PagerDuty is the industry leader in incident management, trusted by over 19,000 organizations worldwide. The platform excels at intelligent alert routing with AIOps capabilities that reduce noise and surface critical issues. Enterprise teams appreciate its comprehensive feature set including event intelligence, automation workflows, and detailed analytics for measuring incident response performance.
Starting price$21/user/mo
Strengths
Industry-leading reliability and uptime
Advanced AIOps reduces alert noise by 90%+
700+ integrations with monitoring tools
Comprehensive analytics and reporting
Limitations
Higher pricing than alternatives
Can be complex to configure initially
Who it's for: Ideal for enterprise DevOps teams and organizations with complex infrastructure that need reliable, scalable incident management with advanced automation.
Opsgenie, now part of Atlassian, provides robust incident management with excellent integration into the Atlassian ecosystem. Teams using Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket will find seamless workflows for incident tracking and documentation. The platform offers flexible alert routing, on-call scheduling, and escalation policies at a competitive price point.
Starting price$9/user/mo
Strengths
Excellent value at $9/user/month
Deep Jira and Confluence integration
Flexible routing rules and policies
Strong mobile app for on-call
Limitations
UI can feel dated compared to newer tools
Some advanced features require higher tiers
Who it's for: Best for teams already using Atlassian products who want tight integration between incident management and their existing workflows.
incident.io brings a modern, Slack-native approach to incident management. The platform automates the entire incident lifecycle from declaration to post-mortem, with beautiful automated documentation that captures everything discussed during response. Their focus on reducing toil and improving learning from incidents makes it popular with forward-thinking engineering teams.
Starting priceCustom
Strengths
Best-in-class Slack integration
Automated post-mortem generation
Beautiful, intuitive interface
Strong focus on incident learning
Limitations
Requires Slack as primary communication
Custom pricing can be expensive
Who it's for: Perfect for modern engineering teams that live in Slack and want to minimize context-switching during incidents while improving documentation.
FireHydrant provides comprehensive incident lifecycle management with built-in runbooks, status pages, and retrospective tools. The platform emphasizes reliability engineering practices and helps teams build resilience through structured response processes. Their runbook feature is particularly useful for codifying tribal knowledge and ensuring consistent response.
Starting price$25/user/mo
Strengths
Built-in runbooks and automation
Integrated status page functionality
Strong retrospective tooling
Good balance of features and price
Limitations
Smaller integration ecosystem
Less mature than PagerDuty
Who it's for: Great for reliability engineering teams that want comprehensive incident lifecycle tooling with built-in runbooks and status pages.
Rootly focuses on Slack-native incident management with powerful workflow automation. The platform excels at reducing manual toil during incidents through automated actions and smart workflows. Their incident learning features help teams identify patterns and improve over time, making it particularly valuable for organizations focused on continuous improvement.
Starting price$19/user/mo
Strengths
Powerful Slack-based automation
Excellent workflow customization
Strong incident learning features
Competitive pricing
Limitations
Slack-centric may not suit all teams
Newer player with smaller market share
Who it's for: Ideal for teams that want deep Slack automation and workflow customization for incident response without the complexity of enterprise tools.
VictorOps, now Splunk On-Call, provides collaborative incident response with tight integration into the Splunk observability platform. The tool emphasizes team collaboration during incidents with its war room features and contextual alerts. Organizations already using Splunk for monitoring will find seamless workflows for incident detection and response.
Strengths
Deep Splunk ecosystem integration
Strong collaboration features
Good contextual alerting
Reliable on-call management
Limitations
Best value when paired with Splunk
UI shows its age
Who it's for: Best suited for organizations using Splunk for observability who want unified incident management within their existing toolchain.
Grafana OnCall is an open-source incident response tool that integrates natively with the Grafana observability stack. It provides on-call scheduling, escalation policies, and ChatOps integrations without licensing costs. Teams already using Grafana for monitoring will appreciate the seamless alert routing from Grafana Alerting.
Starting priceFree
Strengths
Free and open-source
Native Grafana integration
Telegram, Slack, and MS Teams support
Active community development
Limitations
Requires self-hosting for free tier
Fewer features than commercial alternatives
Who it's for: Perfect for teams using Grafana who want cost-effective on-call management with open-source flexibility and control.
On-Call Management (25%) — Scheduling, escalation policies, and coverage management.
Collaboration (20%) — War room features, communication tools, and ChatOps integration.
Post-Incident Analysis (15%) — Retrospectives, metrics, and learning from incidents.
Value for Money (15%) — Pricing relative to features and team size.
How to Choose
Choose PagerDuty if you need Enterprise scale and reliability.
Choose Opsgenie if you need Atlassian ecosystem.
Choose incident.io if you need Slack-native workflow.
Choose FireHydrant if you need Reliability engineering focus.
Choose Grafana OnCall if you need Open-source and Grafana users.
Common Questions
Incident management software helps teams detect, respond to, and resolve service outages and critical issues. It typically includes alerting, on-call scheduling, escalation policies, and post-incident analysis features.
PagerDuty is better for large enterprises needing advanced AIOps and extensive integrations. Opsgenie offers better value for teams using Atlassian products and those with smaller budgets.
Yes, monitoring tells you something is wrong, but incident management ensures the right person is notified, provides escalation if needed, and helps coordinate response. They work together.
Grafana OnCall is the best free option for teams self-hosting. It provides solid on-call scheduling and integrates well with Grafana observability stack.
