Splunk On-Call pricing starts at $5 per user a month, billed annually, for up to 10 seats. That is the only price Splunk publishes for the product. Ten users at that rate cost $600 a year. Above 10 seats there is no list price, only a "Get a quote" button, and the $10, $35 and $45 plans shown on software review sites do not appear anywhere on Splunk's own site.
If you searched for a rate card and found three tidy tiers on a listing page, this is the correction. Below is what Splunk states in its own words, what only third parties claim, the yearly bill for 5, 10, 25 and 50 users next to tools with public prices, and the case where you do not need a per-user paging tool at all.
Are most of your pages "the site is down"?
Splunk On-Call routes alerts that other tools raise. AlertPing raises them itself: it checks 100 websites, APIs and ports every 30 seconds, then pages people in order through escalation chains, for a flat $348 a year on Team with up to 15 members and no per-user fee. See the plans and limits.
How much does Splunk On-Call cost?
Splunk On-Call costs from $5 per user a month, billed annually, for up to 10 seats. That works out to $60 per user a year, or $600 for a full 10-seat account. Splunk publishes no price for an eleventh seat, for monthly billing or for higher service levels. Those come from sales as a quote.
The exact sentence on Splunk's pricing page is "Starting at just $5 per user, per month, billed annually for up to 10 seats". Next to it are two buttons, "Get a quote" and "Free trial", and nothing else: no plan grid, no feature matrix, no overage rates. On-Call sits in the Observability section of that page, beside products priced by host and by data volume, which we cover in the Splunk Observability pricing breakdown.
What Splunk publishes and what review sites claim
Most of the confusion comes from mixing two kinds of source. This table keeps them apart. Everything in the first four rows was read on splunk.com or in Splunk's product documentation. The last row was not.
| Item | What is stated | Where | Published by Splunk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price | From $5 per user a month, billed annually, up to 10 seats | Splunk pricing page | Yes |
| More than 10 seats | No figure, "Get a quote" | Splunk pricing page | No price given |
| Service levels | Starter, Growth, Essential, Enterprise and Full-Stack are named as feature requirements | Splunk On-Call documentation | Names only, no prices |
| Stakeholder licenses | Sold at a discount through your sales representative or Splunk On-Call Billing | Splunk On-Call documentation | No price given |
| Starter $10, Growth $35, Enterprise $45 per user a month | Three per-user plans | Software Advice and GetApp listings | No |
The tier names are real. Splunk's own documentation says the Slack integration works with Starter, Essential and Enterprise, the Jira integration with Starter, Growth and Enterprise, and that the alert rules engine needs Enterprise. The admin guide calls the same rules engine a "Full-Stack service level feature", and the single sign-on page asks for the "full-stack version". So the docs use at least two naming schemes at once and attach a dollar figure to none of them.
The $10, $35 and $45 figures may be an old rate card or a reseller's. We could not find them on any Splunk page, so treat them as a rumor until a quote confirms them. The gap matters: 10 users cost $600 a year at Splunk's published rate, and $1,200, $4,200 or $5,400 a year at the three listed tiers.
Splunk On-Call cost for 5 to 50 users per year
The table multiplies each vendor's annual-billing list price by users and by 12 months. Splunk's column stops at 10 users because its published rate does.
| Users | Splunk On-Call (published rate) | PagerDuty Professional | Datadog On-Call, incident.io On-call or Rootly On-Call | FireHydrant Pro | AlertPing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | $300 | $1,260 | $1,200 | $1,500 | $348 (Team) |
| 10 | $600 | $2,520 | $2,400 | $3,000 | $348 (Team) |
| 25 | Quote | $6,300 | $6,000 | $7,500 | $1,128 (Business) |
| 50 | Quote | $12,600 | $12,000 | $15,000 | $1,128 (Business) |
Per user a month: Splunk On-Call $5 for up to 10 seats, PagerDuty Professional $21, Datadog On-Call $20, incident.io standalone On-call $20, Rootly On-Call $20 and FireHydrant Pro $25 with SMS and voice bought separately. PagerDuty also has a free plan for up to 5 users, which makes its 5-user row optional. The full cards are in our PagerDuty pricing, Datadog On-Call pricing, incident.io pricing and Rootly pricing guides.
