The search for a PagerDuty alternative almost always starts with the invoice. Professional is listed at USD 21 per user per month on annual billing, and alert grouping is not part of it. Teams move to on-call tools that publish a lower seat price or bundle more into it, or to response platforms built around Slack and Microsoft Teams.
Pricing: Free plan up to 5 users; Professional per user per month, published; AIOps and automation priced separately
Established in: United States
Built for: Large estates where every tool must already have an integration
Not for: Teams whose main problem is the size of the on-call bill
01
Why buyers look past PagerDuty
01
Responder seats are priced at the top of the market
PagerDuty lists Professional at USD 21 per user per month billed annually, or USD 25 monthly, after a free plan for up to 5 users. All Quiet lists USD 4.99 with unlimited calls and SMS, Zenduty's successor Xurrent IMR starts at USD 6, and the former Squadcast at USD 15. For a team whose main problem is the on-call bill, that is the whole argument.
02
Noise reduction is sold separately
PagerDuty's own comparison marks alert grouping as not included in Professional. It comes with the separate AIOps add-on or with the PD Reliability Platform, whose Starter tier is listed at USD 2,800 a year for 10 seats. Teams that bought PagerDuty to cut noise find that feature priced apart from the seat, while Rootly and Xurrent IMR include grouping in listed plans.
03
Paging is only the first half of an incident
PagerDuty's reputation is built on rotas and escalation. Organisations that keep skipping postmortems, or that run their response in Slack, look at tools designed around the channel, the timeline and the follow-up actions, where the page is one step among several.
Per user per month, published; Enterprise on request
#9
you want incident administration automated inside Slack and have an owner for it
03
What each one does differently
1
ilert
Germany · Free plan up to 5 users; paid per user per month, published
ilert is a German company with hosting in Germany and a free plan for up to 5 users. Pro is listed at 19 per user per month billed yearly, in USD or EUR, with unlimited SMS and voice alerts and single sign-on; Scale, at 39, adds intelligent alert grouping and major incident management. Call routing and AIOps are priced add-ons.
Switch from PagerDuty if you want hosting in Germany and a published price, and can live with grouping on the higher plan.
India · Per user per month, published; 14-day trial only
Squadcast is now SolarWinds Incident Response. It reproduces PagerDuty's mechanics: escalations, postmortems and basic event intelligence on Pro at USD 15 per user per month billed annually. Premium, at USD 24, adds unlimited SMS and voice, the SLO tracker and status pages. Intelligent alert grouping is an Enterprise feature, and Pro caps free notifications per user.
Switch from PagerDuty if cost is the reason and you are comfortable buying from SolarWinds.
United Kingdom · Free Basic plan; paid per user per month, published; on-call priced on top
incident.io starts from the response, not the page: it opens the channel in Slack or Microsoft Teams, assigns roles, chases updates and drafts the postmortem. Team is USD 15 per user per month on annual billing, with on-call a further USD 10; on-call alone is USD 20. A free Basic plan exists.
Switch from PagerDuty if your weak point is what happens after the page, in Slack or Teams.
India · Per user per month, published; 14-day trial only
Zenduty is now sold as Xurrent IMR. It lists alert correlation, advanced suppression and playbooks on every plan, the capabilities PagerDuty prices separately. Starter is USD 6 per user per month for up to 5 seats and one team; Growth is USD 16 for up to 50 seats with unlimited integrations.
Switch from PagerDuty if you are a startup that needs noise control without an enterprise contract.
Germany · Per user per month, published; 14-day trial
All Quiet's Standard plan includes unlimited SMS, phone calls and integrations at USD 4.99 per user per month. The Terraform provider, public REST API, single sign-on with OIDC and SCIM, status pages and live call routing come with Pro at USD 9.99. It offers US and EU regions and a 14-day trial, with no free plan.
Switch from PagerDuty if you manage rotas as code and want calls included in the seat.
