compare · on-call paging
PagerDuty alternative and PagerDuty competitors priced for 5 to 40 person rotations
Short answer: the per-seat PagerDuty competitors cost about the same as PagerDuty Professional at $21 a user. Datadog On-Call and incident.io On-call are $20, Better Stack is $29 per responder. The only way to cut the bill sharply is to stop paying per seat. If most of your pages say a site or API is down, AlertPing Team does the checking and the paging for up to 15 people at $59 a month flat.
10 people, PagerDuty
$2,520 a year
10 people, AlertPing Team
$348 a year
alertping ▸ check preview
simulated
▸ type a domain to watch a check and an alert play out
▸ simulation of 2 regions · US East · EU Central
▸ waiting…▌
queued
probing▌
If ever goes down, you get:
Alert fired ▸ 2 channels · 6.2 s after first failure
AlertPing app
● DOWN : HTTP timeout confirmed from 2/2 regions (US East, EU Central). Incident opened.
sms · on-call
AlertPing: DOWN. Confirmed 2/2 regions . First fail: EU Central.
Simulation, not a measurement of your site: this preview runs entirely in your browser and the latencies are generated from the domain you typed. Real checks on your monitors run from our US East and EU Central regions.
$21
per user a month for PagerDuty Professional on annual billing, $25 month to month
$20
per seat a month for both Datadog On-Call and incident.io On-call, annual list price
6th user
is where PagerDuty Free ends and every seat moves to Professional
$1.93
per person a month on AlertPing Team with 15 people, billed yearly
two ways to get paged
Why most PagerDuty alternatives cost the same as PagerDuty
PagerDuty detects nothing. A monitoring tool notices the problem, sends an alert, and PagerDuty decides who to wake up. Every tool built on that model charges per person who can be paged, so swapping one router for another moves the bill by a dollar or two a seat. The second model puts the check and the page in one product, priced per account.
model 1 · alert router
Right when alerts come from many places: APM, metrics, logs, cloud alarms. PagerDuty, incident.io, Datadog On-Call, Splunk On-Call and Opsgenie all work this way.
model 2 · monitor with paging
Right when most pages are "the site, API, port or certificate failed". Better Stack also sits here but bills per responder. AlertPing bills per account.
rate cards
PagerDuty competitors pricing per user
These are the paid on-call products a US team actually shortlists against PagerDuty, read from each vendor's own pricing page. Open source and self-hosted tools are left out on purpose: they move the cost into engineering time rather than removing it.
A correction you will need when reading older roundups: PagerDuty's $41 Business plan is gone. The current page lists Free and Professional, then the Reliability Platform from $2,800 a year. Our PagerDuty pricing breakdown covers every tier and add-on.
| Tool | Annual billing | Monthly billing | Free tier and catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| PagerDuty Professional | $21 per user | $25 per user | Free up to 5 users, 1 schedule, 1 escalation policy |
| incident.io On-call | $20 per user standalone; $10 on top of Team | Team response seat $19 | Basic is free with single team on-call; Pro is annual only |
| Datadog On-Call | $20 per seat | $24 per seat, $29 on demand | No free tier; seats billed on peak concurrent use |
| Better Stack | $29 per responder | $34 per responder | Includes uptime checks; extra 50 monitors $21 or $25 |
| Splunk On-Call | From $5 per user, up to 10 seats | Not published | Larger tiers by quote |
| Opsgenie | Not for sale | Not for sale | End of sale June 4, 2025, shutdown April 5, 2027 |
| AlertPing Team | $29 a month for the account | $59 a month for the account | No free plan; 15 members, 100 monitors, 30 s checks |
USD per month unless noted. Sources: pagerduty.com/pricing/incident-management, incident.io/pricing and its seat-type docs, datadoghq.com/pricing/list, betterstack.com/pricing, splunk.com pricing.
five rotations priced
Is there a cheaper alternative to PagerDuty for your team size
Yearly list price on annual billing for the people who can be paged. incident.io uses the standalone On-call seat at $20. AlertPing uses Team up to 15 members and Business above that, because Team stops at 15.
| People on call | PagerDuty Professional | incident.io On-call | Datadog On-Call | Better Stack | AlertPing, flat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 people | $1,260 | $1,200 | $1,200 | $1,740 | $348 (Team) |
| 10 people | $2,520 | $2,400 | $2,400 | $3,480 | $348 (Team) |
| 15 people | $3,780 | $3,600 | $3,600 | $5,220 | $348 (Team) |
| 25 people | $6,300 | $6,000 | $6,000 | $8,700 | $1,128 (Business) |
| 40 people | $10,080 | $9,600 | $9,600 | $13,920 | $1,128 (Business) |
The router tools add the cost of whatever monitoring raises the alert. Better Stack and AlertPing include the checks. At 5 people, PagerDuty Free and incident.io Basic can cost $0 if their single-schedule limits fit you.
