5 Reasons to Switch to a PagerDuty Alternative in 2024

Despite consistent revenue and a leading position in the market, PagerDuty has reported significant losses since becoming a public company. Under pressure from shareholders, the company decided to implement “refinements,” as its CEO referred to them in what was awarded the worst layoff email of 2023. These "refinements" included a massive layoff, price hikes for all customers, and the introduction of more paid add-ons.

PagerDuty customers have felt the pain of these measures, left with a dated UI that doesn’t meet their needs. Instead, they face exorbitant bills and increasing pressure to buy more mediocre add-ons.

This frustration, combined with the fiscal pressures weighing on many teams, has led numerous organizations to seek PagerDuty alternatives.

Why Consider a PagerDuty Alternative?

PagerDuty spent $700 million on marketing and PR over the past five years, representing about 60% of its revenue. This aggressive spending has consolidated its position as the de facto on-call scheduling solution, despite numerous shortcomings. But good branding can only take you so far, especially with engineers. In 2024, SRE teams are switching to modern, superior alternatives like Rootly On-Call in droves.

The most common issues driving people to seek an alternative to PagerDuty include:

• A frustrating pricing structure with numerous paid add-ons.
• A lack of human interaction; even if you pay for support, it’s through an outsourced offshore agency.
• You’re irrelevant to PagerDuty unless you’re paying them at least five figures annually.
• Creating a basic on-call schedule requires complex and time-consuming workarounds.
• Modern use cases, such as shadow rotations, are not supported.

Switching to a PagerDuty alternative could not only save your team money but also streamline your incident response process with a more modern and intuitive platform.

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Top PagerDuty Challenges SRE Teams Face in 2024

Pricing

Have you ever traveled with a low-budget airline? They charge for everything: bringing a carry-on, choosing your seat, even getting a glass of water. PagerDuty is similar, except it’s far from low-budget.

PagerDuty is notorious for aggressive upsells and opaque pricing. Your base cost, already excessive, doesn’t include support or even automations. You won’t get the chance to speak to a person during your evaluation or purchase process. Their motto seems to be: if you want anything, pay—then we’ll talk (if you pay enough).

Medium and smaller teams are particularly frustrated, urgently seeking alternatives because it’s hard to justify the continued use of PagerDuty when there are now modern and cost-effective on-call alternatives.

Clunky and Outdated UI

You’re not alone. Every PagerDuty user I know has had to Google how to perform basic tasks on the platform, even if they’ve used its on-call scheduler for years.

But fear not! In its generosity, PagerDuty offers free access to “PagerDuty University,” a collection of over 50 videos that teach you how to set up on-call rotations. Imagine needing to go through hours of training just so someone on your team can receive a push notification.

Unfortunately, updating the UI to make it more intuitive is not a priority for PagerDuty. The company has made its intentions clear: signing larger deals with enterprise customers and expanding its offerings.

Not Designed for Cross-Functional Teams

Modern teams are no longer composed solely of engineers. Incidents often require input from various incident roles, such as customer success representatives, legal leads, and PR experts. However, if PagerDuty is difficult for experienced SREs to use, imagine how tough it is for non-technical team members.

Modern on-call solutions like Rootly feature intuitive UIs that anyone on your team can use via tools they already know, like Slack and Microsoft Teams.

Configuring On-Call Schedules Is Difficult

Andrea was supposed to be on-call next week, but her brother is getting married, so she asks John if they can swap shifts. John agrees; next week works better for him too. Now begins the epic battle against PagerDuty’s overrides UI.

"Wait, how do we do this?" John asks. "The update isn’t showing up on my end." After lots of button-pushing, Andrea says, "It doesn’t seem like we’re choosing the same dates." John realizes, "Ah, somehow my schedule is set to Australia’s timezone. Ok, try again?" Andrea frowns. "Still not showing up at the right time.”

The horror stories of configuring PagerDuty go on and on. From buying a license for a dummy seat just to adjust schedules to registering your teams as services just to page them, setting up PagerDuty to meet your minimum needs is complex and time-consuming.

Stagnant Feature Development

In recent years, PagerDuty has failed to deliver meaningful improvements to its core product. Despite customer frustration, PagerDuty does not seem to prioritize making its product less complex or addressing basic use cases that have emerged over the past 15 years.

Instead, PagerDuty’s investments have focused on expanding its collection of paid add-ons. The company has spent hundreds of millions acquiring other companies to sell new products: Rundeck for automated workflows, Catalytic for ‘advanced’ workflows, and Jeli for lightweight incident management.

Why Rootly is the Top PagerDuty Alternative

Rootly is a modern on-call and incident management solution that provides an integrated, easy-to-use platform to guide you through the entire incident lifecycle—from alert to retrospective.

• Cost-effective and simple pricing—less than half the cost of PagerDuty.
• Startup program with up to a 50% discount.
• Smart defaults let you set up on-call schedules in minutes instead of hours.
• Shift swaps, partial coverage, and shadow rotations can all be done with a single click using Rootly On-Call.
• Rootly offers a beautiful, intuitive UI accessible via web browser, iOS, Android, Slack, and Microsoft Teams.
• Partnership model in which Rootly’s SRE experts help you improve your reliability practices as you scale.

Book a demo with one of our reliability experts to see how Rootly can help you improve your reliability as a modern alternative to PagerDuty, trusted by LinkedIn, NVIDIA, and Cisco.