Czechia · Free tier; per responder and per monitor, published
Better Stack bundles uptime checks with on-call, unlimited phone and SMS alerts and a status page, so it supplies the monitoring that PagerDuty only receives alerts from. A responder licence is USD 29 per month billed yearly with 10 monitors included, and a free tier covers 10 monitors with Slack and email alerts.
Switch from PagerDuty if you are a small team with no monitoring in place yet.
United States · Free plan up to 10 responders; Pro per responder per month, published; Signals billed by alerts sent
FireHydrant centres on a service catalogue and runbooks that execute the process: create the channel, page the owner, open the ticket. Pro is USD 25 per responder per month billed annually with on-call scheduling; its Signals alerting is billed by alerts sent. Alert grouping and unlimited runbooks are Enterprise features, and a free plan covers 10 responders.
Switch from PagerDuty if unclear service ownership is what slows your incidents.
United States · Per user per month, published; Enterprise on request
Rootly runs incident response from Slack with an automation engine that files tickets and drafts retrospectives. It publishes two Essentials plans at USD 20 per user per month each: incident response, and on-call with alert grouping and live call routing included. Enterprise tiers are quoted, and the workflows need someone to maintain them.
Switch from PagerDuty if you want incident administration automated inside Slack and have an owner for it.
PagerDuty earns its price in large estates where every monitoring tool must already have an integration and a missed page is unacceptable. Its escalation logic handles the awkward rota cases and the phone rings when it should, backed by twenty years of doing so. If on-call reliability outranks the cost of seats, and alert sources are numerous or obscure, cheaper tools add risk for a modest saving.
05
What moving off PagerDuty involves
01
Rebuild the escalation policies, then test at night
Schedules, overrides and escalation steps have to be recreated in the new tool. Afterwards put yourself second on a rota, silence the first responder's phone and see what happens at midnight, including voice calls to every country where responders live.
02
Repoint every alert source
Each monitoring tool currently sends to PagerDuty through an integration. List them all, check the replacement has a native integration for each, and expect the odd ones to arrive by webhook. Set alert keys as you go so repeat firings update one incident.
03
Take the incident history with you
Timelines and postmortems are the record you own after an incident. Export incidents and their timelines as structured data before the contract ends; this is usually an API call, not a download button. Decide where that archive lives if the new tool cannot import it.
06
Questions about replacing PagerDuty
4 answers
What is the cheapest alternative to PagerDuty?
On listed seat prices, All Quiet starts at USD 4.99 per user per month with unlimited calls and SMS, and Xurrent IMR, formerly Zenduty, at USD 6 for up to 5 seats.
PagerDuty Professional is USD 21 billed annually. ilert, incident.io, FireHydrant and Better Stack each have a free tier.
Which PagerDuty alternative includes alert grouping in the base plan?
Xurrent IMR lists alert correlation and suppression on every plan, and Rootly's on-call Essentials plan includes alert grouping.
ilert puts intelligent grouping on its Scale plan, and the former Squadcast and FireHydrant reserve it for Enterprise. PagerDuty Professional excludes it; it needs AIOps or a Reliability Platform tier.
Is incident.io a replacement for PagerDuty?
It can be. incident.io sells on-call on its own at USD 20 per user per month, or as an add-on of USD 10 on the Team plan, which is USD 15 per user on annual billing.
It runs natively in Slack or Microsoft Teams, and a free Basic plan covers a single team.
Can Opsgenie users treat the same tools as PagerDuty alternatives?
Yes, and there is a deadline. Atlassian stopped selling Opsgenie on 4 June 2025 and will shut it down on 5 April 2027, deleting data that has not been moved.
ilert, All Quiet and Xurrent IMR cover the same rota and escalation mechanics at published prices.
—
Sources
Checked 30 September 2026
PagerDuty pricing page: Professional price, free plan, alert grouping not included, Reliability Platform Starter price.
ilert pricing page: ilert plan prices, free tier, German hosting, grouping on Scale.
