5 Best Pagerduty Alternatives in 2024

Pagerduty has been around since 2009 and is still one of the most widely used incident management tools on the market.

There is no doubt that Pagerduty can be a useful tool, but for many teams, there are much better alternatives that provide better functionality at a more affordable price point.

Because of that, we created this list of Pagerduty alternatives to give you the information you need to make an informed switch to a better incident and on-call management tool.

We have compiled this list of alternatives looking specifically at two things: features and pricing. Let's have a look at what are the best tools for DevOps teams to look at when they have had it with Pagerduty.

1. Better Stack

Better Stack combines incident management, uptime monitoring, and status pages into a single beautifully designed product.

Their incident management offers easy-to-use on-call calendar scheduling, which can be done in-app or easily integrated with Google Calendar. Similar to Pagerduty, there are advanced team management and access features.

When it comes to alerting, Better Stack offers unlimited phone call and SMS alerts on all paid plans. There are also Slack and Microsoft Teams integrations available, along with embedding incident screenshots and debugging information directly in alerts, which is very useful as well.

The main benefit of Better Stack is that it has built-in uptime monitoring. They offer HTTP(s), ping, SSL&TLD expiration, cron job, and port monitoring. Those monitors can be integrated with on-call alerting without the need to integrate any third-party monitoring tools like Pingdom or Uptime Robot.

When it comes to integrations, Better Stack offers a wide range of monitoring and analytical integrations that are ideal for more demanding users. The most interesting ones are probably Heroku, New Relic, Datadog, AWS, and Grafana.

A cherry on the top of Better Stack is their free status page. They have a beautifully designed status page, which is connected to all the existing monitors and can be edited in seconds. Their status pages can be fully customized and published on a custom domain. Paid plans also allow users to set up password-protected pages as well as e-mail and API status subscriptions.

Explore the full Better Stack demos library

✅ Pros:

• Integrates monitoring, alerting, status pages, and logging into a single platform
• User-friendly and streamlined interface
• Unlimited phone call capabilities
• Personalized incident templates that can be customized
• Dynamic visual dashboards
• Facilitates collaboration among support teams
• Automatic escalation and routing to designated teams
• Real-time incident detection with a latency of less than one second for quicker response
• Compatible with Slack, Teams, Heroku, AWS, Intercom, and over 100 other integrations
• Offers robust uptime monitoring features for websites, SSL, and APIs
• Conducts automated checks every 30 seconds
• Provides API support for developing custom workflows and data pipelines

⚙️Supported Integrations:

• Datadog
• Newrelic
• Grafana
• Zabbix
• Prometheus
• Kubernetes
• Docker

Check the list of all Better Stack integrations here.

❌ Cons:

• Not a complete observability tool

💰 Pricing:

Better Stack offers a Free plan as well as a Pay-as-you-go plan for those interested in additional features. The free plan includes 10 monitors & heartbeats, e-mail alerts with 3-minute checks, 1 status page, and a 2-month incident history.

2. xMatters

xMatters is another tool to consider when looking for incident management software. xMatters offers the basic functionality you need as a DevOps team to manage your on-calls.

They have easy-to-use on-call scheduling, team management, and incident timelines. They also have advanced team management tools like permission management.

The reason why xMatters is included is that they have a very reasonable free plan, which is suitable for any small team that is just starting and wants to save money while also having basic on-call functionality available. The main difference with the paid plans is that they offer better analytics, data retention, and dedicated support. Furthermore, XMatters offers over 200 pre-built integrations, so plugging in your stack shouldn't be a problem.

The main downside to consider with xMatters is that their phone call notifications are only available on the paid plans and are also limited depending on your tier. To get unlimited phone calls, you would need to switch to their custom pricing available, which obviously comes with a very high price tag and accounting work.

However, for smaller teams, the free tier is a great way to start implementing on-call management in your team.

✅ Pros:

• Combines monitoring, alerting, and automated response capabilities
• Automates incident management and escalation based on predefined criteria
• Supports integrations with Slack, Jira, ServiceNow, AWS, and many others
• Provides tools for real-time team collaboration during incidents

⚙️Supported Integrations:

• Datadog
• Newrelic
• Grafana
• Zabbix
• Prometheus
• Kubernetes
• Docker

Check the list of all xMatters integrations here.

❌ Cons:

• The advanced features might require additional training and onboarding for users
• Requires configuration to prevent users from being inundated with notifications
• Some users have noted that the interface feels outdated compared to more modern competitors

💰 Pricing:

You have four different plans to choose from. The Free Tier supports up to 10 users with essential alerting and integrations. Next is the Starter Plan, starting at $9 per month per user, which includes support for 100 users, automated workflows, and core integrations. The remaining two options are the Advanced Plan and the Enterprise Plan. The Advanced Plan begins at $39 per month per user, providing expanded integrations, analytics, and custom workflows. Meanwhile, the Enterprise Plan offers custom pricing for comprehensive enterprise features and 24/7 support.

3. Alertops

Alertops is a tool for incident management and IT service management. It has all the major features that Pagerduty offers. Probably the major difference is that Alertops now offers heartbeat (cron job) monitoring as part of their higher-tier plans. This is useful for anyone looking to monitor database backups or other scheduled tasks. Regular uptime monitoring or RUM (real user monitoring) is not available. The downside of Alertops is that they lack a free plan. Also, not all plans include unlimited phone and SMS alerts. For the unlimited option, one needs to go for the higher tiers. Their first paid tier, the Standard package is overall, offering much fewer features than others on this list. For example, data retention for the lowest paid plan is only 3 months, and other quite important escalations and alerting features are severely limited as well. Lastly, Alertops is not entirely self-serve. One needs to schedule a demo to start scheduling on-call and integrating monitoring and alerting tools. Overall Alertops is on the more expensive side of Pagerduty alternatives and can be recommended for teams looking to get a partner for a long-lasting commitment.

