PagerDuty Alternatives: What to Look for in 2026

Most teams don’t leave PagerDuty because it failed. They leave because it got expensive, complex, or both.

If you’re evaluating alternatives, ignore the marketing noise and focus on what actually helps during an incident.

The essentials are boring for a reason

If an alert doesn’t reach the right person fast, nothing else matters.

Look for:

Routing that matches reality. Alerts should go to the team that owns the service.
Escalations that work. Timeouts, retries, and clear backstops.
Schedules that don’t break. Rotations that are easy to set up and easy to swap.
Ack and resolve. If a page gets acknowledged, escalation should stop. Every time.
A timeline you can audit. You should be able to answer “what happened” without guesswork.

Per‑seat and per‑alert pricing punish growth. Flat‑rate pricing keeps costs stable and removes pressure to “tune for the bill.”

If your alert volume spikes during an outage, the tool shouldn’t send you a bigger invoice.

Good tools let you migrate schedules and policies without a month‑long project. Look for:

Give each tool a 1–5 score on:

The top score usually wins.

NearIRM is a flat‑rate alternative built around those essentials. If you want a cleaner on‑call setup without the pricing trap, it’s worth a look.