The 9 Best PagerDuty Alternatives in 2024
Last updated
While PagerDuty is a popular choice among SRE teams, there is a significant amount of innovation happening in the development of new systems to better serve the needs of SREs.
Zenduty stands out as one such tool and is preferred for end-to-end incident management. Its comprehensive and user-friendly capability, along with strong security and reliability, makes it a favored choice among SREs.
In this article, we will discuss nine tools commonly used for incident response and on-call, along with their pros and cons, to help you choose the best pagerduty alternative.
Comparing The Best Pagerduty Alternatives (Free/Paid) 2024 at a glance:
Why Consider PagerDuty Alternatives?
PagerDuty, established in 2009, supports Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) functions and operational tasks. However, some organizations are exploring alternatives due to the following considerations:
Cost:
PagerDuty's pricing structure may not be the most cost-effective for smaller organizations or those new to incident management. Even with PagerDuty's basic plan starting at $21 per month, it still comes with limitations that might be necessary for your daily operations.
Customization:
While the tool offers robust features, organizations require a solution that can adapt and scale more readily to accommodate their evolving needs and complex workflows.
Support:
SREs and engineers are dissatisfied with the support provided by the organization. Additionally, the costs associated with the support make it challenging to resolve issues quickly.
"The main thing I hate about PD is their support. They used to have live chat support which was great. These days I have to send in an email and then wait a week or two for a response. That is one of the main reasons we are
investigating alternatives." - G2
Alert Fatigue:
One main reason for requiring an incident management tool is to ensure that appropriate individuals receive relevant alerts. Engineers have voiced alert fatigue while utilizing PagerDuty, prompting organizations to seek alternatives to address this issue.
There are various Pagerduty alternatives that resolve the above challenges. Let’s take a look at some that can help you streamline your incident management needs.
- Zenduty
- Opsgenie
- xMatters
- VictorOps
- Datadog Incident Management
- FireHydrant
- AlertOps
- Better Uptime
- Grafana On-call
1. Zenduty - The Full Stack Pagerduty Alternative
Fast-growing teams rate Zenduty as the best alternative to Pagerduty. Zenduty is an end-to-end incident management tool that helps you improve your MTTA and MTTR by at least 60%.
Features:
Customizable Alert Rules: With Zenduty’s alert rules, you can route and augment incident details on the go. Notify the right team members based on specific conditions, auto-assign priority, attach relevant playbooks, and suppress non-actionable alerts.
150+ Integrations: With integrations with Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Google Hangouts Chat, you can manage the entire incident workflow within your team chat application.
Incident Tasks and Roles: The key differentiators include Incident Tasks and Incident Roles. Zenduty simplifies stakeholder communications, enabling active incident responders to send updates to internal and external stakeholders in minutes.
Postmortem templates: Choose Zenduty as your PagerDuty alternative to utilize pre-built postmortem templates, simplifying the documentation of incident details. Customize templates according to your specific incident types and workflows for a tailored approach.
Pricing: Zenduty provides plans tailored for both small and large teams, starting at $5/user/month and going up to $21/user/month for Enterprise users.
2. Opsgenie
Acquired by Atlassian in 2018, Opsgenie is a robust incident management solution well-suited for large enterprises, established incident management (IM) teams, and organizations with high error budgets. It excels at reliability and handling complex environments.
But if user experience and cost-effectiveness are top priorities for your organization, Opsgenie might not be the optimal choice.
Features:
- The free tier, which supports five users with unlimited SMS notifications, has attracted a significant user base. However, some users have reported challenges with the user interface's complexity and the quality of documentation, especially during the onboarding process.
- Integrates with Jira, Confluence, and Slack for seamless incident management.
- Smart alerting and routing ensure critical incidents are never missed. Multi-channel notifications (SMS, email, push) and actionable filtering have reduced alert fatigue.
- This Pagerduty Alternative is ideal for organizations heavily invested in the Atlassian ecosystem looking for an integrated incident management solution.
Pricing:
If you are looking for a free pagerduty alternative, Opsgenie offers a 14-day free trial with plans starting at $11/user/month with more features in higher tiers.
User Review:
“Users are satisfied with the Slack and MS Teams integrations, but some feel that the UI/UX is not on par with PagerDuty. Additionally, some advanced features present in PagerDuty are missing. Another issue is that the call volume often increases to the maximum, which can be very annoying.” - Source: G2
3. xMatters
xMatters caters specifically to large enterprises and established incident management (IM) teams. Some engineers have reported a lack of transparency regarding planned maintenance and downtime within Xmatters. This can hinder proactive incident management efforts.