✅ Pros:

• Customizable alerting rules, workflows, and escalation procedures
• SMS, email, phone calls, push notifications, and chat notifications
• Compatible with tools such as Slack, Jira, ServiceNow, Datadog, and others
• Directs incident alerts to appropriate teams based on set criteria
• Enables global incident management with international SMS and voice capabilities

⚙️ Supported Integrations:

• AWS
• Datadog
• Bugsnag
• Datacake
• Grafana
• Zabbix

Check the list of all Alertops integrations here.

❌ Cons:

• The advanced configuration may be challenging for new users to navigate
• The user interface could benefit from being more modern and user-friendly

💰 Pricing:

AlertOps provides a free plan for up to 5 users, which includes basic incident management features. The next tier, called Standard, begins at $8 per month per user and offers unlimited SMS and voice alerts. The remaining options are Premium and Enterprise plans, with Premium starting at $18 per month per user, featuring advanced automation and SSL monitoring. The Enterprise plan starts at $28 per month per user and includes major incident management with live call routing and reporting capabilities.

4. Opsgenie

Atlassian's Opsgenie is a slightly more modern on-call platform with similar functionality to Pagerduty, is easier to use, and has a better user experience. When it comes to on-call scheduling, Opsgenie has an easy-to-use calendar and works well, even for larger teams. Similar to Pagerduty, there are plenty of advanced alerting workflows that can be utilized to cover even corner case scenarios. Those include enriched alerts, custom actions, or smart incident merging. The main benefit of Opsgenie is that it offers a nice incident investigation tool, which helps teams to correlate the latest deployments with incidents. This can be of great help when solving downtime in many cases. Opsgenie's free plan is quite generous since it offers unlimited SMS alerts and up to 5 team members. Even though this plan has only a few features compared to paid ones, it is a great start for smaller companies. The pricing of other plans is very reasonable and offers many enterprise-ready features. The main downside of Opsgenie is that even with its modern design, the product can be hard to navigate for those new to incident management.

Recommended reading: Pagerduty vs Opsgenie, side-by-side comparison

✅ Pros:

• Handles alerting and incident response
• Multiple notification channels, including SMS, email, phone calls, and mobile push notifications
• Customizable on-call schedules and escalation policies
• Works seamlessly with over 200 tools, including Jira, Slack, PagerDuty, and AWS
• Provides insights into incident response times, team performance, and alert trends

⚙️Supported Integrations:

• AWS
• Datadog
• Zapier
• Dynatrace
• Atatus
• BigPanda

Check the list of all Opsgenie integrations here.

❌ Cons:

• Initial configuration can be challenging for new users
• Advanced features can take time to master

💰 Pricing:

Opsgenie offers a free plan with basic incident management including on-call and alerts. Paid plan starts at $9 per user per month, offering advanced features like custom routing rules. The standard plan starts at $19 per user per month and includes advanced reporting. The enterprise plan starts at $29 per user per month and offers advanced incident management with enterprise collaboration.

5. Splunk

Previously known as VictorOps, Splunk on-call is an incident management tool from the Splunk product family. At the core, Splunk on-call is very similar to Pagerduty as both are enterprise-focused companies. What this means is that similar to Pagerduty, Splunk on-call is quite hard to operate, especially in the beginning. Since Splunk is built for enterprise, it has all the necessary features needed by the big teams but lacks things that would be appreciated by smaller teams, like, for example, a free plan. Another major limitation is that the paid plans have limitations on e-mail and push notification alerts. This essentially means that to be able to operate, teams need to go for the high-tier plans just to be able to get the basic functionality. Furthermore, some advanced features like incident merging are again only available for high-tier plans. What this means is that Splunk is indeed a great tool, but only if you have the resources to go immediately on the enterprise plan.

Recommended reading: 10 Best Splunk Alternatives

✅ Pros:

• Integrates smoothly with Splunk's logging, monitoring, and observability solutions
• Customizable workflows for incident response and automated escalation processes
• SMS, email, phone calls, and mobile push notifications alerts
• Slack, Jira, ServiceNow, and more integrations

⚙️Supported Integrations:

• Kubernetes
• Linux
• Microsoft Windows

Check the list of all Splunk integrations here.

❌ Cons:

• Can have a steep start for new users

💰 Pricing:

Splunk provides flexible pricing plans organized into three primary categories: Security ($15), Observability ($60), and Platform ($75). Each category features more detailed pricing options. For example, within the Observability category, you can choose from Infrastructure, App & Infra, or End-to-End monitoring, ensuring you only pay for the features you need. Additionally, certain services, such as synthetic monitoring, start at just $1, enabling you to tailor your plan according to your specific requirements.

TLDR tools list:

Want to explore more tools?

FAQ uptime guide to Pagerduty:

Looking for a tool to cater to a very specific use case? Here are a few lists with incident management and monitoring tools to check out:

• 10 Best Splunk On-Call (VictorOps) Alternatives
• 5 Most Used Incident Management Tools (Reviewed & Ranked)
• 22 Tools for Synthetic Monitoring (Tried & Tested)

Article by

Jenda Tovarys

Jenda leads Growth at Better Stack. For the past 5 years, Jenda has been writing about exciting learnings from working with hundreds of developers across the world. When he's not spreading the word about the amazing software built at Better Stack, he enjoys traveling, hiking, reading, and playing tennis.

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