TL;DR
PagerDuty is the industry standard for on-call alerting and escalation. Rootly is a newer player focused on incident coordination — think Slack-native war rooms, runbooks, and post-incident workflows. They're not direct replacements for each other, but there's growing overlap.
On-Call & Alerting
PagerDuty dominates here. Decades of integrations, robust escalation policies, and a mobile app that will wake you up at 3 AM. Rootly has basic alerting but it's not their core strength.
| Feature | PagerDuty | Rootly | |---------|-----------|--------| | On-call scheduling | Excellent | Basic | | Escalation policies | Advanced | Simple | | Mobile alerts | Native app | Slack / SMS | | Integrations | 700+ | 50+ |
Incident Coordination
This is where Rootly shines. When an incident fires, Rootly automatically creates a Slack channel, pages the right people, attaches runbooks, and starts a timeline. PagerDuty added similar features with their Incident Workflows, but it still feels bolted on.
Post-Incident / Retros
Rootly generates retrospective documents automatically from the incident timeline. PagerDuty's postmortem feature exists but is bare-bones compared to Rootly's templates and action item tracking.
Pricing
PagerDuty starts at $21/user/month (Professional). Enterprise pricing gets expensive fast with large teams. Rootly's pricing is less transparent — you'll need to talk to sales — but teams report it's competitive, especially for the coordination features you'd otherwise build with duct tape and Slack bots.
When to Choose What
- Choose PagerDuty if on-call alerting is your priority, you need hundreds of integrations, or your org already uses it.
- Choose Rootly if your incidents are Slack-heavy, you want automated retros, or your current incident process is a mess of manual Slack channels.
- Use both — many teams use PagerDuty for alerting and Rootly for coordination. They integrate well together.
Rootly
Automate your incident management workflow. Slack-native war rooms, runbooks, and retros.
Request a Demo →Bottom Line
There's no single "best" tool here — it depends on where your incident process hurts the most. If you're drowning in alerts, PagerDuty. If your incidents are chaotic Slack threads with no follow-up, Rootly. If budget allows, running both is genuinely the best setup I've seen.