On list price, Datadog On-Call is cheaper than PagerDuty by one dollar a seat: $20 a month on an annual plan against $21 for PagerDuty Professional. A 15-person rotation costs $3,600 a year on Datadog and $3,780 on PagerDuty. Under five people, PagerDuty's Free plan wins outright, and once you need Datadog's incident tooling as well, PagerDuty Professional costs about half as much.
This comparison is for teams that already pay Datadog and are deciding whether to drop PagerDuty, or to replace Opsgenie, which stops working on April 5, 2027. Every figure comes from the two vendors' US pricing pages and Datadog's Incident Response billing documentation, and the arithmetic is shown so you can swap in your own headcount.
Paging mostly for downtime?
If most of your pages fire because a site, API or certificate failed, AlertPing Team covers 100 monitors and escalation for up to 15 people at $59 a month flat. See the plans and limits.
Datadog On-Call and PagerDuty rate cards side by side
Datadog sells every product at three commitment levels. PagerDuty sells Professional monthly or annually, and now sells everything above it as a platform with an annual fee. PagerDuty's former $41 Business plan, still quoted in many comparisons, no longer appears on its pricing page.
| Plan | Annual billing | Monthly billing | Unit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Datadog On-Call | $20 | $24 (on demand $29) | per seat a month |
| Datadog Incident Management | $30 | $36 (on demand $43.20) | per seat a month |
| Datadog Incident Response (both) | $40 | $48 (on demand $58) | per seat a month |
| PagerDuty Free | $0 | $0 | up to 5 users, 1 schedule |
| PagerDuty Professional | $21 | $25 | per user a month |
| PagerDuty Reliability Starter | $2,800 a year | n/a | 10 seats, 5,000 events |
| PagerDuty Reliability Essential | $12,000 a year | n/a | 20 seats, 40,000 events |
| PagerDuty Reliability Plus | $48,000 a year | n/a | 40 seats |
PagerDuty also sells AIOps, PagerDuty Advance, Runbook Automation, Status Pages and Live Call Routing as add-ons, without published prices. Our PagerDuty pricing breakdown covers each plan in detail, and the Datadog On-Call pricing guide covers the seat rules and billing period on the Datadog side. A third option, incident.io, also lists on-call at $20 a user, but bills incident response as a separate seat; our incident.io pricing breakdown shows when that second seat makes it cost more than PagerDuty.
Is Datadog On-Call cheaper than PagerDuty?
Yes, by $1 a seat a month on annual billing and by $1 on monthly billing ($24 against $25). That is $12 per person per year, so a 30-person rotation saves $360 a year by moving from PagerDuty Professional to Datadog On-Call. The saving is real but small, and it reverses for teams of five or fewer that fit PagerDuty's Free plan.
| People on the rotation | Datadog On-Call, annual | PagerDuty Professional, annual | Datadog, month to month | PagerDuty, monthly |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4 | $80 a month ($960 a year) | $84 ($1,008), or $0 on Free | $96 | $100 |
| 8 | $160 ($1,920) | $168 ($2,016) | $192 | $200 |
| 15 | $300 ($3,600) | $315 ($3,780) | $360 | $375 |
| 30 | $600 ($7,200) | $630 ($7,560) | $720 | $750 |
Two cautions apply to the Datadog column. Usage above the seats you committed to is billed at the on-demand rate of $29, and seats are billed on the maximum number assigned at the same time during the period. A contractor added for two weeks of holiday cover is a full month's seat.
Where the PagerDuty Reliability Platform fits
The Starter platform fee of $2,800 a year works out to $233.33 a month. Divided by Professional's $21, that would break even at 11.1 users, but Starter is capped at 10 seats. At its full 10 seats it costs $23.33 a seat, so Starter is never the cheaper way to buy paging seats; you pay for it to get the Signal Intelligence Events and platform features. Essential is $50 a seat a month at 20 seats, and Plus is $100 a seat at 40.
Who needs a Datadog On-Call seat?
Anyone who is on an on-call schedule, sits in an escalation policy or has set notification preferences to receive pages. Viewing pages, escalation policies and schedules does not need a seat, and neither does paging another team. Only the people who can be woken up are billed.
That rule matters for organizations where many people watch incidents but few carry the pager. Take 8 engineers on the rotation and 20 colleagues from support, product and management who read pages or page the platform team. On Datadog that is 8 seats, $160 a month. PagerDuty's pricing page prices Professional "per user" and does not describe a free viewer role, so if all 28 people held user accounts the list math would be $588 a month. If your 20 viewers can do without a PagerDuty login, the bill is $168. Check how your contract counts users before you rely on either number.
Datadog's Incident Management seat follows a similar line. Modifying or deleting an incident, adding to its timeline and assigning tasks or roles needs a seat; creating and viewing incidents, joining the incident channel and commenting in Slack do not.
