incident.io vs Rootly

Rootly offers a Slack-native incident response tool. On the face of it, Rootly’s product is probably the most comparable alternative to incident.io. However, there are some differences between the two. This page is designed to guide you through the pros and cons of each.

What’s the difference between incident.io and Rootly?

Both incident.io and Rootly offer a Slack-native tool, designed to support teams to run incidents end-to-end. However, there are differences in how we approach incident management:

Opinionated best practice vs deep configuration

At incident.io, we’ve used years of experience running hundreds of incidents to create a tool that will guide your teams through incident best practices. We are unashamedly opinionated in how incidents should be run and provide you with the guardrails to do a great job (check out our Practical Guide to Incident Management to find out more). That doesn’t make that we aren’t flexible, or that we can’t be customised. We have plenty of options available for adding custom fields, creating automated workflows that are relevant to you and configuring your existing tools. However, we do this in a simple, accessible way that you can set up and change yourself.

The tool aligns well with modern incident response management practices, providing enough flexibility within its framework for us to tune it to our own needs without needing any specialized technical support

— G2 Review

Rootly offers a less opinionated product, so you build from the ground up. This works really well for organisations who have a clear existing process which they want to automate - Rootly will configure the tool to your specific requirements. The downside is that it becomes more complex to change or update your incident management process as things evolve.

Rootly's biggest advantage is probably that the product is highly configurable to fit your incident response process

— G2 Review

Feature quality vs quantity

Rootly currently has a larger feature set than we do at incident.io, particularly when it comes to integrations. This is something that we are continuously working on: we ship new features every week and listen to customer feedback on what is important to them to guide our product roadmap.

Customers choose incident.io because of the quality of our product. Whilst we currently have fewer features, we focus on making those highly polished, avoiding clunky setups and annoying bugs. For example, customers tell us that our Slack response app is much more intuitive than Rootly’s, and our PagerDuty integration is much more advanced.

Functionality might not yet match what some larger competitors have yet, but they are releasing quality functionality at a high a pace

— G2 Review, Sebastien J., Chief Security Officer