Incident management & on-call, in detail
Who gets paged and what happens next. The category is mid-shake-up: Atlassian is sunsetting Opsgenie, Slack-native challengers bundle response with on-call, and per-responder pricing replaced per-user in the newer tools. Everything below prices out radically differently at 10 vs 100 engineers — model your responder count.
| Tool | Free tier | Entry price | Billing unit | Watch out for | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| incident.io | Basic free (Slack/Teams + 1-team on-call) | Team $15/user/mo + $10 on-call | Per responder | Add-on structure (on-call separate) needs reading | Slack-native response + on-call + status pages |
| PagerDuty | Up to 5 users | Professional $21/user/mo | Per user + add-ons | AIOps/Advance sold separately; renewal creep complaints | The enterprise standard; 700+ integrations |
| