic. You can see a full list of actions available with the PagerDuty integration.

Here is a side-by-side look at how their automation capabilities compare:

Feature

PagerDuty

Rootly

Automated Incident Creation from Alert

Primarily for alerting; incident declaration is often a manual follow-up step.

Fully automated; ingests PagerDuty alerts to create, triage, and manage incidents.

Automated Comms & Stakeholder Updates

Limited native capabilities; often requires manual status updates.

Automated via workflows to Slack, status pages, email, and more.

Automated Role Assignment & Team Assembly

Notifies the on-call person.

Notifies, invites to channel, and assigns specific incident roles automatically.

Automated Ticketing (Jira, Linear)

Possible with integrations, but often with less flexibility.

Deep, two-way sync with ticketing systems like Jira and Linear via flexible workflows [5].

Retrospectives & Action Items

Offers basic post-incident analysis.

Automatically generates comprehensive retrospectives and tracks action items to resolution.

Does Rootly Replace PagerDuty?

This is a common question for teams evaluating their incident management stack. Rootly offers two flexible paths, allowing organizations to adopt automation at their own pace.

1. Enhance PagerDuty: Teams can continue using PagerDuty for on-call scheduling and alerting while leveraging Rootly as the automation and coordination layer. The deep integration ensures the two tools work seamlessly together. Connecting them is straightforward, as shown in the installation guide.
2. Replace PagerDuty: For teams looking to consolidate their toolchain, Rootly now serves as a complete, wholesale replacement for PagerDuty. With Rootly On-Call, you can unify on-call management, alerting, and incident response into a single, cohesive platform. This flexibility allows teams to migrate on their own terms without disrupting established on-call rotations.

How Does Rootly's Automation Compare to Incident.io?

When considering modern incident management platforms, many ask: which platform has stronger automation—Rootly or Incident.io? Both are significant innovators in the space, vastly improving upon traditional tools like PagerDuty [1].

However, Rootly differentiates itself with its AI-native, API-first architecture. This foundation provides a fundamentally higher degree of customization and intelligence. While other platforms offer pre-packaged workflows, Rootly's robust workflow engine and flexible API give it a powerful edge for complex organizations. This allows teams to build highly tailored automations that fit their unique processes, tools, and compliance needs, rather than being constrained by a one-size-fits-all solution.

Conclusion: Build a More Resilient Future with Automation

The conclusion is clear: teams switch from PagerDuty to Rootly to escape manual toil, reduce costs, and embrace consistent, powerful automation. Rootly's automation edge is not just about saving time during an incident; it's about systematically reducing Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR), minimizing human error during stressful events, and empowering engineers to focus on what they do best—solving complex problems.

For these reasons, Rootly is the best automated incident response software in 2025. Its flexibility, powerful workflow engine, and AI-native foundation provide the tools modern engineering teams need to build more resilient systems.

To learn more about how Rootly can transform your response process, explore our overview of end-to-end incident management and book a demo today.

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