Downtime monitoring tools like PagerDuty and alternatives can help. With automatic 24/7 monitoring, they help keep costs down and limit the impact of disruptions.
They can also improve your bottom-line and customer satisfaction.
Every business is unique and has its own challenges, requirements, and budget. That means PagerDuty won’t be the best option for everyone.
To assist, we compiled this list of the best PagerDuty alternatives. Use it to find the perfect downtime monitoring solution for your unique needs.
PagerDuty AlternativesWhat is PagerDuty? Why Look for an Alternative?
PagerDuty is a SaaS incident response platform for IT teams. It provides on-call scheduling combined with event alerts for DevOps and SREs. This helps them respond efficiently to incidents across a broad digital ecosystem.
But, is PagerDuty a good downtime monitoring solution?
PagerDuty isn’t a downtime monitoring solution to begin with. It relies on integrations with uptime monitoring platforms, like Pingdom or Statuscake. PagerDuty then can take these signals to create alerts and provide event intelligence.
Some alternatives also offer better and more transparent pricing. With PagerDuty, many features and capabilities are add-ons that cost extra. So, while PagerDuty may look cheap, costs can quickly escalate.
So, before you commit to PagerDuty, it’s wise to weigh all your options.
Alternatives fall into two categories:
- Specialized downtime monitoring tools.
- Incident response, event intelligence, and observability platforms.
Both have their pros and cons depending on your needs.
10 Best PagerDuty Alternatives
No.1: BetterUptime
BetterUptime is a full-service infrastructure monitoring platform. It features multi-location availability checks, incident response management, and a streamlined user experience.
Starting at $24/user/mo BetterUptime’s paid plans may seem more expensive than others on this list. However, the richness of the features means you’ll be replacing a full suite of paid apps with a single solution.
You also get these useful capabilities for free that usually cost extra:
- Incident management with on-call scheduling
- Free status pages
Notifications are delivered via email, Slack, MS Teams, SMS, and Push Notifications. Zapier and Webhooks are available for Small Team and Business users. As a bonus, you can manage on-call schedules from your favorite calendar app.
All-in-all, BetterUptime is one of the best PagerDuty alternatives. It also provides a great user experience, effective monitoring, and simple pricing.
PagerDuty Alternative No.2: Squadcast
Squadcast is an incident management solution for SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) and DevOps. It helps manage on-call schedules or downtime monitoring and SRE best practices.
The great news is that Squadcast provides a forever free plan for up to 10 users. Even free users get unlimited notifications. Squadcast also claims to provide 3x more value. This is thanks to its inclusive pricing that doesn’t rely on add-ons.
Even better, prices start at only $9/user/month, half that of PagerDuty.
24/7 customer support and a massive selection of 83 integrations are some of its other top features.
PagerDuty Alternative No.3: UptimeRobot
As the name suggests, UptimeRobot is a platform focused entirely on uptime monitoring. Even with a free plan, you get constant 5-min interval checks from 50 monitors.
This can be brought down to 1-min checks with a Pro plan. You can customize your plan by paying more for extra monitors and SMS alerts. UptimeRobot provides other basics like status pages, notification rules, ping/port monitoring, etc.
However, UptimeRobot doesn’t have on-call scheduling, incident management, or other observability features. That’s why it’s often used as an uptime monitoring integration for other services on this list.
PagerDuty Alternative No.4: Datadog
Datadog’s synthetic monitoring can help you track latency for user endpoints. With this, you’ll be able to analyze your uptime, speed, and resolvability. You can use the built-in browser testing tool to simulate real-user access.
Unfortunately, you’ll need to subscribe to at least a Pro plan to access container monitoring. But, it’s suitable as a free downtime monitoring solution.
Datadog’s full suite also covers:
- Log management
- Security monitoring
- Infrastructure management
- And, incident management
PagerDuty Alternative No.5: xMatters
xMatters is a SaaS incident response management platform. It provides tools for DevOps and SREs to use automated incident response. When downtime hits, it will help to resolve issues without human intervention.
xMatters provides many other unique features not available with most alternatives, such as:
- Code-free drag-and-drop workflows with built-in automation for incident response
- Multilingual messaging support
xMatters doesn’t have any direct downtime monitoring. That means you’ll also have to rely on integrations for this capability. However, it’s a top choice for automated incident response and business continuity
PagerDuty Alternative No.6: Splunk On-Call
Splunk On-call is an all-in-one incident management solution. Its tools include everything from security to IT and DevOps to monitoring.
Splunk has won many awards in the past. Its Observability Cloud Tools was named the 2021 GigaOm Market Leader.
Splunk offers a huge suite of products, so it can be somewhat challenging to find the exact solution for you. However, their Synthetic Monitoring solution starts at only $1 for 10,000 uptime tests. You can then start adding services like on-call incident response for only $5/user/month.
Full-stack observability solutions start at $95 a month per host.
PagerDuty Alternative No.7: New Relic One
New Relic One is a comprehensive and massively scalable observability platform. It’s also more than just a downtime monitoring tool. Other capabilities include:
- Code-level and end-user performance insights combined with
- AI/machine-learning processing and an
- Advanced telemetry platform for visualizing this data.
Downtime monitoring is still a relatively new feature for the Relic One platform. You can create and manage synthetic monitors, but their tools are still basic. For example, it still lacks PagerDuty’s alert escalation and access controls functionality.
New Relic One also provides a free plan with 1 full user but unlimited basic users.
PagerDuty Alternatives No.8: Statuscake
Statuscake offers website monitoring for uptime, page speed, and SSL certificates. It can even look for issues with your domain’s DNS.
You can sign up for a free Statuscake plan that provides 10 monitors with 5-min test intervals for uptime. With higher-tier plans, you can increase this to 300 monitors with 30-second intervals. Other metrics come with their own monitor/test interval limits.
Pricing starts at a low $20.41/month. However, Statuscake doesn’t offer any advanced capabilities beyond uptime monitoring and alerts.
PagerDuty Alternatives No.9: Pingdom
Pingdom is a popular monitoring service, known for its free website performance tools. It’s also a full-stack monitoring solution, with advanced features management capability.Pingdom supports both synthetic or real-user website monitoring. For enterprise uses, there is also infrastructure and application monitoring. That makes it a more advanced option than Statuscake or UptimeRobot.
The pricing is very flexible. First, you get to choose whether you want synthetic, real-user monitoring, or both. You can scale your plan according to checks, notifications, and pageviews.
There are no free plans, but pricing starts at only $10.
PagerDuty Alternatives No.10: Montastic
Montastic is a solid option as a free monitor solution for open-source projects. There is a very basic free plan for all users. Open-source projects can also use the Business plan for free.
It’s a relatively straightforward and cost-effective service for website uptime monitoring. Its capabilities are basic compared to many on this list. For example, the smallest check interval is 5 minutes and you can’t scale up the number of monitors.
However, you get the basics, like status pages, notifications, and response time tracking. The pricing starts at only $5 and is pretty cheap considering the number of subscribers you can add.
Found the Right PagerDuty Alternative?
As you can see, there is a wide range of downtime monitoring solutions to choose from. We picked a diverse selection so that you can make an informed decision based on your unique needs.
To help, you might want to answer these questions about what you need:
- Combine monitoring signals with on-call scheduling and incident response?
- Actionable insights into not only uptime, performance, and availability?
- Code-level observability into your apps and infrastructure?
- Integration with your existing DevOps and SRE systems?
If any of these sound useful, you can cover all your bases and go with an option like BetterUptime. BetterUptime offers both built-in downtime tracking as well as some incident
