# Rootly vs Zenduty: An Incident Management comparison for 2026
If your company runs on Google Workspace and talks in Google Chat, this comparison may already be over. Zenduty lets responders acknowledge, update, and resolve incidents from Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Google Chat. Rootly supports Slack and Teams only, and because Rootly runs the whole incident inside the chat channel, a missing chat platform is not a small gap. It removes the main way you would use the product.
For everyone on Slack or Teams, the chat question still matters, just in a different way. Both tools talk to you in chat, but they put very different amounts of the incident there, and that difference explains most of what follows.
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**Rootly treats the chat channel as the place the incident lives**, with roles, a timeline, workflows, an AI assistant, and an extra-cost AI SRE, all working inside Slack or Teams. Zenduty starts earlier in the incident. **Zenduty starts from the alert and adds chat controls on top**, now sold as Xurrent IMR, that correlates alerts from 150+ integrations and pages the right person, with AI included on every plan.
This comparison looks at how much of the incident each puts in chat, alert handling, on-call, automation, AI, status pages, reporting, ownership, and cost.
## Quick comparison
The table below sums up the main differences. Nearly all of them come back to where each product does its main work.
| Category | Rootly | Zenduty |
|---|---|---|
| **Current name** | Rootly | Xurrent IMR, formerly Zenduty |
| **Owner** | Independent | Xurrent, an ITSM vendor |
| **Center of the product** | The incident channel | Alert routing and on-call |
| **Chat platforms** | Slack, Microsoft Teams | Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat |
| **Automatic incident channel** | ✔ | ✘ |
| **Alert correlation** | Alert grouping in On-Call | ✔, every plan |
| **On-call** | Separate license, $20 per user | Included in every seat |
| **Shadow rotations** | ✔ | ✘ |
| **Lifecycle workflows** | ✔ | Playbooks and AI workflows |
| **Incident SLAs** | ✘ | ✔ |
| **AI SRE** | ✔, priced by quote | ✔, included on every plan |
| **MCP server** | ✔, read and write | ✔, read-only |
| **Status pages** | ✔, Essentials | $10,000 per year add-on on Growth |
| **Analytics** | Incident metrics | ✔, every plan |
| **Free plan** | ✘, trial only | ✘, 14-day trial |
| **Entry price with on-call** | $40 per user | $5 per user on Starter, $14 on Growth |
| **Logs, metrics, traces** | ✘ | ✘ |
## How much of the incident lives in chat
This is the clearest difference between the two products.
In Rootly, the chat channel is the product. Declaring an incident creates a Slack or Teams channel, assigns an incident commander and other roles, starts a timeline that records decisions as they happen, and prompts the commander with what to do next. Workflows keep running inside the channel as severity and status change, and the AI assistant can catch up anyone who joins late.
In Zenduty, chat is a control surface. From Slack, Teams, or Google Chat, responders can acknowledge an incident, add people, change its status, and post updates, while the incident itself lives in Zenduty's web console with its alerts, timeline, and SLA timers. Zenduty does not open a dedicated channel or assign roles automatically. incident.io takes the same chat-first approach as Rootly, and our [incident.io vs Zenduty comparison](https://betterstack.com/community/comparisons/incident-io-vs-zenduty/) shows how that gap plays out with another Slack-native tool.
| Chat | Rootly | Zenduty |
|---|---|---|
| **Google Chat** | ✘ | ✔ |
| **Incident channel created automatically** | ✔ | ✘ |
| **Roles assigned in chat** | ✔ | Responders added from chat |
| **Timeline recorded from the channel** | ✔ | Incident log in the console |
| **Acknowledge and update from chat** | ✔ | ✔ |
[summary]
### An incident channel that opens with the data
Rootly runs the incident in chat and Zenduty runs it from a console, but both rely on another product for the logs and metrics responders need. Better Stack opens incident channels in Slack or Teams with the triggering telemetry attached, alongside on-call, escalations, and status pages on the same platform.
**A chat-based incident moves faster when the evidence arrives in the first message.** [Explore Better Stack incident management](https://betterstack.com/incident-management).
[/summary]
## Alert handling
Zenduty does more before anyone is paged.
Its alert rules can change an alert's assignee, escalation policy, urgency, priority, and SLA using any field in the payload, and they run ahead of the default escalation. Correlation merges duplicate alerts by time or content, maintenance windows silence planned work, and recurring incidents can be held back. Even the cheapest plan gets these features, limited mainly by integration counts: 5 on Starter and 25 on Growth, with 5 per team.
Rootly On-Call does group and route alerts, and its AI SRE pulls in related ones once an incident starts, but cleaning up the alert stream is a side job for Rootly, not the main event.
| Alerts | Rootly | Zenduty |
|---|---|---|
| **Payload-based routing rules** | Routing rules | ✔, alert rules |
| **Correlation and deduplication** | ✔, On-Call | ✔, every plan |
| **Maintenance windows** | ✔ | ✔ |
| **Integration limits** | None published | 5 on Starter, 25 on Growth |
## On-call
Both cover rotations, overrides, and escalation, with different pricing catches.