Features:
- xMatters focuses on minimizing the time it takes to identify incidents through Smart alert routing. The tool ensures alerts reach the right people on-call based on predefined schedules and escalation policies.
- Automates incident response tasks, minimizing manual steps and speeding up resolution.
- Provides centralized communication channels for teams to collaborate effectively during incidents.
Pricing:
Xmatters paid plans start at $9 per user per month and go upto $39 per month for enterprise features, which is higher than other Pagerduty alternatives.
User Review:
“While xMatters users appreciate receiving timely alerts, many find the setup process difficult and time-consuming, often requiring extensive documentation review. Furthermore, due to its high cost, xMatters is not typically recommended for startups.” - Source: G2
4. VictorOps (Splunk On-Call)
Founded in 2012, VictorOps is now known as Splunk On-Call. It caters specifically to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) looking for a user-friendly incident management solution.
Features:
- VictorOps emphasizes a user-friendly experience, making it easy for smaller teams to learn and adopt the platform quickly.
- Manage on-call rotations and direct alerts to the appropriate team members based on schedules and escalation policies.
- For organizations already using Splunk for log management, VictorOps integrates effortlessly, offering additional value by leveraging existing data.
Pricing:
VictorOps determines tiered pricing based on the number of users per month. While the Starter Plan caters to up to 10 users, the Growth and Enterprise Plans offer expanded features and integrations at higher price tiers.
User Review:
“Users praise Splunk On-Call for its ease of setup, integration flexibility, and robust on-call management features. However, limitations in two-way communication with external tools like Jira and an inability to re-assign acknowledged issues prevent a completely seamless workflow.” - Source: G2
5. Datadog
Datadog serves organizations with complex IT setups and a robust DevOps/SRE mindset. It excels in thorough monitoring and observability and provides teams with a potent platform to detect and tackle issues proactively.
Features:
- It offers a comprehensive suite of tools to monitor infrastructure, applications, and logs, which allows teams to see the bigger picture and identify potential issues before they turn critical.
- Powerful analytics and customizable dashboards help users analyze data and optimize performance proactively.
- Datadog integrates monitoring data with incident management functionalities. Teams can trigger alerts, collaborate on resolutions, and track progress within the platform.
Pricing:
The basic plan starts at $15 per host per month. It's best suited for organizations where cost isn't a primary concern and the value of deep insights outweighs the potential for a higher cost.
User Review:
“Datadog is praised for its rapid data ingestion, versatile graphing tools, and innovative features like Cloud Insights. However, users find customer support lacking, with difficulties reaching personnel, irrelevant solutions, and poor communication during disruptions. The high cost of support further emphasizes the need for improvement, ideally following AWS's proactive model.” - Source: G2
6. FireHydrant
FireHydrant focuses on defining, supporting, and automating incident response processes. It caters specifically to growing startups, with a focus on streamlining incident response through ChatOps.
Features:
- The tool gathers all incident details and communication in one place on your chat platform, making collaboration transparent and efficient.
- You can create and share runbooks directly within FireHydant, providing clear instructions for resolving recurring incidents.
- FireHydrant prioritizes simplicity and ease of use, making it ideal for smaller teams that might not have dedicated SRE resources or complex alerting needs.
Pricing:
There's a free tier available for small teams, offering basic incident management features. Their Platform Pro plan starts at $9,600 per year.
Vinay Singh
User Review:
“FireHydrant impresses users with its deep integrations, robust runbook creation tools, and responsive support team. However, the fast development pace can sometimes introduce bugs or disrupt existing functionality, requiring users to adapt.” - Source: G2
7. AlertOps
AlertOps is ideally suited for organizations with complex IT environments and high volumes of alerts. Its automation and integration capabilities effectively manage large-scale incident management processes.
Features:
- AlertOps automates the process of routing alerts to the right team member based on predefined schedules and escalation policies.
- It integrates with various monitoring tools, ITSM platforms, and chat applications, providing centralized incident management and streamlined workflows.
- AlertOps offers granular control over escalation sequences. You can define escalation paths to ensure timely issue resolution even when the primary responder is unavailable.
- Apart from the above capabilities, you can monitor your service level agreements (SLAs) with built-in tracking functionalities within AlertOps.
