7 PagerDuty Alternatives for Modern Incident Response Teams

Maybe your team has outgrown PagerDuty's per-user pricing, or you need more than paging, or both. Either way, you're evaluating on-call and incident response tools at a moment when alert volume keeps climbing and on-call burnout is a real retention risk, not just a talking point in a vendor pitch.

This list covers seven of the strongest PagerDuty alternatives for on-call scheduling and incident coordination: what each one does well, where it falls short, and who it's actually built for. A few names on this list have changed hands or been renamed since you last looked, and we've flagged that where it matters.

One note before you dig in: New Relic isn't one of the seven tools below, and it's not trying to be. It's the detection layer that feeds into whichever on-call tool you pick, correlating alerts and surfacing root cause before the alert reaches the person on call. More on why that matters later in this piece.

The best PagerDuty alternatives for on-call and incident management

We evaluated each tool against four things that matter more than a feature checklist:

• Alerting reliability: Does it fire, every time, across every channel you need?
• Escalation flexibility: Can you build routing rules that match how your team actually works?
• Pricing predictability: Does per-user pricing get expensive fast as headcount grows?
• Depth of incident coordination: Scheduling and paging, or a full incident lifecycle with retrospectives and post-mortems built in?

incident.io

Incident.io is a Slack- and Microsoft Teams-native incident management and on-call platform out of London. It's grown fast among teams that want on-call scheduling and incident response in one product instead of several tools stitched together.

Features worth knowing: On-call scheduling with shadow rotations and cover requests, escalation through WhatsApp and live call routing, workflow automation with Slack slash commands, and AI-generated post-mortems. Status pages are included, too.

The trade-off: The reporting dashboard has limited customization, and teams migrating from a simpler tool sometimes find the initial setup takes real effort to configure.

Best for: Mid-market and enterprise teams already living in Slack or Teams who want on-call management and incident response under one roof. Zendesk reported saving more than $500,000 in its first year after switching from PagerDuty.

G2 rates it: 4.8/5

Jira Service Management (JSM)

Jira Service Management now includes the on-call scheduling, alerting, and incident management that used to be sold as the standalone Opsgenie product. Atlassian stopped selling new Opsgenie licenses on June 4, 2025, and will end support on April 5, 2027. For teams moving to JSM, that functionality is increasingly being folded into the broader service management platform rather than sold as a separate on-call tool.

Features worth knowing: On-call schedules and rotations with overrides, multi-step escalation policies, condition-based routing rules, and, on the Premium tier and above, AI-powered alert grouping, automatic incident creation, and post-incident review generation.

The trade-off: Some of Opsgenie's alert-creation automation doesn't carry over one-to-one, and a few on-call features that were standard in Opsgenie are gated to JSM's higher tiers. JSM's ticket-first design can also add friction during a live incident. Engineers can end up switching between chat for investigation and JSM for record-keeping.

Best for: Teams already standardized on Jira and Confluence who want on-call and incident management folded into the same platform as their service desk and dev tooling, rather than a standalone best-of-breed tool. Applied Systems consolidated on-call and alert management across ten business units on JSM and cut its reporting workload from 40-50 hours a year to about a day.

G2 rates it: 4.3/5 

Rootly

Rootly is an incident management and on-call platform built for fast-growing engineering teams migrating off PagerDuty or Opsgenie. It's part of a newer wave of tools marketing themselves as "AI SRE" platforms, layering AI chat and similar-incident detection on top of standard incident response workflows.

Features: On-call scheduling with shadow rotations and PTO tracking, dynamic escalation paths, live call routing, and automated post-mortems with a meeting bot that documents incidents as they happen.

The trade-off: The workflow automation engine has a learning curve, and some integrations rely on webhooks where competitors offer native support.

Best for: Startups and scale-ups that want strong automation and startup-friendly pricing, including discounts for smaller companies. UNiDAYS says it replaced a decade of PagerDuty usage in two weeks.

G2 rates it: 4.7/5 

Better Stack

Better Stack bundles on-call scheduling and incident response with uptime monitoring, log management, and status pages in one platform, rather than selling incident management as a standalone product. That makes it a fit for leaner teams that don't want to run separate tools for monitoring and paging.

Features worth knowing: On-call rotations with calendar sync for Google and Outlook, unlimited phone and SMS alerts, smart incident merging, and a free tier that includes basic on-call scheduling.

The trade-off: You can't really separate the on-call piece from the broader Better Stack proposition. That's a plus if you also want monitoring and status pages and a minus if you only need incident management.

Best for: Smaller engineering teams that want on-call bundled with uptime monitoring rather than a dedicated incident coordination suite.

G2 rates it: 4.8/5 

FireHydrant

FireHydrant is built around incident response orchestration and a service catalog, so incidents map back to the services and teams that own them, rather than stopping at an alert and whoever gets paged. In 2024, it acquired Blameless, a well-regarded post-mortem tool, and folded its post-incident review practices into the platform.

Features worth knowing: On-call scheduling with unlimited escalation policies, runbooks, a service catalog, and AI-generated incident summaries and retrospectives on its higher tiers.

The trade-off: Reviewers describe the UI and licensing model as confusing, especially when setting up integrations for the first time.

Best for: SRE-mature organizations that want incident response tied to service ownership, not just alerting. Backblaze reported a 91% reduction in mitigation time.

G2 rates it: 4.5/5 

Squadcast (now SolarWinds IT Incident Response)

Squadcast was acquired by SolarWinds in March 2025 and rebranded as SolarWinds IT Incident Response shortly after. If you search for Squadcast today, you'll land on a SolarWinds product page, not an independent company.