Every Zenduty seat comes with on-call. Rotations can be shaped however you like, with overrides and escalation set per team or per service, and pages reach people by phone, text, email, push, or chat. You can also describe a rotation in ordinary words and let Sera AI build it. On Starter, calls and texts are limited per user each month, more generously in the US, Canada, and India than elsewhere, and Growth lifts the limit.
Rootly's on-call is a $20-per-user add-on covering schedules, escalation, and overrides, and adds shadow rotations, coverage-gap warnings, and routing for inbound phone calls.
| On-call | Rootly | Zenduty |
|---|---|---|
| **Rotations and overrides** | ✔ | ✔ |
| **Shadow rotations** | ✔ | ✘ |
| **Natural-language scheduling** | ✘ | ✔, Sera AI |
| **SMS and voice limits** | Part of On-Call | Limited on Starter, unlimited on Growth |
| **Pricing** | $20 per user, separate | Included in the seat |
## Automation
Rootly automates the process. Zenduty automates the checklist and the paperwork.
Rootly's workflows can start from nearly any change in an incident, from declaration through resolution, check conditions like service, severity, or custom fields, and then page people, open tickets, post updates, call webhooks, or change the status page. You can encode a detailed process, though someone has to keep it maintained.
Zenduty leans on playbooks that list the steps for incidents the team has seen before, timers that flag a slipping response target, stakeholder templates keep updates consistent, and AI workflows assign responders and keep Jira or ServiceNow tickets current.
| Automation | Rootly | Zenduty |
|---|---|---|
| **Lifecycle workflows** | ✔, detailed | AI workflows |
| **Task checklists** | Via workflows | ✔, playbooks |
| **Incident SLAs** | ✘ | ✔ |
| **Ticket sync** | Jira, ServiceNow, and others | Jira, ServiceNow, and others |
## Two AI SREs
Both vendors now sell an AI SRE. One includes it in the base price, and the other quotes it separately.
Zenduty includes Xurrent's Sera AI on every plan, from Starter up. Included are alert grouping, generated incident summaries and post-mortems, schedule building from plain requests, automated assignment workflows, and an AI SRE that suggests what went wrong. Its training source, according to Xurrent, is your organization's own past incidents, write-ups, and chat threads.
On Rootly's side, the Essentials assistant summarizes, answers questions in the channel, and starts the write-up, while the separately sold AI SRE works the problem in parallel, checking deploys, neighboring alerts, and similar past outages before offering a cause, a confidence level, and its reasoning. How that agent stacks up against ours is the subject of [Better Stack AI SRE vs Rootly AI SRE](https://betterstack.com/community/comparisons/better-stack-ai-sre-vs-rootly-ai-sre/).
The MCP servers differ in scope. Rootly's lets assistants read and change incidents, alerts, schedules, and workflows. Zenduty's IMR server is read-only, so assistants can look up incidents and who is on call but cannot act on them.
| AI and MCP | Rootly | Zenduty |
|---|---|---|
| **AI SRE** | ✔, priced by quote | ✔, every plan |
| **Main evidence** | Deploys, alerts, past incidents | Incident history, post-mortems, alert payloads |
| **Confidence scores** | ✔ | Not advertised |
| **Summaries and post-mortem drafts** | ✔ | ✔ |
| **Natural-language scheduling** | ✘ | ✔ |
| **MCP server** | ✔, read and write | ✔, read-only |
[summary]
### An AI SRE that reads more than incident history
Zenduty's AI SRE learns from past incidents and alert payloads, and Rootly's reasons over deploys and related alerts, but neither can query the logs and traces behind a failure. Better Stack's AI SRE sits next to that data in one platform, so the cause it suggests comes with proof.
**Incident history shows what usually breaks, and telemetry shows what broke today.** [See Better Stack AI SRE](https://betterstack.com/ai-sre).
[/summary]
## Status pages
This is Rootly's clearest packaging advantage.
On Rootly, status pages ship with Essentials, and the incident's workflows can refresh them when severity moves.
Zenduty's pages, public or private, track incident status automatically. The catch is packaging: no pages on Starter, a $10,000-a-year add-on on Growth, and inclusion only at Enterprise. Twenty-five Growth seats cost less per year than that single add-on.
| Status pages | Rootly | Zenduty |
|---|---|---|
| **Entry plan** | ✔, Essentials | ✘, Starter |
| **Mid-tier plan** | ✔ | $10,000 per year add-on |
| **Updates from incidents** | ✔, via workflows | ✔ |
## Reporting
Zenduty gives managers more. Every plan includes dashboards for acknowledgment and resolution times, incident counts by team, service, and person, the services that fail most often, and SLA results, with CSV and PDF exports. History is held for twelve months on Starter and with no limit on Growth.
