incident.io vs PagerDuty

Until March 2024, we viewed PagerDuty as a complementary product and integrated feature within the incident.io platform. But this changed when we introduced incident.io On-call, our on-call management and paging system that broadened our offering to the cover the full range of incident management capabilities.

Our platform now supports the entire incident management lifecycle, from first alert to final follow-up, and is used by some of the most recognizable and well respected brands in the world.

If you’re in a rush, we’ll summarise the comparison of incident.io and PagerDuty for you here:

PagerDuty is a system for waking engineers up.

whilst,

incident.io is an incident management platform that not only alerts you when there’s issues, but also guides the incident response process, facilitates communication with customers, and turns each incident into a learning opportunity to drive improvement.

📟 Paging System
A tool allowing organizations to arrange their on-call schedules, connect their alerting systems, and wake someone up when something goes wrong.

🔥 Incident Management Platform
A system that orchestrates your incident workflow from the first alert firing, through the entire response process, and on to the final follow-up action being completed.

Sounds interesting but I have a few questions…

PagerDuty isn’t just a tool for paging, their website says they do it all too?

There’s a reason many of the logos on our homepage picked us for incident management, despite already using PagerDuty. For many, PagerDuty hasn’t been widely adopted outside of paging, and does little to help them actually manage their incidents.

Do I really need an incident management platform like incident.io if I have PagerDuty?

If you’re lacking process, finding incidents stressful and chaotic, or struggling to learn and improve, then the answer is almost certainly ‘yes’. But we’d love to talk things through to help you answer this question properly.

Do I actually still need PagerDuty?

Well, no. With incident.io On-call available in the incident.io platform, you can connect all of your alerting systems, manage your schedules and escalation paths, and get notified via our mobile apps, phone, SMS and more. And with it tightly integrated with the rest of your incident processes, we think that covers everything you might need from PagerDuty.

PagerDuty is a reliable paging system

Let’s get one thing out of the way right from the start: PagerDuty got a lot of things right with the paging solution they built. They’ve become the default for most organizations, and earned a strong reputation for their reliability. If you’re looking to set up an on-call schedule, plug in your alerts, and have you phone ring when something goes wrong, you certainly won’t go wrong.

PagerDuty limitations

Whilst it’s the most commonly used product in the paging space, PagerDuty isn’t without its shortcomings. There’s been a limited sense of progress in product development, specifically with the core paging offering, and we hear variations of the follow feedback from incident.io customers who use PagerDuty:

The price is high for a tool that ‘just’ calls my phone.
Modelling paging and incidents around PagerDuty Services doesn’t fit my organization well.
Nobody outside of engineering knows how to use PagerDuty.
Managing our on-call team is hard. Everything from overrides and holiday cover, to configuration of notification preferences – nothing in the product makes this easy to manage.
When there’s an incident, our organization gravitates towards Slack. PagerDuty isn’t a tool we interact with after we’ve been called.

incident.io On-call offers some compelling advantages

✋ Cover me!
Overrides are commonplace in healthy on-call rotations. We’ve made them 100x times easier with “Cover me”. Just submit the times you like covered, and we’ll find people to take the shift, and update the schedules for you.

📆 Fully flexible Scheduling
With incident.io schedules, configure dual on-call, shadow rotations and more, out of box and on a single schedule. No need to hack multiple PagerDuty schedules together.

💬 Integrations with Slack
Slack is a part of the experience not an afterthought. Synchronizing on-call schedules to Slack user groups, paging folks right from a channel, and getting shift notifications in a DM are all natively supported.

📱 Mobile app
Designed in this century and a joy to use. Acknowledge your alerts, manage your schedules and cover requests, and get information on your incidents in one place.

How does incident.io On-call compare to PagerDuty?

Feature	Details	incident.io	PagerDuty
Integrations with alerting systems	Native support for systems like Datadog, Grafana, Alertmanager, Honeycomb, Cronitor, etc.	✅	✅
Generic alert support	For non-natively supported alerting integrations, connect via HTTP, email, etc.	✅	✅
Alert grouping and filtering	Filter inbound alerts, and group based on content and time window.	✅	✅ (requires AIOps add-on)
Dynamic ungrouping	Selectively ungroup alerts during an incident, in the event that they've been grouped incorrectly.	✅	❌
Alert enrichment	Enrich alerts with context from external systems, like a service catalog, HRIS system, or CRM.	✅	❌
Scheduling	Create on-call schedules, including basic/single team, through more complex follow-the-sun	✅	✅
Advanced Scheduling	Support for advanced, multi-layer schedules to support dual-on-call, shadow rotations, etc.	✅	❌ (requires multiple separate schedules, no guarantees two people paged)
Overrides	Support for individuals to override the configured schedule for a period of time, for example to cover someone on vacation.	✅	✅
Requesting cover	The ability for on-callers to request cover for an on-call shift and have the system find someone to take it and then configure the override.	✅	❌
Escalation paths (policies)	Support for schedules and individuals to be linked together with rules for escalating. i.e. notify the first line, but if they don't acknowledge, escalate to L2.	✅	✅
Synchronise schedules with calendar	Synchronize an on-call schedule with an external calendar, like Google.	✅	✅
Configure personal notification preferences	Configure the order and timing of all notifications	✅	✅
Synchronise schedules with Slack user groups	Synchronize active on-callers to a Slack user group	✅	❌
Support for multiple notification channels	Phone, SMS, Email, Push notifications and Slack	✅	✅
Native Android and iOS App	Native mobile applications, approved by Google and Apple, and downloadable through the respective app stores	✅	✅
On-call compensation calculator	Calculate how much individuals are owed for on-call, subject to custom rules	✅	❌

What customers and experts are saying about incident.io and PagerDuty

We've managed to seamlessly & successfully migrate from PagerDuty to incident.io by working in close partnership with their team. incident.io is now our primary tool for managing incidents and alerts.

Thank you and the whole team for all your hard work! You've done a wonderful job creating a competitive product and as always, you're customer feedback loop is fantastic.

Good news: I tried fixing our warped CS scheduling with your schedules and the great news is it's ten times better in incident.io 🎉

It's nice to have an app that doesn't look like it wasn't built 12 years ago

Your Workload insights are better than what Pagerduty ever provides. We stopped looking at Pagerduty for insights.

Check out @incident_io for the best alerting/oncall/incident mgmt platform. they sweat the details. Our team was delighted on the first incident ...luckily a false alarm!

incident.io vs PagerDuty: One wakes you up, the other sees you through the entire process