Features worth knowing: Schedules and escalations with role-based access control, AI-powered alert correlation to reduce noise, and more than 200 third-party integrations.

The trade-off: It's a newly folded-in SolarWinds product, so there's less of an independent track record since the rebrand than the standalone Squadcast had.

Best for: Teams already using or open to SolarWinds' broader observability and IT operations management stack. Reviewers cite meaningful MTTR improvements from the built-in alert correlation.

G2 rates it: 4.4/5 

Grafana OnCall (Grafana Cloud IRM)

Grafana OnCall's open source version entered maintenance mode in March 2025 and was archived on March 24, 2026. The repository is now read-only, while active development has moved to Grafana Cloud IRM, which combines Grafana's OnCall and Incident capabilities. If you're evaluating this option today, plan around Grafana Cloud IRM, not standalone Grafana OnCall.

Features worth knowing: On-call scheduling through a web UI, Terraform, or iCal, Google Calendar sync for shift swaps, multi-step escalation with customizable routing templates, and multi-channel alerting across Slack, Teams, SMS, and phone.

The trade-off: The open source sunset is the big one. Teams that wanted Grafana OnCall specifically for a supported self-hosted option no longer have that path, while cloud customers are buying into the broader Grafana Cloud IRM product.

Best for: Teams already running Grafana Cloud for infrastructure monitoring who want on-call and incident response built into the same platform.

G2 rates it: 4.5/5 

What to look for in a PagerDuty alternative

When comparing PagerDuty alternatives, look at three things:

• How well the tool handles your real escalation paths
• What it will cost as your team grows
• How much context it carries over from your monitoring stack

Feature lists can look nearly identical. The differences tend to show up during a real incident, when an alert needs to reach the right person quickly and give them enough information to act.

Escalation and on-call flexibility

Most of these tools now live inside Slack or Microsoft Teams, with slash commands to declare an incident, page the on-call engineer, or kick off a retro without leaving chat. That ChatOps model is table stakes at this point. What matters more is whether the escalation policies and routing rules match how your team actually works.

Before you choose a tool, test whether you can:

• Build realistic on-call rotations: Include holidays, PTO, shift swaps, overrides, and follow-the-sun coverage if you need it.
• Route by service or team: A database alert shouldn't have to take the same path as a frontend incident.
• Handle a missed page: Check what happens when the first responder doesn't acknowledge an alert and how quickly the next person gets pulled in.

The best setup is one your team can maintain without someone manually fixing the schedule every week.

Pricing predictability

Per-user pricing is a common reason teams start looking for a PagerDuty alternative. Run the total cost of ownership (TCO) math before you sign, not after. Some tools charge per responder, some bundle unlimited team members into a flat rate, and some meter SMS and voice notifications separately once you're past the free tier.

Model the cost at your expected headcount 12 months from now, not just today's team size. Include everyone who might need to respond to an incident, plus any usage-based charges for phone, SMS, status pages, or other features you expect to use.

Integration with your monitoring stack

An on-call tool is only as good as the alerts feeding it. Whatever you use for infrastructure monitoring and observability—New Relic, Datadog, or another platform—test the integration with a real alert before you commit.

Check whether the page gives the responder the service, host, recent deploy, relevant telemetry, and other context they need to start investigating, or whether it just sends a bare alert with a link back to a dashboard. The fewer systems an engineer has to open to work out what broke, the better.

If you're also reevaluating your broader monitoring stack alongside your on-call tool, our guide to CloudWatch alternatives covers similar ground on the observability side.

Why your alerting tool is only half the equation

Picking a new on-call tool changes how alerts get routed. It doesn't change how many of them are noise in the first place, and that distinction matters more than it sounds.

PagerDuty's own 2024 research put the average cost of a single incident at nearly $800,000, with downtime running over $4,500 a minute. Separately, New Relic's own 2026 AI Impact Report found that the average engineer loses a full 33% of their week to system disruptions and alert noise — and that accounts without AI-assisted alert correlation saw noisy-alert rates top 70%, compared with 46% for teams using it. A better on-call tool won't fix either number. It'll just route the noise faster.

New Relic's role as the detection layer

New Relic's role here is narrower than you might expect. It's an observability platform, not an on-call tool, and it integrates directly with PagerDuty and similar platforms rather than replacing them. It sits upstream as the detection layer, where its AIOps capabilities correlate related alerts into a single issue instead of sending a dozen separate pages. Alert correlation also helps surface root cause before an incident reaches the human on call.

New Relic also updates incident records automatically in ServiceNow and Jira as an investigation progresses, so the incident lifecycle stays documented without someone copying notes between systems by hand.

That connection between changes and recovery isn't new. Uptime Institute's 2025 Annual Outage Analysis found that among outages caused by human error, 85% stem from staff failing to follow procedures or from flaws in the procedures themselves — reinforcing that controlling risky changes and improving problem resolution are still some of the most effective ways to reduce MTTR.

Reducing alert noise before it reaches your on-call tool

Before you switch on-call tools, look at the alerts you're asking that tool to handle. A new platform can improve routing, escalation, and on-call management, but noisy alerts are still noisy alerts. Ignore that part of the problem and you can end up migrating from PagerDuty to a PagerDuty alternative only to hit the same alert fatigue a few years later.

Pair your on-call tool with alert correlation at the source. That means defining alert ownership, grouping related signals, and using post-incident reviews to stop the same noisy alert from paging someone again next month. Our enterprise alert management blueprint goes deeper into these SRE best practices.

If noisy, uncorrelated alerts are still going to be the bottleneck no matter which tool from this list you pick, request a New Relic demo to see how alert correlation and root cause detection can reduce the noise before it reaches your team's on-call tool.