Does the Incident Response bundle change the math?
Yes, and it usually favors PagerDuty. PagerDuty Professional's $21 covers paging and the incident itself. If your responders also need Datadog's incident features, each one needs an Incident Response seat at $40, since On-Call plus Incident Management bought separately is $50.
| People, annual billing | Datadog On-Call only | Datadog Incident Response | PagerDuty Professional |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4 | $80 | $160 | $84 |
| 8 | $160 | $320 | $168 |
| 15 | $300 | $600 | $315 |
| 30 | $600 | $1,200 | $630 |
So the honest comparison depends on what your people do after the page. If they acknowledge, fix and write the postmortem in a doc, On-Call alone is the cheapest line. If they run the incident inside Datadog, budget $40 a seat and the gap to PagerDuty becomes roughly $19 a person a month.
Can Datadog On-Call replace PagerDuty?
For a team whose alerts already come from Datadog monitors, mostly yes. PagerDuty detects nothing on its own; it routes alerts from tools such as Datadog to people. If Datadog is the only source, a second vendor in the middle adds a contract and a hop without adding a signal.
The same reasoning applies to Opsgenie users. Atlassian ended Opsgenie sales on June 4, 2025, and un-migrated data is deleted when it shuts down on April 5, 2027. Datadog customers moving off Opsgenie can compare what Opsgenie cost them with the tables above, and our PagerDuty vs Opsgenie comparison covers the other common migration path.
When to keep PagerDuty
Keep PagerDuty when alerts come from many tools and Datadog is only one of them, because PagerDuty is built to sit in the middle of all of them. Keep it if you rely on its add-ons, such as AIOps, Runbook Automation or Live Call Routing, which have no direct line on Datadog's price list. And keep the Free plan if your rotation is five people or fewer with one schedule and one escalation policy; Datadog has no free tier for On-Call, so a four-person team pays $80 a month for what PagerDuty gives away.
Contract timing also matters. A PagerDuty Reliability Platform fee and a Datadog annual commitment are both yearly contracts with renewal dates, and switching mid-term usually means paying for both. Teams that track renewal notice windows in contract management software can line the switch up with the PagerDuty renewal instead of discovering it after it auto-renews.
Where AlertPing fits
Many smaller SaaS and ecommerce teams page for one main reason: the website, API or checkout stopped answering. For them, a per-seat pager is only half the bill, because the check that triggers the page is billed too. In Datadog, an uptime check is a synthetic API test at $5 per 10,000 runs on annual billing, with a one-minute minimum frequency, and browser tests are $12 per 1,000 runs.
AlertPing Team is $59 a month, or $29 a month on a yearly plan ($348 a year), flat for up to 15 members. It includes 100 monitors checked every 30 seconds, escalation chains, on-call hours, five status pages and SMS, email, Slack and webhook alerts. Fifteen people on Datadog On-Call cost $3,600 a year and on PagerDuty Professional $3,780, before the checks themselves.
To be clear about the limits: AlertPing pages on its own checks (site, API, port, SSL and cron heartbeats). It is not an incident platform, it does not replace Datadog's APM telemetry, and it does not do what PagerDuty's AIOps does. If your pages come from application metrics, keep the tools above. If they come from outside-in downtime, compare our Datadog alternative page with your current bill.
Check your own URL before you buy seats
Run a live check on your site, then compare it with what per-seat paging plus per-run checks would cost. Every plan is listed on our pricing page.
Datadog On-Call vs PagerDuty questions
Is Datadog On-Call cheaper than PagerDuty?
Slightly. Datadog On-Call is $20 a seat a month on annual billing and PagerDuty Professional is $21 a user, so 15 people cost $3,600 a year on Datadog and $3,780 on PagerDuty. PagerDuty's Free plan covers up to five users, and Datadog's Incident Response seat at $40 costs about twice Professional.
Can Datadog On-Call replace PagerDuty?
For teams whose alerts already come from Datadog monitors, mostly yes, because PagerDuty detects nothing itself and only routes alerts from tools like Datadog. Teams with many alert sources, or that rely on PagerDuty add-ons such as AIOps, Runbook Automation or Live Call Routing, usually keep it.
Who needs a Datadog On-Call seat?
A user needs a seat if they are on an on-call schedule, in an escalation policy or have notification preferences set to receive pages. Viewing pages, schedules and escalation policies, and paging another team, need no seat. Billing follows the maximum number of seats assigned at the same time.
Is the PagerDuty Reliability Platform cheaper than Professional?
Not per seat. Starter is $2,800 a year for up to 10 seats, which is $23.33 a seat a month at full use, against $21 for Professional on annual billing. The break-even would be 11.1 users, above the 10-seat cap. Essential is $12,000 a year for 20 seats and Plus $48,000 for 40.