PagerDuty, founded in 2009, is a SaaS-based platform used to notify businesses of any malfunctions that may occur. The idea is that these issues can then be rectified before becoming a huge hindrance to company customers. This is a tool that is utilized to maintain customer satisfaction. Of late, however, PagerDuty has gained a few competitors that alternatively support businesses in the same way. After concluding research, it is safe to say that the most suitable competitor for PagerDuty is Dynatrace.

Top 9 PagerDuty alternatives and competitors

  1. Dynatrace – Provides answers; not just data
  2. xMatters – Uses adaptive incident management
  3. Jira Service Management – Uses a collaborative platform
  4. Squadcast – Relevant context added to issues to solve them quicker
  5. Splunk On-Call – Uses advanced threat detection
  6. Opsgenie – Utilizes a very secure cloud infrastructure
  7. Freshservice – Triages incoming tickets
  8. Datadog – Analyzes data
  9. SolarWinds Service Desk – Managing processes

1. Dynatrace – Most Suitable Alternative

Pricing:

  • Full-stack monitoring $74 per month for 8 GB per host
  • Infrastructure monitoring $22 per month for 8 GB per host
  • Digital Experience monitoring $11 per month for 10K annual Digital Experience Monitoring Units
  • Application security $15 per month for 8 GB host in addition to Full-stack or Infrastructure Monitoring
  • Open ingestion $25 per month for 100K annual Davis Data Units
  • Cloud automation $0.10 per Cloud Automation Unit

With Dynatrace, the aim is to simplify cloud complexity with the use of software intelligence. Some of the tools that this software uses to rectify problems are observability, automation, AI, and cloud-native application security. This software is able to support whole digital teams and ensures that ultimately, there is a better outcome for the business.

Key features:

  • Real user monitoring
  • Mobile app monitoring
  • Server-side service monitoring
  • Network, process, and host monitoring
  • Cloud and virtual machine monitoring
  • Root-cause analysis

Reasons to buy:

  • Provides software intelligence
  • Information on the digital experience of users
  • Information on the performance of application and infrastructure
  • Information on IT Operations
  • Purpose-built for enterprise cloud handles
  • Deliver applications faster and more securely
  • Business analytics
  • Automatic
  • AI at the core
  • Web-scale

Reasons to avoid:

  • More expensive
  • Unclear documentation
  • Not as user-friendly

2. xMatters – Adaptive incident management

Pricing:

  • Free: Up to 10 users (helps small teams automate away issues
  • Starter: $9 per user, per month (scalable incident response and management for large teams)
  • Base: $39 per user, per month (the best choice to identify, prevent and resolve issues across multiple teams)
  • Advanced: Customers need to contact xMatters to find out the exact pricing. (Unlimited everything for global enterprises)

xMatters is another software that can be used to automate workflows for businesses. It is used to ensure that applications are always working and gives customers the tools to feel empowered when doing so. xMatters focuses very much on having an adaptive approach to incident management, delivering real-time performance analytics. This ensures customer satisfaction.

Key features:

  • Workflow automation (to ensure that infrastructure and applications are reliable) code-free workflow builder; ready-made integrations; flexible API
  • Adaptive incident management (lowers the business impact of service issues and major incidents) collaborative response, automated resolution workflows, facilitate continuous improvement
  • Signal intelligence (allows the team to focus on signals that matter) control alert floods, target intelligently, set thresholds)
  • Actionable analytics (detailed post-incident reports, instant replays on event timeline, real-time visibility into service-level indicators, user and team performance metrics)

Reasons to Buy:

  • Strong security and privacy
  • Scalable architecture – grows with teams
  • Hybrid interoperability – ability to deal with the issues when it arises
  • Role-based permission – access to platform features

Reasons to avoid:

  • Setting up user communication mode takes time- lags in sending verification codes
  • Can be a complex system to use
  • The search function can be tricky

3. Jira Service Management – Collaborative platform

Pricing:

  • Free for three agents (for small teams getting started with a service desk)
  • Standard: $20 per agent (1-15), per month (for teams maturing to standardized service desk and ITSM practices
  • Premium: $45 per agent (1-15), per month (for organizations seeking high-velocity ITSM at a scale)

Jira Service Management is another competitor with PagerDuty that enables customers to fix problems that may arise. Projects can easily be set up by anyone in the business, that works for them, to ensure problems are fixed comfortably. Jira Service Management uses a collaborative platform which enables various sources to be used to come up with solutions.

Key features:

  • Request management
  • Problem management
  • Asset management
  • Incident management
  • Change management
  • Configuration management
  • Knowledge management

Reasons to buy:

  • Fast delivery
  • Open, collaborative platform
  • Ability to ingest data from external software development tools

Reasons to avoid:

  • Mobile app is not up to standard

4. Squadcast – Great context added to issues to solve quicker

Pricing:

  • Pro: $9 per user per month billed annually and $12 per user per month billed monthly
  • Enterprise: $19 per user per month billed annually or $25 per user per month billed monthly

With the use of highly configurable features, Squadcast helps customers discover what is needed to solve issues within the business that occur. Customers can preempt issues arising and deal with them effectively to limit any damage or harm to the business. You can also as a customer, rank your issues in order of most important to least important.

