Top 7 PagerDuty Alternatives in 2024: Cost-Effective Solutions for Modern Teams

Not all wines get better with time. In fact, only around 15% of all wine production can age well. By 2024, about 90% of all wine bottles produced in 2009 are past their peak or have important quality deteriorations.

Motorola Razrs, portable DVD players, and iPods were pervasive in society fifteen years ago, but you won’t see any of those around anymore. Obsolescence in technology happens much quicker than in wine. To survive in this industry, you must radically adapt and improve your product and services.

Yet, PagerDuty remains the same product it was from its origins in 2009: an expensive phone call service. Instead of investing in their product, PagerDuty has managed to stay afloat by managing legacy enterprise accounts and making basic features separate paid add-ons.

Frustrated by the lack of essential functionalities a modern SRE team needs, and upset with the inflated costs of PagerDuty in a tight-budget context, most organizations are looking for a robust PagerDuty alternative.

In this article, you’ll learn about seven popular PagerDuty alternatives with their pros, cons, and pricing details.

Why look for a PagerDuty alternative?

Launched in 2009, PagerDuty was the go-to on-call and alerting solution that was reliable enough to be trusted by enterprises. However, the product was designed to operate under the assumptions and practices at that time. Over the past 15 years, the way organizations develop and ship code has radically changed. Reliability is now a much more mature practice with more demanding requirements.

Some people consider PagerDuty a legacy on-call solution because it keeps offering essentially the same product, without accounting for the many new needs SREs have. Common complaints from PagerDuty customers include a low ROI, unnecessary complexity, and a lack of value beyond delivering push notifications.

PagerDuty is too expensive

According to G2, excessive costs are the topmost complaint PagerDuty’s customers make. PagerDuty’s base product is an on-call scheduler that sends push notifications to whoever is on-call. Everything else is a paid add-on, each with different tiers, from status pages (and “premium” status pages), automations, call-rerouting, AI, and “advanced” integrations.

The lightest plan starts at $21/user/month, but the functionality is so limited that most customers necessarily have to get into the $41/user/month plan. Teams that need automated workflows will have to jump to the Enterprise tier at $60/user/month. You’ll also pay extra if you want status pages or AI.

Here’s a breakdown of the minimum annual costs of setting up your on-call and incident response with PagerDuty, with references for a small and a medium team.

PagerDuty is too complex

Ask anybody who has used PagerDuty how much time they spent setting up their on-call rotations and how much they dislike having to update them. You’ll trigger them. G2 reviews reflect this frustration too, with complexity being listed as the second-largest problem PagerDuty customers report.

It takes training and many hours of manual work to set up everything you need for your on-call strategy with PagerDuty. And if you need to update anything, good luck, you’ll likely have to redo a lot of your work.

PagerDuty lacks essential features

Leave aside the fact that most basic features are sold separately in PagerDuty. Many features that modern teams need are not available in PagerDuty at all, which means SREs must constantly put together hacky and fragile configurations just to get on-call set up.

For example, most organizations these days want to page teams outside of just engineering, but PagerDuty makes this incredibly difficult by requiring you to register your teams as services in order to attach them to an on-call schedule.

In modern on-call solutions like Rootly, more complex features like on-call shadowing can be activated with a click, but PagerDuty requires you to duplicate schedules and update them manually.

PagerDuty leaves you hanging after an alert

PagerDuty only offers on-call and alerting, but what comes after is left for you to figure out.

In an attempt to fix this gap, PagerDuty acquired an incident management vendor called Jeli last year. Jeli was an incident manager focused on handling post-incident tasks such as writing retrospectives and tracking action items derived from an incident. Its incident response solutions were still quite bare by the time it was acquired.

However, Jeli’s rollout as part of PagerDuty remains to be seen. So far, Jeli is only being offered to a select number of PagerDuty enterprise customers. As in most product acquisitions of this kind, customers are unlikely to get a smooth experience for a while.

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PagerDuty Alternatives

Fortunately for SREs, PagerDuty is not the only on-call and alerting solution in the market in 2024. We’ve compiled a list of the most popular options and outlined their competitive features, trade-offs, and costs.

Rootly

Backed by Google and Y Combinator, Rootly is the leading modern on-call and incident management solution.

Rootly, founded in 2021, revolutionized reliability by bringing modern practices into alerting and incident response. Rootly is trusted by industry leaders like LinkedIn, NVIDIA, and Elastic.

