Nowadays, incident management software is a widely used technology. As a result, PagerDuty is a rather popular choice of many companies. However, if you are looking for PagerDuty alternatives, you have come to the right place. This article will help you save money on your overall incident management solution.
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How PagerDuty Works
PagerDuty is an incident response platform for IT departments that offers on-call alert dispatchers for digital operations, and other services to help teams quickly identify and resolve infrastructure issues.
It integrates data from a couple of monitoring systems into a single display. When an issue occurs, PagerDuty’s configurations ensure that the most qualified team member is alerted. If the team member is not able to handle the issue, it redirects the alert to a secondary engineer or even an operational manager.
This platform aims to reduce mean time to repair with an effective early notification. Here, you are able to schedule 24/7 monitoring by an operational team that can reach the whole world. In addition, you can send alerts through various integrated collaboration tools, such as SMS, phone calls, and emails.
When an incident occurs, PagerDuty assists with reducing application downtime significantly by filtering data and notifying support staff. On the extensive incident dashboard, you are able to see which issue is assigned to which team member.
This platform also provides analytic reports that show the number of incidents, average response time, and the frequencies each alert mechanism utilizes.
With PagerDuty, users are able to implement machine learning to fully conduct an incident triage in real-time. And it also verifies the impact incidents have on a business systematically.
And lastly, it integrates flawlessly with third-party applications such as Slack, Atlassian, Zendesk, and many more. It brings insights by the combination of human data and machine data to help your team improve your performance continuously.
PagerDuty Alternatives That Do The Same Thing
PagerDuty might be a well-known incident response platform. But, it comes with a significant cost that almost reaches $35 per user monthly. Many organizations might not be willing to put aside that kind of money just to improve their production alerts.
It was established in 2009, but it still fails to deliver the functionality its users so desperately need in many aspects. It undoubtedly could be a useful tool, but there are many more alternatives to PagerDuty that offer better functionality at a more affordable price. Even some are free.
Here is a list of PagerDuty alternatives to give you should consider switching over to.
1. Better Uptime
Even though this PagerDuty alternative offers some paid packages, it also provides a basic one for free. It mixes incident management, status pages, and uptime monitoring into one product.
This software offers a calendar schedule that can be integrated with Google Calendar without hassle. It also has advanced team management and access features not unlike those of PagerDuty.
Better Uptime provides unlimited phone calls and SMS for all of its paid packages regarding the notification system. Integrations to Slack and Microsoft Teams are also made available. And one of its great notification features is incident screenshots and debug information embedded into the alerts.
One of Better Uptime’s main advantages is that it has built-in uptime monitoring. Thus, this software can offer various features that can be integrated into the on-call alert without any third party.
And regarding integrations, Better Uptime has extensive monitoring and analytic integration that are ideal for any user. For example, Grafana, AWS, and Heroku.
The best thing about Better Uptime is its free status page. The status pages are designed to be connected with all available monitors and can be configured in no time. Moreover, users can customize and publish them on a custom domain.
And as for the paid packages, users can set up passwords to protect the pages and e-mail and API status subscriptions.
2. xMatters
xMatters should be taken into consideration if you are looking for a PagerDuty substitute. xMatters offers basic functionality for a team of DevOps to manage their on-calls.
It has intuitive automatic on-call scheduling, team management, and incident timelines, and also advanced management tools.
It aims to help businesses quickly respond to incidents through detailed notifications. It eliminates the need for multiple monitoring tools by providing an integrated alert system, detailed notifications, and proper escalations.
It delivers quick insights based on real-time processes and inefficiencies in order to boost productivity.
The tool’s GUI is pretty user-friendly, thus, it is easier to create workflows. Moreover, it enables users to test their designed workflows before the actual implementation in production.
xMatters offers a free plan suitable for a budding small team who aims to save some funds while still having access to basic on-call functionality.
The main distinction between free and paid plans is better analytics, data retention, and allotted support. Moreover, this tool offers more than 200 pre-built integrations.
The biggest weakness of xMatters that you need to think about is that the phone call notifications are only available for paid plans and the limit set for each tier. So you need to pick a special package to get unlimited phone calls.
However, the free plan is a great place for a small team to start implementing your on-call management.
Overall, xMatters can integrate with over 200+ other applications to automate operations from start to end. Thus, because of its major compatibility, its API webhook features will greatly increase your team’s performance.
3. Zenduty
This is a PagerDuty free alternative that can do anything PagerDuty does. Whatever PagerDuty does regarding any incident response, Zenduty can do it just as well. Moreover, it also assists you in automating a couple of crucial steps in incident response.
