In today’s digital landscape, ensuring the uninterrupted operation of your business-critical systems and applications is paramount. PagerDuty, a pioneer in this field, has emerged as a leading choice for organizations worldwide. Known for its real-time incident response capabilities, PagerDuty has played a pivotal role in minimizing downtime, reducing service disruptions, and ensuring swift issue resolution.

Even though PagerDuty has long been a go-to solution for incident management and on-call scheduling, it’s essential to explore other options that might better suit your organisation’s needs. So we will be looking at some of the best PagerDuty alternatives out there. But first, let’s look at what PagerDuty is.

What is PagerDuty?

PagerDuty is a cloud-based platform that offers services like incident management and alerting for organizations and small to large businesses. It is designed in a way that it helps teams detect and respond to incidents, such as system outages, performance issues, or any other critical disruptions, in a timely and organized way.

PagerDuty however, does not necessarily do everything and more importantly there are more functional solutions available for you to choose from. Depending on your specific organizational goals and use cases your needs can vary so we have compiled this list of the best PagerDuty alternatives.

10 Best PagerDuty Alternatives

1.xMatters

xMatters is a popular incident management tool that offers good functionality for any DevOps teams that are looking for a competent PagerDuty alternative. With very usable features like on-call scheduling and advanced team management features it is a perfect tool for smaller teams, while still providing scalability with its advanced features. Some of the other major features of xMatters include:

Provides over 200 in-built integrations.
Team management and incident timeline features.
Offers analytics for insights.
Dedicated support available.
Unlimited phone calls.

xMatters has a free plan that best suits smaller teams but for more functionality, you can go for their paid plans for which you can reach out for a quote.

2. Datadog

The next entry on this list offers a one-stop solution for teams looking for an incident management solution that does it all. Datadog is a comprehensive cloud-scale monitoring and analytics platform. It uses real-time alerting and notification systems, and it expands its capabilities to include incident management. Teams can more effectively identify, address, and resolve any issues when they have a comprehensive understanding of your infrastructure and applications, and Datadog enables this seamlessly. Some of its best features include:

Automated infrastructure management.
Application performance monitoring.
Customizable thresholds and real-time alerting.
Integration with various monitoring sources, including infrastructure, application performance, and security.
Collaboration tools for team communication.

Datadog provides a free trial for those who would prefer to test it out before making a shift. Their paid plans start at $15 per month.

3. BigPanda

BigPanda is an incident management platform powered by AIOps which houses a number of great features and functions that make it a great PagerDuty alternative. BigPanda aims to reduce alert fatigue by automating the correlation of alerts from multiple monitoring systems. And by providing a unified incident management view that is enhanced with machine learning and AI, it enables teams to respond to issues more efficiently. Here are some of the key features of BigPanda that make it a convenient and reliable incident management tool:

Conducting topology-based analysis to find issue root causes.
Automate processes and handle two-way sync.
Incident timeline to track problems in real time
Has a centralized inside dashboard.

BigPanda offers a demo and for the paid version you can contact their sales for a price.

4. AlertOps

AlertOps is a great incident management and alerting platform that effectively streamlines incident response processes. It helps teams manage on-call rotations, escalations, and notifications efficiently, ensuring that incidents are addressed promptly and effectively. AlertOps houses all the major features of PagerDuty and more, making it a worthy alternative to PagerDuty, some of its features are:

Heartbeat (cron job) monitoring.
Unlimited phone and SMS alerts
Multichannel alerting.
Incident escalation policies for routing issues to the right responders.
Incident recording and tracking for compliance and performance analysis.
Easy integration with other collaboration and monitoring tools.

AlertOps has a free plan and paid plans starting at $5 for additional features.

5. Opsgenie

Opsgenie from Atlassian, is an incident management and on-call scheduling solution that focuses greatly on reliability and rapid response. Opsgenie effectively helps teams manage on-call schedules, notifies the right people during incidents, and provides tools for automating and tracking the incident resolution process. Opsgenie also has a number of alerting workflows like custom actions and clever incident merging. With its intuitive interface and exceptional performance, it gives users a comprehensive overview of their processes and infrastructure. Its features include:

Easy-to-use calendar for on-call scheduling.
Advanced alerting workflows.
Exceptional incident investigation tools.
Highly usable and reliable modern dashboard.
Extensive integrations with popular monitoring, logging, and collaboration tools.

Opsgenie has a pricing scheme that can be adapted according to your scaling.

6. JIRA

JIRA, another tool developed by Atlassian, is primarily a project and issue-tracking tool. While not exclusively an incident management tool, it can be customized for incident tracking and resolution through its flexible workflows and extensive integration options. Teams can stay on top of tasks and processes and deliver better value with comprehensive built-in dashboards. Its features are:

Works well with Slack, Zoom, Bitbucket and more.
Customizable issue tracking workflows.
Automatic user provisioning for security.
Customizable automation rules.

For a quote on JIRA, you can reach out to the support team.

7. Sentry

Sentry is an error tracking and monitoring platform, that does a great job at identifying and resolving software errors and exceptions. While not a traditional incident management tool, it plays a vital role in tracking and managing software-related incidents. One of the best parts of Sentry is that it is open-source. Some of Sentry’s features are:

Real-time error tracking and alerting.
Visual monitoring with intuitive dashboards.
Detailed error information and context to aid in incident resolution.
Collaboration tools for development and operations teams.

You can either go for a trial first or directly go for one of the paid plans of Sentry that start at $26 per month.

8. Zenduty

Zenduty is an incident management platform that aims to streamline incident response workflows and simplify the whole process. It centralizes incident alerts, enabling teams to coordinate and resolve issues quickly making it one of the best alternatives to PagerDuty for incident management. Zenduty also lets you automate a lot of steps related to incident response. Some of its major features are:

100+ alert source integrations.
On-call scheduling and escalation matrices.
Deep integration with Slack, Zoom, Microsoft Teams and more.
Interactive incident playbooks.
SLA alerts.

Zenduty has a free plan as well as paid plans that start at $5 per month.

9. Openduty

Openduty is an open-source incident management platform that helps DevOps teams, big or small, to manage on-call schedules and respond to incidents efficiently. It emphasizes simplicity and ease of use and this sets it apart as a very friendly and compelling choice for users. Its features include:

Multi-channel alerting and notification options.
Supports call, email, SMS, HipChat and Rocket.chat.
Highly customizable incident management workflows.
Incident tracking and reporting.

Openduty is open source and free to use.

10. Cabot

Cabot is a strong contender in this list of the best PagerDuty alternatives as it merges a lot of features that many other incident management and infrastructure monitoring tools like Nagios and Pingdom have. And it does this without the complex interface or insane prices that haunt other tools. Cabot is open source and has a web interface that lets you monitor processes and send alerts as SMS or email. Some of its features are:

Send alerts based on Graphite metrics.
Monitor services like the Production ElasticSearch cluster and Stage Redis server.
Web interface for incident tracking and collaboration.
Extensibility through plugins and the ability to add custom checks.
Easy 5-minute deployment.

For pricing details, you can check Cabot’s website.

6 More Great PagerDuty Alternatives

Conclusion

As the technology landscape continues to evolve, so do the demands and preferences of businesses. While PagerDuty offers a comprehensive suite of features, it may not be the perfect fit for every organization due to factors like budget constraints, specific use-case requirements, or differing priorities.

The above tools offer diverse features and capabilities that allow for a lot more functionalities and might better suit your particular use case. Go through them and you might find something that works the best for your application.