---
title: PagerDuty alternatives: the best on-call scheduling tools in 2026
description: Opsgenie stops working on 5 April 2027 and the open-source Grafana OnCall is archived, so a lot of teams are choosing an on-call tool this year. Here is what PagerDuty actually costs now, seven alternatives with prices checked on 3 October 2026, and the one question that decides most of it: where do your alerts come from?
canonical: https://watchfor.io/blog/best-pagerduty-alternatives
---

# PagerDuty alternatives: the best on-call scheduling tools in 2026

2026-10-03 · WatchFor Team · Reliability · on-call, incidents, alerting, sre

Opsgenie stops working on 5 April 2027 and the open-source Grafana OnCall is archived, so a lot of teams are choosing an on-call tool this year. Here is what PagerDuty actually costs now, seven alternatives with prices checked on 3 October 2026, and the one question that decides most of it: where do your alerts come from?

On-call tooling did not get much attention for a decade. You bought
PagerDuty, or Opsgenie if you were already on Jira, and moved on. Two things
changed that.

Atlassian stopped selling Opsgenie and has set a date on which it switches
it off. And Grafana OnCall, the open-source option many self-hosters picked
instead, has been archived. So a lot of teams are choosing again, and the
market they are choosing in looks different from the one they left.

This post covers PagerDuty as the baseline, the two exits, and the
alternatives worth a look, sorted by situation rather than ranked. Prices
were checked against each vendor's public pricing page on
**3 October 2026**. They change without notice.

## First: are you here because of Opsgenie?

Then here are the dates, from
[Atlassian's own pricing FAQ](https://www.atlassian.com/software/opsgenie/pricing):
on 4 March 2025 Atlassian announced that Opsgenie "will no longer be
available for purchase, effective June 4th, 2025", and that customers can
keep using it "until the end of support on April 5th, 2027". On that date,
in Atlassian's words, "access to Opsgenie will be shut off, the product will
no longer be accessible, and any un-migrated customer data in Opsgenie will
be deleted."

Atlassian's own path is a migration into Jira Service Management or Compass,
with an automated tool and 120 days of parallel access. If your company
already lives in Jira Service Management, that path is the least work.
If not, you have until April 2027 to pick something else, and there is no
reason to leave it to March.

## And if you self-hosted Grafana OnCall

The [project's README](https://github.com/grafana/oncall) says it directly:
"On 2025-03-11 Grafana OnCall (OSS) entered maintenance mode and was
archived on 2026-03-24." The repository is read-only. Grafana points users
to **Grafana Cloud IRM**, the hosted successor, which is covered below. If
self-hosting was the reason you chose OnCall, that reason is gone; nothing
in this list is a maintained, self-hosted on-call scheduler.

## The baseline: what PagerDuty costs now

PagerDuty's [pricing](https://www.pagerduty.com/pricing/incident-management/)
has two tracks.

- **Free:** five users, one on-call schedule, one escalation policy, and 100
  free SMS or phone notifications a month.
- **Professional:** $21 per user per month billed annually, $25 monthly.
  Status pages and live call routing are add-ons.
- **PD Reliability Platform:** platform fees with seats included. Starter is
  $2,800 a year with 10 seats, Essential $12,000 with 20, Plus $48,000 with
  50, and Ultimate is custom.

**Where PagerDuty is still the one to beat:** integrations (it lists 750+),
a mature mobile app, phone and SMS paging, and event routing, deduplication and AIOps for teams drowning in
alerts from many sources. If you have twenty monitoring tools feeding one
pager, PagerDuty was built for you and most of this list was not.

**Why people look elsewhere:** per-user pricing that grows with every
engineer you add to a rotation, add-ons for things that feel basic, and a
free plan with a single schedule.

## Seven alternatives, by situation

### "I want PagerDuty's shape, for less per head"

**SolarWinds Incident Response (formerly Squadcast).** Squadcast's site now
redirects to SolarWinds, and the product page calls it "Squadcast
(SolarWinds Incident Response)". Pro starts at **$15 per user per month**
billed annually and includes schedules and escalations, a mobile app, and a
per-user allowance of SMS and voice notifications. Premium is $24 and makes
SMS and voice unlimited. 14-day trial, no free plan.

*Where it loses:* it is now one product inside a large IT portfolio, and the
cheapest tier rations phone and SMS.

**Grafana Cloud IRM.** Free for up to three active IRM users a month. Pro is
**$20 per active IRM user** with a $19 monthly platform fee that includes
three users. Notifications go through iOS and Android apps, Slack, Microsoft
Teams, Telegram, SMS, phone calls and email, with overrides, shift-swap
requests and Google Calendar sync.

*Where it loses:* it makes the most sense if your alerting is already in
Grafana. As a standalone pager, you are adopting a platform.

### "We run incidents in Slack and want on-call in the same place"

**incident.io.** The Basic plan is free and includes single-team on-call and
a status page. On-call is otherwise priced per user on top of the response
plan: Team is $15 per user per month billed annually ($19 monthly) plus $10
for on-call; Pro is $25 plus $20. On-call alone is $20 per user. The
scheduling is thoughtful: shadow rotations, holiday calendars, cover
requests, and, depending on the plan, a compensation calculator and live
call routing.

*Where it loses:* the full price is the response plan plus the on-call
add-on, per user, which makes it one of the more expensive options here for
a team that only wants a pager.