Two things stand out. At 10 seats or fewer, Splunk's published rate is the lowest per-user price in the table by a wide margin: $600 a year against $2,400 to $3,000. And past 10 seats Splunk is the only vendor here whose bill you cannot work out from a public page.
What to ask before you accept a quote
Because the price above 10 seats exists only in a sales conversation, the quote is where the real number gets set. It pays to run the quote as a procurement request with the same questions sent to two or three vendors, so the answers line up side by side. For Splunk On-Call, ask for these in writing:
- The per-user price at your seat count, and whether the $5 rate still applies to the first 10 seats.
- Which service level the quote covers, by the name used on the order form, and which features it includes. The rules engine and single sign-on are tied to the higher levels in Splunk's docs.
- The price of a stakeholder license, since read-only users are sold separately at a discount.
- Whether monthly billing exists, because the published rate is annual only.
- The renewal price and any uplift cap, not just year one.
Is Splunk On-Call the same as VictorOps?
Yes. Splunk On-Call is VictorOps under a new name. Splunk acquired VictorOps on June 22, 2018 for $112.3 million, according to its annual report, and later rebranded the product. The login portal still runs on a victorops.com address and greets you with "VictorOps is now Splunk On-Call". Anyone searching for VictorOps pricing wants the same $5 rate.
Ownership changed once more. Cisco completed its acquisition of Splunk on March 18, 2024, so a Splunk On-Call contract today is a contract with a Cisco company. That has not changed the published price, but it is a reason to ask about the product roadmap before signing a multi-year term.
Does Splunk On-Call have a free plan?
No free plan is listed. Splunk's pricing page offers a "Free trial" button for On-Call next to the $5 rate, and the trial starts by creating a Splunk account with a business email. Splunk does not state the trial length on that page. If you need a permanently free tier, PagerDuty has one for up to 5 users.
Does Splunk On-Call charge per user?
Yes. The published rate is per user, per month, billed annually. Splunk's docs define five roles: global admin, team admin, alert admin, user and stakeholder. Stakeholders are read-only, cannot go on a schedule or act on incidents, and are licensed separately at a discount that Splunk does not publish.
Is Splunk On-Call cheaper than PagerDuty?
At 10 users or fewer, yes, on published prices. Splunk On-Call is $5 per user a month against $21 for PagerDuty Professional, so 10 users cost $600 a year instead of $2,520. Above 10 seats nobody can say without a quote, because Splunk stops publishing a rate there and PagerDuty does not.
What is the cheapest alternative to Splunk On-Call?
For alert routing from many tools, none of the public rate cards beats $5 per user. PagerDuty's free plan covers 5 users, and Datadog On-Call, incident.io and Rootly all list $20. If your pages come from uptime checks, a flat-priced monitor with escalation is cheaper than any per-seat tool once you pass 5 people.
Opsgenie used to be the usual low-cost answer. It is no longer sold to new customers and shuts down on April 5, 2027, so it is off the list. If you are leaving it, our Opsgenie alternative page covers the move, and the PagerDuty alternative page covers the same question from the PagerDuty side.
When a flat-priced uptime monitor is enough
Be clear about what each tool does. Splunk On-Call is an alert router. It takes alerts from your monitoring stack, such as Splunk, Datadog, Prometheus or Nagios, and decides who gets paged. It does not check whether your site is up. You still pay for whatever raises the alert.
AlertPing is the other half. It is an uptime monitor that runs HTTP, API, port, ping, SSL and heartbeat checks, and it has its own escalation chains and on-call hours. It does not ingest alerts from Datadog, Prometheus or Splunk. So it replaces a paging tool only for teams whose pages come from uptime checks: the site is down, the API returns errors, a certificate is about to expire, a cron job did not report in.
For that kind of team the math is short. Starter is $288 a year for 20 monitors checked every 60 seconds and 3 members. Team is $348 a year for 100 monitors checked every 30 seconds, escalation chains, on-call hours and 15 members. Business is $1,128 a year for 500 monitors and an unlimited team. Every plan sends SMS, email, Slack and webhook alerts, and none charges per user. A 10-person team pays $348 a year for monitoring and paging together, against $600 for Splunk On-Call seats alone before the cost of a monitor.
If your alerts come from application metrics, logs and traces across several systems, you need a router, and Splunk On-Call at $5 for a small team is a fair deal. If nearly every page is an outage a simple check would catch, compare the AlertPing plans first.