Pricing:
The entry-level plan starts at $5 per user per month, offering alerting features and on-call scheduling, ideal for small teams of up to 10 users. For additional features, the Enterprise plan is priced at $23 per user per month.
User Review:
AlertOps offers user-friendly features like team schedules, Slack integration, and customizable notifications, all accessible through their mobile app. However, the app's on-call display and schedule management could be improved to streamline team communication and reduce administrative burden.”- Source: G2
8. Better Stack (Formerly Better Uptime)
BetterStack caters to a broad audience, including freelancers, startups, small businesses, and even established companies taking their first steps in monitoring and incident management (IM) practices.
Features:
- The platform includes a robust incident management system, featuring an on-call calendar that can be easily accessed within the app or integrated with Google Calendar. Additionally, it offers advanced team management and access options.
- One of the main features is its built-in uptime monitoring, which covers a range of checks such as HTTP(s), ping, SSL and TLD expiration, cron jobs, and port monitoring.
- The platform provides a free status page connected to existing monitors. Users can easily customize and publish this status page on a custom domain.
Pricing:
While Better Uptime provides a variety of helpful features, it might not be the most budget-friendly choice for small businesses. The freelancer pack begins at $25 per month, while the business plan costs $170 per team per month, which can be costly.
User Review:
"Better Stack's intuitive interface makes it easy for beginners to set up monitors and understand reports, with a generous free plan ideal for small businesses or personal projects. However, upgrading from the free plan involves a significant price jump, and the mobile app lacks some core functionalities found in the web interface. A more feature-rich mobile app and tiered pricing options would be beneficial."-Source: G2
9. Grafana On-call
Grafana On-Call is designed for DevOps and SRE teams already utilizing Grafana for monitoring. It provides a central hub for on-call scheduling, alerting, and incident response, all within the Grafana environment.
Features:
- If your team heavily relies on Grafana for monitoring and prioritizes a centralized on-call management solution, Grafana On-Call offers seamless integration and an efficient workflow.
- A visual representation of the incident's activity timeline aids teams in tracking and understanding the progression of incidents. Easily assign incident roles, ensuring clarity in responsibilities during incident resolution.
- Get push notifications and manage on-call duties from your mobile device for quick responsiveness. (Requires connection to Grafana Cloud)
- Leveraging Grafana On-Call within your existing Grafana environment minimizes the need for additional integrations and reduces context switching.
Pricing:
This Pagerduty Alternative offers a free tier, pay-as-you-go plans starting at $29/month, and an advanced tier with enterprise features starting at $299/month.
User Review:
“Users feel that the platform excels in simplifying and visualizing metrics effectively, offering a centralized view of alerts for better incident management. They appreciate its easy integration with monitoring software, which enhances functionality, and the friendly interface aids in flexible automated scaling.
However, users note that configuring route aggregation may require prior knowledge, and the steep learning curve could be challenging for those without experience. Additionally, users find the boards not very organized and suggest that offering unlimited boards would improve usability. Furthermore, they believe that visualizations should not be limited by data type.” - Source: G2
How to Choose the Right Pagerduty Alternative
Consider the following questions and evaluate the requirements:
- Identify your team size, alert volume, and desired features. Do you need basic on-call scheduling and alerting, or more advanced functionalities like automated workflows and in-depth reporting?
- Consider free tiers, pay-as-you-go options, and per-user fees. Choose a solution that aligns with your budget and scales with your needs.
- Consider the level of support offered by the alternative. Do they provide basic email support or offer more comprehensive options like phone support or dedicated account managers?
- Evaluate how user-friendly the interface is. Can your team learn and adopt the new platform quickly? Intuitive interfaces minimize training time and ensure efficient incident response.
- Research features offered by different PagerDuty alternatives. Look for functionalities like on-call scheduling, alerting & escalation, incident management tools, integrations with your existing monitoring systems, and reporting capabilities.
Make Informed Decision: Zenduty Can Help You Resolve Incidents Faster
The abovementioned PagerDuty alternatives will help you find the right incident management software.
If you need comprehensive incident management, on-call scheduling, reduced MTTA and MTTR, and a cost-effective solution, Zenduty is the choice for you.
No CC required Free migration and Dedicated developer support throughout the journey. Signup for a free trial today!
Anjali Udasi
As a technical writer, I love simplifying technical terms and write on latest technologies.
