Grafana OnCall vs NearIRM: Which Is Right for Your Team?

Grafana OnCall has been a solid choice for on-call management, especially for teams already running the Grafana stack. It's open-source, integrates tightly with Grafana dashboards, and gives you full control over your infrastructure.

But things have changed. The OSS version of Grafana OnCall entered maintenance mode, and teams that were planning to adopt it (or already running it) are now reassessing their options. If you're in that position, this comparison should help you figure out which direction makes sense.

This isn't a hit piece on Grafana OnCall. It's a genuine comparison between two different approaches to the same problem.

Grafana OnCall: What You Get

Grafana OnCall is an open-source incident response tool built to fit into the Grafana ecosystem. If you're already running Grafana for dashboards and alerting, OnCall slots in as the on-call management layer.

You can self-host the OSS version or use it through Grafana Cloud. The self-hosted version gives you full control. You run it on your own infrastructure, manage the database, handle updates, and configure everything yourself. The Cloud version is managed by Grafana but comes with their standard cloud pricing model.

The core features are what you'd expect: on-call schedules, escalation policies, alert routing, and integrations with common notification channels (primarily Slack and email). The Grafana integration is the real selling point. Alerts from Grafana Alerting flow directly into OnCall without any middleware or webhook configuration.

The OSS version entering maintenance mode is the elephant in the room. Maintenance mode means the team isn't actively building new features. Bug fixes and security patches will slow down. It still works, but you're betting on a codebase that's winding down rather than growing.

On the Cloud side, Grafana folded OnCall into a broader product called Grafana IRM. The transition rolled out in March 2025 (Mar 17–24), with the legacy Cloud OnCall app sunset on April 21, 2025. Existing Cloud data, schedules, and integrations were preserved during the migration, but the product is now part of IRM with different pricing and a different feature set.

NearIRM: What You Get

NearIRM is a managed SaaS platform for on-call management and incident response. There's nothing to self-host. You sign up, configure your alert sources, set up your schedules and escalation policies, and you're running.

The pricing model is simple: $29/month flat rate with unlimited users. No per-seat fees, no usage-based pricing that surprises you at the end of the month.

NearIRM includes native Grafana integration. Your Grafana alerts route into NearIRM the same way they would with OnCall. The difference is you're not managing the receiving infrastructure yourself.

Notification channels go beyond Slack and email. NearIRM supports push notifications, WhatsApp, email, and webhook delivery. If your team isn't glued to Slack (or if you need notifications that actually wake people up at 3am), that matters.

The focus is on doing the core on-call workflow well: alert routing, escalation policies, on-call scheduling with weekly rotations, and multi-channel notifications. You can see the full feature set at /features.

Feature Comparison

Here's how the two stack up across the things that matter most for day-to-day on-call management.

The table tells most of the story. The core on-call features are similar. The differences are in how you run it, what you maintain, and how you pay.

When Grafana OnCall Is the Better Choice

Grafana OnCall wins in specific scenarios. Be honest about whether your situation matches these.

You're already deep in the Grafana ecosystem. If your team lives in Grafana dashboards all day and your entire monitoring stack is Grafana-native, OnCall's integration is tighter than anything else. The workflow from dashboard to alert to on-call is seamless within Grafana's UI.

You have DevOps capacity to spare. Self-hosting OnCall means running another service. You need to provision infrastructure, manage the database, handle upgrades, and debug issues when things break. If your team has a dedicated platform or DevOps function that can absorb this, it's fine.

Your budget is genuinely zero. The self-hosted OSS version is free. If $29/month is a real constraint (and for some teams it is), self-hosted OnCall is hard to beat on price. You pay in time and maintenance instead of dollars.

You want maximum control. Self-hosting means you own the data, control the network, and can customize the deployment. For teams with strict compliance requirements or air-gapped environments, that matters.

When NearIRM Is the Better Choice

NearIRM makes more sense when the self-hosting trade-offs don't work for you.

You don't want to run another service. Every self-hosted tool adds to your operational burden. If your team is small or your DevOps capacity is already stretched, adding another service to monitor and maintain is the last thing you need. NearIRM is managed, so that operational overhead disappears.

You need notifications that go beyond Slack. Push notifications and WhatsApp delivery are not things that Grafana OnCall handles well out of the box. If your on-call engineers need to be reached through multiple channels (especially mobile push for those 3am pages), NearIRM covers that natively.

You want predictable pricing. Grafana Cloud pricing can get complicated as your usage scales. NearIRM is $29/month regardless of team size. You can see the breakdown at /pricing. No surprises, no "we need to talk about your bill" emails.

You're worried about maintenance mode. If you're evaluating Grafana OnCall today, you're choosing a tool that the maintainers have signaled they're stepping back from. That doesn't mean it breaks tomorrow, but it does mean the gap between what it offers and what you need will widen over time.

You're a small team without spare DevOps bandwidth. A five-person engineering team doesn't need to be self-hosting their on-call system. They need to be building their product. Managed tools exist for exactly this reason.

The Maintenance Mode Factor

This is the thing that changes the calculus for a lot of teams.

When Grafana announced that OnCall OSS was entering maintenance mode, it meant the open-source version would stop getting new features. Bug fixes will continue for a while, but they'll slow down. Security patches will follow a similar trajectory.

For teams already running OnCall in production, this isn't an emergency. Your existing setup will keep working. But the longer you stay on a tool in maintenance mode, the more risk accumulates. Dependencies get outdated. Security vulnerabilities take longer to patch. Integration points with other tools drift apart.

On the Cloud side, the transition to Grafana IRM is a different kind of disruption. IRM is a broader product that bundles incident management, on-call, and other capabilities. If you only need on-call management, you may end up paying for features you don't use, or learning a new product that's more complex than what you had.

For teams evaluating a new on-call tool today, maintenance mode is a legitimate concern. You're making a decision that affects your incident response for the next few years. Choosing a tool that's winding down means you'll likely be doing this evaluation again sooner than you'd like.

Migrating from Grafana OnCall

If you decide to move away from Grafana OnCall, the migration isn't as painful as you might expect.

NearIRM integrates with Grafana natively. Your Grafana alerting rules stay exactly as they are. You change the notification target from OnCall to NearIRM's webhook endpoint, and alerts start flowing. The monitoring side of your stack doesn't change at all.

The main work is recreating your schedules and escalation policies in NearIRM. For most teams, that's an afternoon of setup. You can find a detailed comparison and migration guidance at /alternative/grafana-oncall.

The biggest risk in any migration is the transition period. Run both systems in parallel for a week or two. Send alerts to both and verify that NearIRM routes them correctly before cutting over completely. Don't yolo it on a Friday afternoon.

Picking the Right Tool

Both Grafana OnCall and NearIRM solve the same fundamental problem: getting the right person notified when something breaks.

Grafana OnCall is the right call if you're already invested in Grafana Cloud's ecosystem, have the infrastructure team to support self-hosting, or need the tight integration that comes from everything being under one roof.

NearIRM is the right call if you want managed infrastructure, predictable pricing, multi-channel notifications, and a tool that's actively being developed. It works with Grafana, but it doesn't require you to be all-in on the Grafana stack.

The maintenance mode situation makes the decision more urgent for some teams. If you've been putting off this evaluation, now is a reasonable time to do it.

For a full side-by-side comparison with migration details, check out /alternative/grafana-oncall.