Rootly reports incident metrics and leans on its retrospectives, which its AI drafts from the recorded channel history, with follow-ups pushed to Jira, Linear, and other trackers.
| Reporting | Rootly | Zenduty |
|---|---|---|
| **MTTA and MTTR dashboards** | ✔ | ✔, every plan |
| **SLA reporting** | ✘ | ✔ |
| **AI retrospective drafts** | ✔ | ✔ |
| **Follow-up sync to trackers** | ✔ | Via ticket sync |
[summary]
### Response metrics next to system metrics
Zenduty charts response times and Rootly tracks retrospectives, but neither can show the error rates and latency behind each incident. Better Stack lets you query incidents and telemetry with SQL on one platform, so response times and the failures that caused them appear on the same dashboard.
**A slow response makes more sense next to the spike that caused it.** [Build charts with SQL](https://betterstack.com/dashboards).
[/summary]
## Ownership
Rootly is an independent company that sells only incident tooling. Zenduty's parent, Xurrent, is primarily an IT service management vendor, placed by Gartner among the niche players in its 2026 ITSM evaluation. If you ever want incidents and IT tickets under one roof, that helps. If you only care about engineering incidents, it means the roadmap is shared with service desk work you will not use.
## The telemetry neither tool holds
Rootly and Zenduty both rely on other products for observability, with no log storage, metrics, tracing, or uptime checks of their own. Both AI SREs reason over what integrations and past incidents provide, and responders still switch to a monitoring tool to see what failed. Buyers who want the pager and the data from a single vendor can see how that looks against Zenduty in our [Better Stack vs Xurrent IMR comparison](https://betterstack.com/community/comparisons/better-stack-vs-xurrent/).
| Observability | Rootly | Zenduty |
|---|---|---|
| **Logs, metrics, traces** | ✘ | ✘ |
| **Uptime monitoring** | ✘ | ✘ |
| **Where investigation data lives** | Connected integrations | Connected integrations |
[summary]
### Collect the evidence without touching code
Rootly and Zenduty both leave the logs, metrics, and traces in another product. Better Stack's eBPF-based collector discovers your services and captures that telemetry without code changes, then runs on-call, incidents, and status pages on the same data.
**An AI SRE gets smarter the moment it can see the telemetry itself.** [See Better Stack tracing](https://betterstack.com/tracing).
[/summary]
## Pricing
Xurrent positions its tiers as the same product at different scales. Starter is $5 a user per month billed yearly, or $6 month to month, and caps out at 5 users. Growth is $14 yearly or $16 monthly and stretches to 50 users across 5 teams with 25 integrations and no phone or text limits. Enterprise is priced on request and is the only tier with status pages included.
Rootly bills $20 a user for its response product and $20 more for on-call, with the AI SRE priced by quote and no free option.
A 25-person engineering team with 10 people on call would pay roughly this at list:
| Cost component | Rootly Essentials | Zenduty Growth |
|---|---|---|
| **If all 25 need seats** | 25 at $20 plus 10 at $20 for on-call, so $700 | 25 at $14, so $350 |
| **If only the 10 on rotation need seats** | 10 at $20 plus 10 at $20, so $400 | 10 at $14, so $140 |
| **AI SRE** | Quote on top | Included |
| **Status pages** | Included | About $833 per month add-on |
| **All 25 seats with a status page** | About $700 | About $1,183 |
Without a status page, Zenduty costs half as much and includes an AI SRE. With one, Rootly becomes the cheaper option before its AI SRE quote. Many Zenduty customers buy a separate status page tool instead, which narrows the gap but adds another product.
## Which one fits your team
Zenduty is the pick for Google Chat companies, for teams whose biggest headache is noisy alerts, and for anyone who wants an AI SRE without negotiating a second contract. Organizations pulling alerts from many tools, managers who live in SLA reports, and budgets that cannot cover two licenses per responder will feel at home. Check the team and integration limits on Growth, and plan for a separate status page unless you buy Enterprise.
Choose Rootly if you are on Slack or Teams and want the incident itself run in chat, with roles, timelines, and workflows that make every response consistent. Status pages are included, and its MCP server can act on incidents as well as read them. If you are deciding between chat-native tools, the [incident.io vs Rootly comparison](https://betterstack.com/community/comparisons/incident-io-vs-rootly/) covers Rootly's nearest competitor.
## Final thoughts
Both of these tools talk to you in chat, but only one lives there. **Rootly puts the whole incident in the channel**, while Zenduty keeps the incident in its console and lets chat steer it.
Start with the practical constraint. If your company is on Google Chat, Zenduty is the only one of the two that will work. If you are on Slack or Teams, look at your status page needs and how much of your process you want running in chat. Once a public status page and a structured response are both on the list, **Zenduty's cheaper seat stops being the cheaper deal.**
[summary]
### One MCP endpoint for incidents and telemetry
Rootly's MCP server can act on incidents and Zenduty's can only read them, yet neither can hand an assistant your logs or traces, since neither stores them. Better Stack's MCP server covers the whole platform, so Claude or Cursor can query your logs with SQL, check who is on call, acknowledge an incident, and build a dashboard chart in one conversation.
**With incidents and telemetry behind one MCP endpoint, your assistant can investigate and respond without switching tools.** [Try Better Stack](https://betterstack.com).
[/summary]