**Rootly.** On-Call Essentials is **$20 per user per month**, with shadow
rotations, holiday calendars and PTO, coverage requests, a pay calculator and
schedule gap detection. Incident response is a separate $20-per-user
product. Rootly publishes a startup programme: up to 50% off under 100
employees, and pay-what-you-can under 25.

*Where it loses:* no published free plan, and the full incident stack is two
per-user products.

### "I want on-call, monitoring and status pages in one bill"

**Better Stack.** One responder licence is $29 a month billed yearly ($34
monthly) and includes on-call scheduling, unlimited phone call and SMS
alerts, iOS and Android apps, and calendar integration with Google and
Outlook. Team members who are not on call are free. Uptime monitors,
heartbeats and a status page come with it.

*Where it loses:* add-ons add up. Extra status pages, Slack-based incident
workflows ($9 per responder) and call routing ($208 a month yearly per
number) are all priced separately.

**WatchFor.** Ours, so discount accordingly. On-call is part of the plan
rather than a per-user product: Starter (€7 a month) includes one schedule,
Pro (€25) three, Business (€49) ten, and team members are included on every
plan with no per-seat fee. The free plan has no on-call.

A schedule has up to five layers, each with a daily, weekly or every-N-days
rotation, a handoff time and optional hour and weekday restrictions, all in
the schedule's own timezone. Overrides cover vacations without touching the
rotation, and the calendar shows per-person totals (time on call, share of
the period, shift count) for compensation.

![Editing an on-call schedule in WatchFor: a weekly rotation with a 09:00 handoff in Europe/London, four participants in order, a warning that one person has no notification method yet, and a four-week preview of who is on call](/blog/best-pagerduty-alternatives-schedule.webp)

Escalation policies have up to ten steps, each paging the current on-call
person, a named person or a channel, with a wait of up to 24 hours between
steps, and the chain stops the moment someone acknowledges. The Flow view
draws the whole path for a contact group before anything happens.

![The Flow view for a contact group: the channels notified first, then level 1 paging whoever is on the platform schedule right now, level 2 paging a named engineer after 10 minutes, level 3 posting to the incidents channel, and a repeat of the chain](/blog/best-pagerduty-alternatives-escalation-flow.webp)

*Where it loses,* and this matters more than the price: **WatchFor only
pages for incidents WatchFor opens**, from its own monitors and hosts. It
does not accept alerts from Prometheus, Datadog or Sentry. It also cannot
phone or text anyone: people are paged by email, Telegram, ntfy, Pushover,
Gotify or Pushbullet, and there is no native mobile app. If your alerts come
from several tools, WatchFor is not a PagerDuty replacement. Keep PagerDuty,
or pick one of the tools above, and send WatchFor's incidents to it through
the PagerDuty or Opsgenie channel.

## What six people on call cost

List prices for six responders, per month, billed annually where the vendor
offers it. Our arithmetic, before tax and before the add-ons each vendor
sells.

| Tool | How it is priced | Six responders |
| --- | --- | --- |
| PagerDuty Professional | $21/user | $126 |
| SolarWinds IR Pro | $15/user | $90 |
| Grafana Cloud IRM Pro | $19 platform (3 users) + $20/user | $79 |
| incident.io Team + on-call | $15 + $10/user | $150 |
| incident.io on-call only | $20/user | $120 |
| Rootly On-Call Essentials | $20/user | $120 |
| Better Stack | $29/responder | $174 |
| WatchFor Starter | €7 flat, 1 schedule | €7 |

Checked 3 October 2026 against published pricing.

The WatchFor row is not a like-for-like comparison, and we would rather say
so than let the table imply it. Everyone else on the list is a dedicated
paging product that takes alerts from anywhere and can ring a phone at 4
a.m. WatchFor is monitoring with on-call built in. It is cheap because it
does less.

## How to choose

**Start with where your alerts come from.** If it is many tools, you need a
router with integrations: PagerDuty, SolarWinds Incident Response, Grafana
Cloud IRM, incident.io or Rootly. If it is one monitoring tool, check whether
that tool already does on-call before you buy a second product.

**Decide whether a phone call is required.** For a team that sleeps through
push notifications, it is. Better Stack and SolarWinds Premium include
unlimited phone and SMS; PagerDuty's free plan has 100 a month.

**Count everyone who will ever be on the rotation.** Per-user pricing is fine
at four people and painful at forty. Include the people who are only in the
escalation chain.

**Test the override flow before you buy.** The rotation is set up once.
Vacations, sick days and swaps happen every week. If covering a colleague's
Saturday takes more than a minute, people stop recording it, and then your
compensation totals are wrong.

On the practice side, [On-call best practices](/blog/on-call-best-practices)
covers rotation length, handoffs and paging rules, and
[Alert fatigue](/blog/alert-fatigue) is about the alerts themselves. If
WatchFor fits, [On-call scheduling in WatchFor](/blog/on-call-scheduling-in-watchfor)
walks through a setup and the [on-call docs](/docs/alerting/on-call) have
every option.

---

*We make one of the tools on this list, and we have tried to be clear that
it is the narrowest one: it pages for its own monitors and nothing else, and
it does not make phone calls. If something here is wrong or out of date,
tell us at hello@watchfor.io and we will fix it.*

---

Canonical page: https://watchfor.io/blog/best-pagerduty-alternatives · All articles: https://watchfor.io/blog/all.md · Site guide: https://watchfor.io/llms.txt