A 10-person rotation for a year
The four per-seat products land within about $1,100 of each other. The flat plan is a different order of magnitude because the price does not move when you add the tenth person. That is the whole argument for switching models rather than switching vendors. How escalation works in practice is on our downtime alerts and on-call page.
features
PagerDuty vs AlertPing feature by feature
Honest about the gaps. PagerDuty is a broader incident platform. AlertPing is a monitoring service that pages people itself, which is enough for teams whose incidents start as downtime.
| Capability | PagerDuty | AlertPing |
|---|---|---|
| Checks websites, APIs and ports itself | No, needs a monitoring tool | Yes, from 2 regions (US East and EU Central) |
| SSL expiry and cron heartbeat checks | No | Yes |
| Fastest check interval | Not applicable | 60 s Starter, 30 s Team and Business, 15 s Enterprise |
| On-call schedules and escalation | Yes, 1 schedule and 1 policy on Free | Escalation chains and on-call hours from Team |
| SMS, email, Slack, webhooks | Yes, limited on Free | Every plan |
| Voice calls | Yes; Live Call Routing is an add-on | Enterprise |
| Ingest alerts from Datadog, Prometheus and others | Yes, its core job | No, webhooks out only |
| Noise reduction | AIOps add-on | Confirms a failure from more than one region before alerting |
| Runbook automation | Add-on | No |
| Public status page | Status Pages add-on | Included, 1 to 20 by plan |
| Pricing model | Per user, or annual platform fee | Flat per account |
who should buy which
The best PagerDuty alternative for each kind of team
choose alertping
Pages mostly mean "it is down"
SaaS teams, agencies and ecommerce shops whose alerts come from websites, APIs, ports, SSL and cron jobs. One flat plan replaces the monitor and the paging seats, with a status page included.
See AlertPing planschoose incident.io
Incidents run in Slack
You want declared incidents, roles, timelines and postmortems in Slack or Teams, and free viewer seats for everyone watching. Price both seat types, as our incident.io pricing breakdown shows. FireHydrant, now owned by Freshworks, works the same way at $25 per responder; see FireHydrant pricing. Rootly sells response and on-call as two $20 products; see Rootly pricing.
choose datadog on-call
Alerts already come from Datadog
One vendor, one bill, $1 a seat under PagerDuty. See Datadog On-Call vs PagerDuty for rotations of 4 to 30 priced.
choose better stack
Monitoring, logs and paging together
You want uptime checks plus log management from one vendor and the rotation is small enough that $29 a responder is fine.
stay on pagerduty
Many alert sources, mature process
Dozens of integrations, AIOps, runbooks and audit needs. Switching saves little per seat, so the migration risk is rarely worth it.
where alertping does not fit
Routing other tools' alerts
AlertPing does not receive alerts from APM or metrics tools. If that is most of your paging, keep a router and run AlertPing beside it as the outside check.
switching
How to move off PagerDuty without a missed page
The risk in any switch is one forgotten integration that still points at the old service on cutover day. Count what actually pages you first. If 80% of last quarter's incidents started with a failed HTTP check or an expired certificate, the cheaper model covers 80% of the job.
Coming from Opsgenie instead? The deadline is fixed, so start with our Opsgenie alternative page, which costs every replacement route, or the PagerDuty vs Opsgenie comparison for teams from 5 to 50 users.
-
1
Export the last 90 days of incidents
Group them by source. That tells you which model you need.
-
2
List every integration and alert email
Cloud alarms and cron mail are the ones teams forget.
-
3
Rebuild schedules and escalation
Time zones and overrides first, then the escalation delay.
-
4
Run both for two rotations
Fire a test failure through every source and confirm the phone rings.
-
5
Cut over before the renewal date
Annual seats are paid a year ahead, so time the switch to the renewal.
questions buyers ask
PagerDuty alternative questions
What is the best alternative to PagerDuty?
It depends on where your alerts come from. If they come from many monitoring tools, incident.io and Datadog On-Call are the closest per-seat replacements at $20 a user on annual plans. If most pages are websites or APIs going down, a monitoring service with built-in on-call, such as AlertPing Team at $59 a month flat, replaces both bills.
Is there a cheaper alternative to PagerDuty?
Yes, but not by much among per-seat tools. Datadog On-Call and incident.io On-call are $20 a user against $21 for PagerDuty Professional, a saving of $12 a person a year. Splunk On-Call starts at $5 a user for up to 10 seats. A flat plan such as AlertPing Team at $348 a year for 15 people is the large saving.
Who are PagerDuty competitors?
The main paid competitors are incident.io, Datadog On-Call, Splunk On-Call (formerly VictorOps), Better Stack and Jira Service Management, which is Atlassian's replacement for Opsgenie. Opsgenie itself can no longer be bought. Monitoring services with built-in paging, such as AlertPing, compete for teams whose pages are mostly downtime.
Is PagerDuty free?
PagerDuty has a Free plan for up to 5 users with one schedule, one escalation policy and limited notifications. The sixth user moves the account to Professional at $21 a user a month on annual billing or $25 month to month, which is $1,512 a year for six people on annual terms.
Does PagerDuty monitor my website?
No. PagerDuty routes alerts that another tool raises, so you still pay for uptime monitoring separately. AlertPing checks websites, APIs, ports, SSL certificates and cron heartbeats from two regions and pages the on-call person itself, so one plan covers both jobs.
Is incident.io cheaper than PagerDuty?
For paging alone, slightly. incident.io On-call is $20 a user a month against $21 for PagerDuty Professional on annual billing. If the same people also need incident.io response seats, Team costs $15 plus $10 on-call, $25 a user, which is more than PagerDuty. Viewers are free on incident.io.
Can I replace PagerDuty with my monitoring tool?
Yes, if your monitoring tool has schedules and escalation and most of your pages come from it. AlertPing Team includes escalation chains, on-call hours and SMS, email, Slack and webhook alerts for up to 15 people. Keep a router if you need to ingest alerts from APM, metrics or log tools.
How much does PagerDuty cost for 10 users?
Ten users on PagerDuty Professional cost $2,520 a year on annual billing or $3,000 month to month. The same ten people cost $2,400 on Datadog On-Call or incident.io On-call, $3,480 on Better Stack responders, and $348 a year on AlertPing Team, which includes the uptime checks.
keep reading
Related on-call pricing guides
Checks and on-call paging in one flat plan
100 monitors every 30 seconds, escalation chains and on-call hours for up to 15 people, $59 a month.