Key features:

  • Compliance management
  • Contact management
  • Corrective and Preventive Actions (CAPA)
  • Dashboard
  • Disaster recovery
  • Incident reporting
  • Investigation management
  • Issue auditing
  • Issue scheduling
  • IT Incident management

Reasons to buy:

  • Reliable incident alerting
  • Lower price point for large enterprises
  • Implementing customers’ requests with ease

Reasons to avoid:

  • Ability to sync the SquadCast number in your iPhone contact list (Pagerduty do it in the app)
  • Ability to repeat an alert to the same target
  • Inability to override volume control
  • Documentation is not as good

5. Splunk On-Call – Advanced threat detection

Pricing:

  • Starter: $5 per user per month billed yearly
  • Growth: $23 per user per month billed yearly
  • Enterprise: $25 per user per month billed yearly

Splunk On-Call uses the data from the customer to defend their system against threats and to tackle problems. Within the same software, companies can also use data from customers to ensure that customers are receiving better service.

Key features:

  • Advanced threat detection
  • Application modernization
  • Cloud migration
  • DevOps
  • Incident investigation and forensics
  • Insider threat detection
  • IT modernization
  • SOC automation and orchestration
  • Compliance and data privacy
  • Data optimization
  • Incident response
  • AIOps
  • Cloud monitoring
  • SLI/SLO monitoring

Reasons to buy:

  • Modernized security
  • System resilience
  • End-to-end data coverage
  • Integrated observability and security
  • Extensible data platform
  • Rapid time-to-action
  • World-leading investigation

Reasons to avoid:

  • UI is bland
  • Difficult to shift schedules around

6. Opsgenie – Secure cloud infrastructure

Pricing:

  • Free: up to 5 users
  • Essentials: $9 per user per month
  • Standard: $19 per user per month

Opsgenie is also software that can be used to enable customers to plan ahead by receiving reliable alerts before issues occur. Information is then provided by Opsgenie to customers who can then put relevant strategies in place to safeguard their business. Opsgenie also uses an on-call feature so that customers are aware of who is on-call should they need support.

Key features:

  • Actionable and reliable alerting
  • On-call management and escalations
  • Advanced reporting and analytics

Reasons to buy:

  • Secure cloud infrastructure
  • Community support

Reasons to avoid:

  • No premium consulting or integration services
  • User management feature is confusing

7. Freshservice – Ability to triage incoming tickets

Pricing:

  • Starter: £15 per agent per month- billed annually / £25 per agent per month- billed monthly
  • Growth: £40 per agent per month – billed annually / £45 per agent per month billed monthly
  • Pro: £70 per agent per month – billed annually / £85 per agent per month billed monthly
  • Enterprise: £85 per agent per month billed annually / £100 per agent per month billed monthly

Freshservice focuses on triaging incoming tickets so that relevant IT initiatives can be put in place to solve issues. Customers can choose a channel of their choice to communicate to staff with, which empowers customers. Freshstart also uses automated workflows and API for custom integration.

Key features:

  • Triage incoming tickets
  • Custom integration
  • Automated workflows
  • Smart analytics
  • Ecosystem partner solutions
  • Unified platform

Reasons to buy:

  • Add-ons
  • Self-service portal
  • Workflow Automator
  • Multiple portal languages
  • Marketplace apps
  • Portal customization

Reasons to avoid:

  • A limited number of marketplace apps compared to other platforms
  • Delays in accurate analytics
  • Expensive

8. Datadog – Analyzing data

Pricing:

  • Free: up to 5 hosts
  • Premium: $1.27 per million log events
  • Standard: $15 per host up to 500 hosts

Datadog allows customers to analyze and track their data accurately and efficiently. This allows customers to filter through information from all services, applications, and platforms. Datadog also allows customers to monitor their users and track their experience. This enables for a more proactive stance in business.

Key features:

  • Analyze logs from all services, applications and platforms
  • Visualize traffic flow in cloud-native environments
  • Correlate frontend performance with business impact using user experience metrics
  • Detect threats in real-time
  • Monitor critical user journey
  • Automation tools
  • SaaS and cloud providers
  • Source control and bug tracking

Reasons to buy:

  • Easy to investigate metrics history
  • Network mapping
  • Error finding
  • Can track most of the platform
  • Powerful data analysis features

Reasons to avoid:

  • Documentation
  • Training is inefficient
  • Can be overwhelming for new users

9. SolarWinds Service Desk – Managing processes

Pricing:

  • Team: £19 per month per technician, unlimited users
  • Business: £39 per month per technician – unlimited users
  • Professional: £69 per month per technician – unlimited users
  • Enterprise: £89 per month per technician – unlimited users

SolarWinds Service Desk is used to help customers improve their IT processes. They do so by monitoring current trends and processes to enable IT systems to run more efficiently. The main goal of SolarWinds Service Desk is to restore the end-user to productivity through tracking tickets and implementing solutions.

Key features:

  • Asset discovery
  • Benchmarking
  • Dashboards
  • Employee service portal
  • Enterprise service desk
  • Hardware inventory management
  • Help desk knowledge base
  • Incident management software
  • IT asset management

Reasons to buy:

  • Integration
  • Excellent support to help with customization

Reasons to avoid:

  • Increasing procurement capabilities
  • Automations require a licensed account
  • Custom report building
  • Costly

References:

  • https://www.trustradius.com
  • https://www.g2.com
  • https://www.dynatrace.com
  • https://www.xmatters.com
  • https://www.atlassian.com
  • https://www.capterra.com
  • https://comparecamp.com
  • https://www.splunk.com
  • https://freshservice.com
  • https://www.solarwinds.com