What’s good about Rootly

• End-to-end incident management platform: Rootly helps you through the entire incident lifecycle, not just paging.
• Modern features like shadow rotations, on-call pay calculator, schedule gap detector, and seamless overrides are included in the platform.
• Startup-ready: comes with smart defaults that get you started with reliability best practices in a few minutes, and offers a special startup plan.
• Preferred by enterprises: offers features to manage reliability at scale (ex. Terraform support, multi-cloud redundancy) and a partnership model trusted by companies like Cisco and Shell.

Rootly Pricing (>50% less than PagerDuty)

Rootly’s comprehensive platform (including on-call, incident response, status pages, AI, and premium support) comes at competitive prices, saving you at least 50% of the costs of PagerDuty. Check out Rootly’s Pricing page for plans and prices.

Rootly also offers a special program for startups getting started with on-call and incident management.

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Datadog On-Call

Datadog, founded in 2010, is a popular observability tool that made waves in the industry by introducing ergonomic patterns to make instrumentation and visualization much easier to implement than in traditional solutions, especially in cloud-native environments.

Over the years, Datadog has grown to offer more than a dozen add-ons to their platform. One of the latest additions is Datadog On-Call, currently available only as a private beta.

The information available on the product is limited to a few blog posts, but it looks promising as the content hints at the possibility of accessing more metrics related to the alert. Datadog On-Call could be a strong PagerDuty alternative for Datadog customers due to the context-rich pages it promises.

What’s good about Datadog On-Call

• Seamless integration with Datadog
• Slick and clean UI both on web and the mobile app
• Straightforward escalation policies and schedules
• Pages that bring more metrics that may be related to the alert in question

What’s not great about Datadog On-Call

• Datadog On-Call is currently in beta, which is great for future customers. You may want to wait for the platform to mature some more before trusting it with critical alerts.
• Datadog On-Call is only an option for you if you’re a Datadog customer.
• Datadog On-Call is only a scheduling and alerting solution, which means you still need to build your own incident management strategy on a different tool.

Datadog On-Call pricing

Datadog On-Call is still in private beta, and there’s no public information about how much the company will charge for the add-on to their platform. However, the sentiment of Datadog invoices skyrocketing keeps permeating the community, forcing teams to look for alternatives for their observability solution.

OpsGenie

OpsGenie was acquired by Atlassian in 2018, a decision its users lament to this day because the company has stopped investing in the product since then. For Atlassian, OpsGenie is just one more among its 18 products.

Atlassian’s strategy for OpsGenie, as a PagerDuty alternative, has always been to compete on pricing rather than platform quality or innovation. Downtimes are frequent, which means you could lose critical alerts if their platform is down.

The product has remained the same for years. For example, even the recent AI wave saw PagerDuty implementing LLM features to stay competitive, but OpsGenie remained unmoved.

What’s good about OpsGenie

• Integrates very well with other Atlassian products, especially with Jira.
• UX is consistent with other Atlassian products, so if you use any, you’ll find OpsGenie intuitive to use.
• Simple onboarding if you’re an Atlassian customer, and you can likely get a bundle deal on OpsGenie.

What’s not great about OpsGenie

• Practically non-existent investments to improve OpsGenie.
• Downtime is a huge concern due to its frequency and duration. OpsGenie consistently reports downtime in their systems, with a week-long window of degraded alerting services being their record for unavailability.
• OpsGenie only offers on-call and alerting. You have to put together a solution for your incident response process, which implies more research, evaluations, and negotiations for a separate incident response management vendor.

OpsGenie Pricing

OpsGenie’s “Essentials Plan” starts at $9/user/month, but as the plan name suggests, it only includes basic features that are unlikely to be enough for most teams. To access features like user roles or analytics, you’ll have to opt for the “Enterprise Plan” at $29/user/month. Status pages are sold as a separate product.

Don’t forget, you also have to buy an incident response solution to get your SRE team going beyond getting a push notification.

Below are the annual costs of setting up your on-call and incident response with OpsGenie, with references for a small and a medium team:

Grafana OnCall

Released in 2014, Grafana is a well-known visualization tool, popular in the open-source community as a companion for Prometheus, an OSS monitoring tool. Grafana Labs offers managed versions and enterprise support for their open-source initiatives.

Grafana OnCall, however, was not developed by the Grafana Labs team but bought from a solo developer in 2021. It is not meant to be used as a standalone product, and it’s not commercialized as such.

You can only get managed Grafana OnCall if you’re a customer of Grafana Cloud. There is an OSS version of Grafana OnCall, but setting it up and maintaining it will require at least a full-time engineer dedicated to the project.

