PagerDuty vs
Rootly On-Call

Rootly provides a full incident management solution, giving you more features at half the cost of PagerDuty.

Work email
PagerDuty logo
PagerDuty
PagerDuty
Rootly logo
Rootly
Rootly

Top 8 PagerDuty Challenges Solved By Rootly

PagerDuty logo
PagerDuty
Rootly logo
Rootly
PagerDuty logo

PagerDuty is a very expensive phone call. I don’t use it for anything else.

Rootly logo

Rootly is a top PagerDuty alternative that goes beyond paging to offer a complete end-to-end solution for managing the entire incident. In addition to alerting, Rootly provides tools for automating communication, running retrospectives, and ensuring seamless collaboration across teams.

PagerDuty logo

Our teams do not collaborate in PagerDuty to respond to incidents, we use tools like Slack

Rootly logo

With Rootly, you can seamlessly collaborate in Slack without having to switch between different platforms.

PagerDuty logo

Only engineering uses PagerDuty because it’s not designed for everyone else. It creates separation. 

Rootly logo

We’ve purposefully built Rootly to be simple, modern, and so easy that even non-engineers can use it. It is designed for cross-functional teams, breaking down silos and ensuring everyone is aligned during an incident.

PagerDuty logo

Workarounds are required such as modeling teams as services or creating dummy users to fill gaps.

Rootly logo

In Rootly, you can page teams, individuals, or services, eliminating the need to set everything up as a service. Rootly also offers built-in gap detection, a feature unique to our platform, that automatically identifies gaps in coverage and assigns them to the Schedule Owner, who can either cover the shift or create an override.

PagerDuty logo

The UI feels dated, unintuitive, is hard to configure, and feels like it was built 15 years ago.

Rootly logo

Rootly’s UI is guided, intuitive, and easy to navigate. It is designed with user experience in mind, ensuring that even non-technical users can easily manage on-call schedules and incident workflows. 

PagerDuty logo

Configuring and updating on-call schedules and overrides is difficult and doesn't feel human-centric.

Rootly logo

Rootly is designed to adapt on-call scheduling to how your teams actually work. You can easily configure and update schedules based on your team’s specific needs, like adjusting shifts for time off with vacation-aware scheduling, and hassle-free overrides.

PagerDuty logo

Innovation and feature development has remained stagnant. We lack many table stake features.

Rootly logo

Rootly is continuously evolving to meet the needs of modern incident response teams. We stay on the bleeding edge of innovation and make sure your team has all the tools it needs to stay ahead of the incidents.

PagerDuty logo

Frustrated by the consistent upsells and price increases that no longer fit our budget.

Rootly logo

We offer simple and straightforward pricing, with no per-alerts, surprise bills, or silly upsells. And did we mention, it’s half the cost of PagerDuty?

End-to-End Incident
Management With Rootly

Rootly is an end-to-end incident management platform that powers the entire incident response lifecycle, while PagerDuty is primarily an alerting tool with basic incident management features available at an extra cost.

Stunning Mobile App

Stunning Mobile App

A mobile experience so sleek, you won’t mind getting paged.

Native Shadow Rotations

Native Shadow Rotations

Make onboarding seamless with easy-to-schedule shadow rotations.

On-Call Pay Calculator

On-Call Pay Calculator

Simplify on-call compensation and generate reports in just a few clicks.

Synced Slack User Groups

Synced Slack User Groups

On-call schedules are synced to Slack user groups, ensuring that whoever is currently on call is automatically reflected within Slack.

Schedule Gap Detection

Schedule Gap Detection

Rootly’s gap detection automatically identifies coverage gaps and assigns them to the Schedule Owner, notifying them to take action.

Seamless Overrides

Seamless Overrides

Whether you need coverage for a dentist appointment or an entire shift, Rootly makes it simple to request an override with just a click.

Cycle-Based Round Robin

Cycle-Based Round Robin

Rootly’s round robin feature automatically rotates on-call responsibilities, ensuring that no single team member is overwhelmed.

Slack Native

Slack Native

With Rootly, you can see who is currently on-call, upcoming shifts, and manually page responders without logging into web. 

