PagerDuty vs Radar
PagerDuty and Radar are both uptime & monitoring tools. PagerDuty is aimed at developers and enterprise, while Radar is aimed at developers and small businesses. PagerDuty costs less, from $25/mo versus $149/mo for Radar. Both have a free plan.
On-call scheduling, alerting and incident response for ops teams
Open-source Kubernetes UI and MCP server for engineers and agents
| Pricing | Freemium · $25 | Open source · $149 |
| Starting price | $25/mo | $149/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | 14 days | 14 days |
| Built for | Developers, Enterprise, Small businesses | Developers, Small businesses, Enterprise |
| Platforms | web, ios, android | web, macos, windows, linux |
| Country | US · 2009 | IL · 2023 |
| Rating | — | — |
Choose PagerDuty if
Engineering and IT operations teams that run critical production services and need proven on-call paging and incident coordination.
- Highly reliable paging, the industry reference for on-call
- Largest integration catalogue among incident tools
- Free plan is enough for very small teams
Look elsewhere if: Small teams wanting cheap, bundled uptime monitoring and paging (Better Stack, Grafana Cloud IRM).
Choose Radar if
Platform and DevOps teams that want a free open-source Kubernetes UI and a safe way to give AI agents cluster context.
- Fully featured open-source build under Apache 2.0
- Single binary and desktop app for macOS, Windows and Linux, no account needed
- Read-only MCP endpoint lets agents inspect clusters safely
Look elsewhere if: Teams that need full-stack metrics, logs and APM in one hosted suite (Datadog, Dynatrace).
PagerDuty vs Radar pricing
PagerDuty
- Free$0Up to 5 users, 1 schedule, 100 SMS/phone alerts a month
- Professional$25/user/mo$21/user/mo billed annually; post-incident reviews
- Starter (Platform)$2,800/yr10 seats, 5,000 events, 1,000 AI actions; billed upfront
- Essential (Platform)$12,000/yr20 seats, 40,000 events, 4,000 AI actions
- Plus (Platform)$48,000/yr50 seats, 150,000 events, 16,000 AI actions
Radar
- Radar OSS$0Apache 2.0, unlimited clusters, one cluster at a time
- Cloud Free$03 hosted clusters, unlimited users, 100 investigations/mo
- Team$149/cluster/moScoped RBAC, fleet cost rollup; 20% off annual contracts
- Enterprise$299/cluster/moSSO, SCIM, SIEM export, self-managed; 20% off annual contracts
- CustomCustomAnnual contract, air-gapped, data residency, 99.9% SLA
PagerDuty · Key features
- On-call schedules, overrides and multi-level escalation policies
- Alert routing, grouping and deduplication from 700+ integrations
- Push, SMS, phone and email notifications with mobile acknowledgement
- Incident channels and actions inside Slack and Microsoft Teams
- Post-incident reviews and operational analytics
- AIOps add-on for event correlation and noise reduction
Cons
- Costs rise fast with AIOps, status pages and automation add-ons
- Packaging and plan names change often, making comparisons hard
- Platform tiers require annual upfront payment
Radar · Key features
- Issues queue that groups failures by root cause and blast radius
- Live topology graph and resource browser for any conformant cluster
- Event and change timeline with diffs beyond the one-hour default
- Helm release views with upgrades and rollbacks
- Argo CD and Flux drift detection, diagnosis and sync
- Cluster audit with 44 best-practice checks
Cons
- Per-cluster pricing gets expensive for large fleets
- Radar Cloud SSO and SCIM only on the $299 Enterprise plan
- Team plan keeps just 3 days of timeline history
PagerDuty vs Radar: FAQ
Which is cheaper, PagerDuty or Radar?
PagerDuty starts at $25/mo and Radar at $149/mo. Both prices are checked on the vendors' own pricing pages.
Do PagerDuty and Radar have a free plan?
Yes, both PagerDuty and Radar have a free plan; paid plans add more usage and features.