What’s good about Grafana OnCall

• If you use Grafana Cloud and Prometheus as an observability solution, it is very easy to set up Grafana OnCall.
• Grafana OnCall is offered complimentary to Grafana Cloud customers, which definitely makes it an attractive option if you’re already part of the ecosystem.
• Grafana OnCall offers minimalistic functionality, which makes it easy to set up and use daily. Grafana OnCall can be a good solution for teams that just need a simple escalation policy.

What’s not great about Grafana OnCall

• Only works within the Grafana ecosystem.
• Grafana OnCall is a lightweight on-call and alerting solution, which means it lacks most features teams often need, like flexible schedules or round-robin rotations.
• Grafana OnCall doesn’t offer an incident management solution. Your responders will be on their own once they get an alert.

Grafana OnCall Pricing

Grafana OnCall is not sold as a standalone product, so it doesn’t have a cost on its own. Grafana OnCall is offered without additional charge within your Grafana Cloud suite of managed solutions, which hints at the investments that are put into this on-call product.

The costs of Grafana Cloud are usage-based and have tiered rates. It is difficult to estimate how much you’ll pay for Grafana Cloud without implementing Grafana and Prometheus as part of your observability strategy.

You’ll likely have to speak with a Grafana Labs sales representative to get a better idea of which costs to expect.

VictorOps / Splunk On-Call

Splunk, launched in 2003, is a popular observability solution that caters to traditional enterprises. VictorOps was acquired by Splunk and rebranded as Splunk On-Call in 2018, offered as a paid add-on to their platform.

Splunk On-Call is not sold as a standalone product.

What’s good about Splunk On-Call

• If you’re already a Splunk customer, setting up Splunk On-Call is the simplest way to digest alerts from your system.
• Covers most simple use cases for escalation policies and rotations, making it ideal for teams that don’t require advanced features or flexibility.

What’s not great about Splunk On-Call

• Splunk On-Call is only available to Splunk customers.
• If you’d like to be paged by alert sources that aren’t Splunk-based (e.g., VIP customer inbox or landline call), you’ll need to implement workarounds to funnel the alerts through Splunk.
• Splunk On-Call is a companion product, which means it has very limited functionality.

Splunk On-Call Pricing

Splunk On-Call is not offered as a standalone product, so the price isn’t entirely applicable.

However, Splunk discloses that Splunk On-Call is available as an add-on for $5/user/month if you require fewer than 10 seats. The per-seat cost for larger teams is likely to have a steep increase, but you’ll need to contact their sales team for details.

BetterStack

BetterStack, founded in 2021, is part of a new generation of observability solutions, focused on uptime monitoring. BetterStack offers solutions that can solve specific use cases, like the availability of your HTTP endpoints, which makes setting it up a breeze compared to Prometheus. However, BetterStack is not meant to be a full-blown replacement for a full-stack observability tool.

BetterStack also offers on-call schedules, so you can set up simple escalation policies and rotations to respond to what their platform reports.

What’s good about BetterStack

• BetterStack is a consolidated platform that brings together uptime monitoring, on-call scheduling, and status pages under the same roof.
• Built to simplify high-value use cases that many small and medium companies will need covered.

What’s not great about BetterStack

• As your company grows, so does the complexity you have to manage. While BetterStack is easy to set up and use at first, it doesn’t scale with you.
• The on-call and alerting solution from BetterStack only works if their uptime monitoring is enough for you.
• The on-call features that BetterStack offers are rather lightweight and can’t support the advanced use cases of larger teams.

BetterStack Pricing

BetterStack is billed at $29 / user / month, although they won’t charge you for users that only view logs and traces.

If monitoring uptime of your public endpoints is all you need, BetterStack is definitely the perfect option for you, as you’ll get monitoring, a simple on-call suite, and a status page.

Zenduty

Zenduty emerged in 2015 as a cheaper alternative to PagerDuty. However, various issues with its platform, such as constant scheduling errors and never-ending missed alerts, have consistently held the company back. Nearly a decade after its founding, Zenduty remains unprofitable and had to sell a portion of its stake in 2021 for $1.9 million to stay in business.

What’s good about Zenduty

• Zenduty has the cheapest rates in the market, with a full-access unlimited plan at $21/user/month for both on-call and incident response management.

What’s not great about Zenduty

• Users constantly report scheduling errors and that Zenduty didn’t pick up critical alerts.
• The feature set in both on-call scheduling and incident response is limited and poorly implemented.
• Business continuity is a concern.

Zenduty pricing

Zenduty starts at $5/user/month when you have fewer than 10 users and offers everything in their platform without limits with the Enterprise tier at $21/user/month.

Choosing the right tool for your team

A robust on-call and incident management solution will be critical for your reliability strategy. To pick the best option, you’ll need to assess your tech stack, budget, and priorities.

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