Its free package includes many basic features that are well-integrated with Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and various alert source integrations.
The capabilities of Zenduty’s incident response are mainly swayed by the SRE practices of Google. Some of the key features it offers are task templates, SLA alerts, and integrated incident comms.
Zenduty offers an intuitive user experience throughout its integrated platforms. A team is able to manage incidents without getting out of their Slack channel. Moreover, it has powerful custom routing rules and task templates to automatically give instructions on how to solve incidents when they occur.
It’s perfect for teams that are looking to implement the incident management tools that have been developed by leading technology companies.
Furthermore, Zenduty provides documentation and tutorial videos regarding its functionality for anyone who is unfamiliar with this platform, especially beginners.
And finally, its response time is lightning quick. It is definitely the next advancement of on-call and incident management tools.
4. Cabot
This platform is a free open-source alternative for PagerDuty. Even though it is self-hosted and lightweight, Cabot offers the same great features of PagerDuty without the latter’s price tag and complexities.
It offers a web interface that assists you to monitor services and the end notifications via phone calls, SMS, or emails to your team when there is any issue without any coding. Furthermore, you are able to use data that you might have pushed to Graphite/StatsD to generate alerts, instead of implementing and maintaining a whole new system of data collectors.
5. Dispatch
This open-source Slack-based incident response tool is developed by Netflix. It aims to assist you in effectively monitoring security incidents by integrating tools, such as Slack and GSuite, to be used by the entire organization. Dispatch takes advantage of the familiarity of these tools to provide orchestration.
However, it can’t make any on-call schedules or escalate any calls. You also need to integrate it with API software. And, it does report manually instead of integrating with automated incident monitoring tools.
Thus, Dispatch creates resources, assembles participants, sends out alerts, tracks tasks, and assists with post-incident reviews, while you need to focus on solving the problems.
6. Opsgenie
This Atlassian’s software is definitely an alternative to PagerDuty. Opsgenie is a slightly more sophisticated on-call platform with comparable basic functions. However, it is more effortless to use with a superior user experience.
Opsgenie offers a simple calendar suitable for large teams to schedule on-calls. Like Pagerduty, there are many progressive notification workflows that can be used to solve various incidents. This includes a more comprehensive warning.
The main advantage of Opsgenie is that it has great tools for investigating incidents to help the team deal with the latest incidents. This is often very useful for managing downtime.
The Opsgenie free plan is very practical as it provides unlimited SMS alerts and includes up to 5 team members, but this plan has fewer features compared to the paid plans. But it still is a good start for small businesses.
The main drawback of Opsgenie, despite its modern design, is that it is rather difficult to operate for new users.
7. Alertops
This software is great to deal with incident management and IT service management. It offers many features similar to that of PagerDuty.
The significant distinction is that Alertops provides heartbeat (cron job) monitoring that is useful for monitoring database backups or other scheduled tasks.
However, Alertops lacks a free package. Also, some packages don’t include unlimited phone calls and SMS alerts.
The standard package offers far fewer features than the other alternatives on this list. For example, the cheapest package retains data for only three months, and other significant features are also limited.
In the end, Alertops is the more expensive alternative to PagerDuty and not recommended for those who just started.
8. Response
This is a Slack-based incident response tool built by Monzo to reduce pressure and make it easier for engineers in dealing with incidents and to produce reports that are convenient to learn from.
The key processes of Response are internal and external communication, clear role descriptions, and monitoring and tracking actions.
9. Splunk
This incident management tool is part of the Splunk product family. It is quite hard to navigate, especially for beginners.
Because Splunk is designed for business, it offers various necessary features for big teams but lacks things needed by smaller teams, such as a free plan.
Another major drawback is that the paid plans have limits on the number of emails and push notifications. Furthermore, some advanced features are only available for high-tier plans.
This means that although Splunk is a great tool, a team must get the high-tier plans just to be able to work.
10. OnPage
This software automates incident notifications to reduce human errors and enables fast resolution of various incidents.
It is developed with the incident resolution lifecycle in mind, to enable organizations to optimize their digital investments, ensuring that the monitoring system is reliable to escalate incident alerts in the right direction.
Although it doesn’t have a free version, OnPage offers a free trial.
Conclusion
PagerDuty may provide many features for incident management. However, for many teams, there are much better options that offer superior functionality with a more reasonable price tag. And Better Uptime is one of the best PagerDuty Alternatives as its basic plan offers so much functionality already.
