Our List of the 6 Best PagerDuty Alternatives

PagerDuty is one of the most popular incident management and response tools. It has a user-friendly UI and an affordable pricing model that attracts many users. However, there are other options out there that can fill your needs more effectively.

If you're looking for the best incident management software or considering a change, this is the article for you. We’ve tested tons of incident response tools in building out Instatus’ incident management features—and we’ve rounded up the absolute best PagerDuty alternatives.

Let’s dive in.

What Is PagerDuty?

PagerDuty is an incident management and response platform used by organizations around the world. It integrates with popular systems like Slack, ServiceNow, Splunk, OpsGenie, VictorOps, and more.

With PagerDuty, you can set up alerts based on certain triggers or events and then route them to the appropriate personnel. You can also create custom reports and dashboards to track performance metrics and respond to incidents quickly and efficiently.

Why People Look for PagerDuty Alternatives?

Cost Concerns

While PagerDuty offers a robust incident management solution, its pricing structure may not align with the budget constraints of smaller businesses or startups. This prompts many organizations to explore more cost-effective alternatives.

Learning Curve

PagerDuty's feature-rich platform can be perceived as complex, with a steep learning curve for new users. Some businesses prefer alternatives that offer simpler setups and workflows for quicker onboarding.

Integration Limitations

While PagerDuty integrates with various tools and services, it may not cover every unique use case or technology stack. Some users seek alternatives that provide more extensive or specialized integrations to connect seamlessly with their systems.

Customization Needs

PagerDuty's customization options may not meet the specific requirements of all organizations. Some users look for alternatives that offer greater flexibility in tailoring alerting and incident management workflows to match their unique processes.

Criteria to Consider When Choosing PagerDuty Alternatives

Visibility

The incident management tool you choose should offer a clear and comprehensive view of the incident status. It should show you the impact, timeline, and actions taken during the incident. This visibility enables real-time communication with stakeholders, ensuring everyone stays informed and aligned.

Automation and Integration

Opt for tools that automate repetitive incident management tasks. These tools should seamlessly integrate with your existing systems, allowing data to flow effortlessly between them. This integration ensures coordination across different platforms and teams, streamlining incident response.

Incident Identification

Look for tools that come equipped with automated incident identification capabilities. These capabilities should be able to integrate with various monitoring and alerting sources. This way, you'll have a tool that can spot incidents accurately based on real-time data from multiple sources.

Instatus is a tool that allows you to quickly get a detailed status page, complete with actionable insights and real-time reports. Share your issues with customers before they ask about them. Monitor issues before your customers notice them.

Alert Filtering and Suppression

Effective alert filtering and suppression features are essential to prevent information overload. These features ensure that only critical alerts reach the right personnel, reducing noise and allowing your team to focus on the most important tasks during incidents.

Alert Correlation

Your chosen tool should be capable of correlating alerts originating from different monitoring sources. This correlation is vital for identifying incidents accurately. It helps avoid duplicate alerts and ensures that you're addressing the root cause of an incident, not just its symptoms.

On-Call Management

Efficient on-call management is a key aspect of incident resolution. You need a tool that can quickly determine which team members are currently on-call and qualified to handle specific types of incidents. This capability ensures a swift response to incidents without causing chaos or confusion within your team.

6 Best PagerDuty Alternatives

Excited to discover alternative tools for PagerDuty? Here’s some of the best tools we’ve discovered:

1. Instatus
2. xMatters
3. BigPanda
4. Splunk
5. OpsGenie
6. ServiceNow

Let’s learn more about them below.

1. Instatus

Instatus is an all-in-one monitoring tool and status page builder that helps with end-to-end incident management.

You can set up a range of monitors (website, API, SSL, TCP, and more) with rapid, 30-second checks from a range of locations around the world. It helps with automated incident response, alerts and notifications, on-call scheduling, and shift management.

Plus, you can also create integrated public and private status pages that automatically keep users and teammates informed when something goes wrong.

Relevant Features

• Incident management: Develop on-call calendars, establish escalation and routing rules, handle incidents through Slack, include comments, and engage in collaborative problem-solving.
• Monitoring types: Monitor websites and apps using our website, API, keyword, SSL, TCP, ping, and DNS checks. Get real-time updates every 30 seconds from various locations.
• Monitoring integrations: Connect your current monitoring tools—Site24x7, Pingdom, Datadog, and more—to effortlessly keep track of all your existing systems.
• Integrated status page: Keep your users and team members informed about any outages and maintenance using customizable public or private status pages.
• Alerts & notifications: Receive notifications via email, SMS, and phone calls, or through integrated communication tools like Slack, Discord, and Microsoft Teams.
• Customization & branding: Personalize your status page by adding customized colors, logos, and domains that align with your unique brand style. Get creative with CSS to design a page that perfectly complements your product.

Pricing

We offer a free forever plan with access to 15 monitors, 3-minute checks, email alerts, and a public status page that can support 200 subscribers. It’s a great starting point for small businesses and teams that don’t need many monitors or subscribers.

We also offer three paid plans with features that cater to larger businesses and projects.

Pro ($15/month) includes 50 monitors, 30-second checks, SMS and phone alerts, unlimited team members, and 1 custom domain for your status page. Business ($225/month) raises the monitor limit to 1,000 and offers more on-call members and custom domains.

The final plan is a customizable Enterprise plan.

2. xMatters

xMatters is an incident management software that provides basic functionality for managing infrastructure errors and application downtimes. It offers on-call scheduling, timelines of incidents, and team management.

xMatters also helps users to share information between different systems, whether they're on-premises or in the cloud. It works with monitoring and issue-tracking tools and can connect both new and legacy systems using open APIs.