Simple Escalation Policies

Simple Escalation Policies

Rootly’s easy-to-configure escalation policies ensure that the right people are notified when incidents exceed predefined thresholds.

Startup Program

Are you an early-stage company?

Best-in-class incident response should be accessible for everyone. All the features at a fraction of the cost.

ELIGIBILITY

< 100

employees

< $50m

raised

< 5 years

in business

Companies backed by xare also eligible for additional discounts.

Apply now
Apply now

Enter your details:

  • Something bad
  • Something bad
Thanks for applying!

We’ll get back to you within 48 hours.

Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

Feature Comparison

INcident ResponseSchedulingOverrideEPUsersPagingAlertsIntegrationsenterprise

What our customers say

Joanne H.Joanne H.

Joanne H.

Engineering Director, Reliability Platform, Canva

We no longer need to have engineers maintaining an in-house solution - we could never catch up to the number of features Rootly was shipping, and the ongoing operational load was significant.

Scott K.Scott K.

Scott K.

Engineering Manager, Replit

The single most impressive thing about Rootly is how fast they ship. At times we’ve reported a bug or feature request only to have it fixed live within 10-15 minutes.

 Chris I. Chris I.

Chris I.

Director of Engineering, Wealthsimple

We started focusing more on dedicated incident management solutions, like Rootly, FireHydrant, Incident.io, and a few more. In the end, Rootly was the option that best met our needs while providing the flexibility we needed as a high growth company.

Enoch L.Enoch L.

Enoch L.

Site Reliability Engineer, Bolt

Working with Rootly feels like a partnership; as we continued to use their tool and found more use cases, our feature requests quickly found their way into (or, luckily for us, were already in) their backlog.

 Verified User Verified User

Verified User

Computer & Network Security

Rootly stood out as having the most number of integrations that are actually useful. It is simple, easy to use, yet highly customizable to your organization. We use it every time there is an active incident - in fact, we have made Rootly the starting point of our organization’s incident response process.

Colin F.Colin F.

Colin F.

Incident & Problem Manager, Webflow

It provides us with data where there was none, allowed us to standardize our process, and has increased the automations that let our incident response team focus on responding and not on managing a third party product.

Joanne H.Joanne H.

Joanne H.

Engineering Director, Reliability Platform, Canva

We no longer need to have engineers maintaining an in-house solution - we could never catch up to the number of features Rootly was shipping, and the ongoing operational load was significant.

Scott K.Scott K.

Scott K.

Engineering Manager, Replit

The single most impressive thing about Rootly is how fast they ship. At times we’ve reported a bug or feature request only to have it fixed live within 10-15 minutes.

 Chris I. Chris I.

Chris I.

Director of Engineering, Wealthsimple

We started focusing more on dedicated incident management solutions, like Rootly, FireHydrant, Incident.io, and a few more. In the end, Rootly was the option that best met our needs while providing the flexibility we needed as a high growth company.

Enoch L.Enoch L.

Enoch L.

Site Reliability Engineer, Bolt

Working with Rootly feels like a partnership; as we continued to use their tool and found more use cases, our feature requests quickly found their way into (or, luckily for us, were already in) their backlog.

 Verified User Verified User

Verified User

Computer & Network Security

Rootly stood out as having the most number of integrations that are actually useful. It is simple, easy to use, yet highly customizable to your organization. We use it every time there is an active incident - in fact, we have made Rootly the starting point of our organization’s incident response process.

Colin F.Colin F.

Colin F.

Incident & Problem Manager, Webflow

It provides us with data where there was none, allowed us to standardize our process, and has increased the automations that let our incident response team focus on responding and not on managing a third party product.

Mark F.Mark F.

Mark F.

Director of Engineering, Faire

Rootly adds simple automation to incident management without large process changes

 Cory A. Cory A.

Cory A.

Engineer, Flickr & Smugmug

Rootly has been a great partner to work with from the beginning. Rootly has always listened to our feedback.

Matthew M.Matthew M.

Matthew M.

Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Upstart

With Rootly, incident spin-up time has been reduced from minutes to seconds and it covers over 90% of our needs. Overall, Rootly is the best tool currently available in the market.

Karl K.Karl K.

Karl K.

Incident Engineer, Rush Street Interactive

Rootly has very clear and easy to use guidelines, helpful descriptions and that enables people with little to no previous experience in Incident Management to jump straight into creating their first incident!

Shane B.Shane B.

Shane B.

Site Reliability Engineer, Roller Digital

Rootly allows us to focus on the issue at hand when we have an incident by removing a lot of the laborious tasks required when resolving an incident.

Verified UserVerified User

Verified User

Computer & Network Security

Their customer facing team are all friendly, easy going, and highly responsive. I would pick Rootly for their people alone.

Mark F.Mark F.

Mark F.

Director of Engineering, Faire

Rootly adds simple automation to incident management without large process changes

 Cory A. Cory A.

Cory A.

Engineer, Flickr & Smugmug

Rootly has been a great partner to work with from the beginning. Rootly has always listened to our feedback.

Matthew M.Matthew M.

Matthew M.

Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Upstart

With Rootly, incident spin-up time has been reduced from minutes to seconds and it covers over 90% of our needs. Overall, Rootly is the best tool currently available in the market.

Karl K.Karl K.

Karl K.

Incident Engineer, Rush Street Interactive

Rootly has very clear and easy to use guidelines, helpful descriptions and that enables people with little to no previous experience in Incident Management to jump straight into creating their first incident!

Shane B.Shane B.

Shane B.

Site Reliability Engineer, Roller Digital

Rootly allows us to focus on the issue at hand when we have an incident by removing a lot of the laborious tasks required when resolving an incident.

Verified UserVerified User

Verified User

Computer & Network Security

Their customer facing team are all friendly, easy going, and highly responsive. I would pick Rootly for their people alone.

Curious, but still have a few questions?

Does Rootly offer the same on-call scheduling and paging features as PagerDuty?

Rootly’s On-Call solution incorporates all the core on-call and paging features you’re familiar with from PagerDuty, making it simple for teams to adopt. We’ve deliberately kept the learning curve minimal, so teams can get up and running quickly.

Beyond that, Rootly surpasses PagerDuty with advanced features like native shadow rotations, on-call calculator, and seamless overrides.

Plus, Rootly’s intuitive, modern interface ensures any team member can manage schedules and escalations with ease.

Can Rootly do more than just paging?

Absolutely! Rootly goes beyond paging to offer a complete end-to-end solution for managing the entire incident. In addition to alerting, Rootly helps your team quickly investigate potential incidents before escalating, assemble the right responders in seconds, automate communications and task tracking, and generate comprehensive incident retrospectives. By consolidating these capabilities in one platform, Rootly eliminates the need for multiple tools, offering greater value and efficiency at a more affordable price point.

Is Rootly as reliable as PagerDuty?

Yes, reliability is our #1 feature. Rootly is the only alerting solution built on top of a multi-cloud architecture, ensuring that even if AWS goes down, you won’t miss a single alert.

How does Rootly compare to PagerDuty in terms of cost?

Rootly offers a more transparent pricing structure with no hidden upsells or surprise price hikes. Our pricing is designed to scale with your business, ensuring you only pay for what you need, while still providing powerful incident management tools— at a fraction of the cost of PagerDuty.

How easy is it to switch from PagerDuty to Rootly?

We have an automated migration process that pulls over schedules, escalation policies, and user details. A team of experts who are former PagerDuty employees are dedicated to ensuring this process is seamless. The entire migration process for small teams is a matter of minutes, but for larger organizations can be longer depending on complexity.

Does it integrate with the tools I’m already using?

Absolutely! Rootly integrates with over 25 alert sources and supports custom email alerts and generic webhooks, so that you’re able to move from alert to incident creation seamlessly, no matter your observability stack.

Rootly also integrates with over 70 native tools, including Slack, Jira, and AWS, making it easy to incorporate the tools you rely on into your incident response process

Ready to learn more? Watch the on-demand demo

Ready to learn more?
Watch the on-demand demo

Work email