PagerDuty
On-call scheduling, alerting and incident response for ops teams
PagerDuty is a uptime & monitoring tool for Developers and Enterprise, offered as freemium ($25/mo). Founded in United States in 2009.
About PagerDuty
PagerDuty is an incident management and on-call platform founded in 2009 by Alex Solomon, Andrew Miklas and Baskar Puvanathasan, headquartered in San Francisco and listed on the NYSE since 2019. Its core job: take alerts from monitoring tools, wake up the right engineer through escalation policies and coordinate the response until the incident is resolved.
The product covers on-call schedules and escalation policies, alert routing and deduplication, push, SMS and phone notifications, Slack and Teams incident channels, status pages, post-incident reviews and analytics, plus 700+ integrations. Add-ons include AIOps for noise reduction, Runbook Automation, Status Pages and PagerDuty Advance generative AI. Pricing has two parts: Incident Management has a Free plan for 5 users and Professional at $25 per user a month, while the PD Reliability Platform is sold as annual platform fees (Starter, Essential, Plus, Ultimate) with bundles of seats, events and AI actions.
PagerDuty fits engineering and IT operations teams that run production systems around the clock and need dependable paging at scale. Add-ons get expensive. Better Stack bundles uptime monitoring, on-call and status pages for less, Datadog On-Call suits Datadog users, and Statuspage only covers public updates.
PagerDuty launched SRE, Scribe, Shift and Insights agents and a remote MCP server in October 2025; since the March 2026 release the SRE Agent can join escalation policies. A 14-day trial needs no credit card; check whether the per-user Professional plan or a platform tier is cheaper for your team size.
Key features of PagerDuty
- 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
- Runbook Automation for scripted diagnostics and remediation
- SRE, Scribe, Shift and Insights AI agents plus a remote MCP server
Pros and cons
Pros
- Highly reliable paging, the industry reference for on-call
- Largest integration catalogue among incident tools
- Free plan is enough for very small teams
- Mature mobile apps for acknowledging and resolving alerts
- Strong AI roadmap with agents and MCP support
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
- Free plan allows only one schedule and one escalation policy
- Overkill for teams that just need uptime alerts
PagerDuty pricing
PagerDuty uses a freemium model. A 14-day free trial is available.
| Plan | Price | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Up 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 / yr | 10 seats, 5,000 events, 1,000 AI actions; billed upfront |
| Essential (Platform) | $12,000 / yr | 20 seats, 40,000 events, 4,000 AI actions |
| Plus (Platform) | $48,000 / yr | 50 seats, 150,000 events, 16,000 AI actions |
| Ultimate | Custom | 500 seats, 2M events, 100,000 AI actions |
Source: www.pagerduty.com · checked on Oct 20, 2026
How PagerDuty compares in Uptime & monitoring
- Rank by votes
- #1 / 16
- Starting price
- $25
- Free alternatives
- 3
0 votes from members
4% above the category median ($24/mo)
Free or open-source tools in Uptime & monitoring
PagerDuty ranks #1 of 16 uptime & monitoring tools by community votes and is priced in line with the category.
Common use cases
- 124/7 on-call rotation for SRE and platform teams
- 2Routing alerts from Datadog, New Relic or CloudWatch to the right person
- 3Coordinating major incidents in Slack with defined roles
- 4IT operations escalation for service desks linked to ServiceNow
- 5Reducing alert noise in large environments with AIOps
- 6Running post-incident reviews and tracking MTTR
Best for
Engineering and IT operations teams that run critical production services and need proven on-call paging and incident coordination.
Not ideal for
Small teams wanting cheap, bundled uptime monitoring and paging (Better Stack, Grafana Cloud IRM).
Integrations
- Slack
- Microsoft Teams
- Datadog
- New Relic
- Grafana
- Jira
- ServiceNow
- AWS CloudWatch
Our take
PagerDuty remains the safest choice for serious on-call and incident response, especially at enterprise scale. Start on Professional, add AIOps only when alert noise is a measured problem, and price Better Stack if budget matters more than ecosystem depth.
FAQ
- What is PagerDuty?
- PagerDuty is a Uptime & monitoring tool: On-call scheduling, alerting and incident response for ops teams.
- How much does PagerDuty cost?
- PagerDuty uses a Freemium model; paid plans start at $25 per month.
- Does PagerDuty have a free trial?
- Yes, PagerDuty offers a 14-day free trial.
- What does PagerDuty integrate with?
- PagerDuty integrates with Slack, Microsoft Teams, Datadog, New Relic, Grafana, Jira and more.
- Which platforms does PagerDuty support?
- PagerDuty is available on web, ios, android.
- Who is PagerDuty for?
- Engineering and IT operations teams that run critical production services and need proven on-call paging and incident coordination.
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