Relevant Features

• Incident response and management: Automate incident resolution, review incident details, and learn from in-depth analytics.
• Signal intelligence: Filter alerts, block redundant notifications, and route issues to team members with relevant context.
• Performance analytics: Gain full visibility on team performance, response efficacy, and real-time incident details.
• On-call management: Automate escalations to prevent issues from going unacknowledged and get the help you need to fix things fast.

Pricing

xMatters offers a free plan with on-call functionality and limited incident monitoring features that support up to 10 users.

The paid plans (Starter & Base) cost $9/user/month to $39/user/month and includes data retention, analytics, and support.

Pros

• Supports real-time alerts through a wide range of channels
• Allows for extensive customization when creating workflows
• Flexible pricing model

Cons

• Complex user interface
• Android app UI needs improvement
• Lacks plug-and-play integrations for several other third-party tools

3. BigPanda

BigPanda uses machine learning to spot alerts, downtimes, or incidents from different data sources and identify their roots in real-time.

It allows users to group alerts from different systems into one database while filtering multiple entries for the same incident. Plus, it can work with lots of other tools like Jira, Slack, Amazon CloudTrail, and many others.

Relevant Features

• Alert intelligence: Convert raw event data into a stream of alerts to quickly understand what is happening and which action to take.
• Automated incident intelligence: Use Generative AI to identify and automate root cause analysis to explain the probable reasons behind an active incident.
• Workflow automation: Accelerate incident investigation and resolution of automated notifications and ticketing.
• Unified analytics: Analytics and reporting solution that provides deep visibility into KPIs, metrics, and trends for continuous optimization.

Pricing

Contact sales for a quote.

Pros

• Integrates with multiple tools
• Console is user-friendly and provides ease of administration
• Helpful noise reduction to reduce duplicate alerts

Cons

• Dashboard needs improvement
• Poor customer support
• Lacks the feasibility to show the alert count in a particular incident

4. Splunk

Splunk (formerly VictorOps) offers a platform that helps resolve issues using backend system data. It focuses on providing analytics and AI-driven approaches for addressing the incident lifecycle—from monitoring to response to continuous learning and improvement.

Splunk combines event management, monitoring, on-call management, and ChatOps, enabling users to make proactive recommendations based on past actions.

 Relevant Features

• Incident management: Perform rapid searches across data, focus on the most relevant issues, and quickly close investigations.
• Advanced threat detection: Use real-time streaming analytics to detect and address suspicious and malicious behaviors.
• Application performance monitoring: Detect slowness, errors, or anomalies from new deployments, updates, or configurations.
• Infrastructure monitoring: Monitor dynamic thresholds, multiple conditions, and complex rules to reduce MTTD/MTTR.

Pricing

Splunk offers a variety of pricing options, including workload pricing, ingest pricing, entity pricing, and activity-based pricing. You’ll need to contact sales for an accurate quote, though.

Pros

• Easy to implement
• Extensive features and add-ons
• Variety of supported alert types

Cons

• Difficult optimization
• Expensive pricing
• Unreliable performance

5. OpsGenie

OpsGenie is a modern incident management system that supports processes such as incident management and problem management. It gathers notifications and alerts for incidents that require service technician intervention.

OpsGenie automatically notifies the right person and escalates the request if there is no response. It manages notifications by categorizing them based on priority and time. Users can receive incident alerts through various channels such as phone calls, SMS, and push notifications.

Relevant Features

• Actionable alerts: Provides integrations into monitoring, ticketing, and chat tools to filter out the noise and notify users through multiple channels.
• On-call management: Build and modify schedules and define escalation rules within one interface.
• Reporting and analytics: Identify the source of most alerts, the team’s performance in acknowledging and resolving them, and how on-call workloads are distributed.

Pricing

Opsgenie has four pricing plans (including a free forever plan for up to 5 users). Essentials ($9/user/month) provides alerting and incident management, and Standard ($19/user/month) provides unlimited alerting and incident management.

Enterprise ($29/user/month) offers advanced incident management features like collaboration tools and business visibility.

Pros

• Easy setup and intuitive interface
• Works well on many devices
• Simple Python integration that allows for customized alerts

Cons

• Can't schedule on-call rotations via Outlook or Google calendar
• Limited dashboard features and filters
• Lacks robust reporting capabilities

6. ServiceNow

ServiceNow is an ITSM tool that speeds up and optimizes IT incident management by automating support for common requests with virtual agents. Users can gain visibility and automated workflows at every stage of their online assets’ lifecycle.

It has an easy-to-use interface with intuitive dashboards. Plus, it supports several integrations with third-party platforms and other apps such as Jira, Cisco, and 3C Logic.

Relevant Features

• IT service management: Expand IT services and minimize response times with real-time alerts, actionable insights, and automation tools.
• IT asset management: Automate the end-to-end lifecycle for software licenses, hardware assets, and cloud.
• Cloud observability: Gain insights to detect and respond to incidents in cloud-native applications.
• Operational technology management: Protect operational technology and improve uptime.

Pricing

Contact sales for a quote.

Pros

• Customizable dashboards
• Helpful self-service portals
• Supports attachments to tickets

Cons

• Poor sorting and searching for users’ requests
• Resets to default settings after every upgrade
• Lacks functionality for Slack integration

Conclusion

When looking for PagerDuty alternatives, you'll find a range of options—from simple services that work with existing incident management tools to comprehensive incident management platforms. Keep in mind that no single product can solve every issue, so you need to consider each tool’s pros and cons to find the best fit for your organization.

If you're having trouble deciding on a PagerDuty alternative, try Instatus—an incident management tool with strong monitoring capabilities, integrated status pages, and a free forever plan. Align your team, keep everyone in the loop, and collaborate on solutions.

Give Instatus a try for free today!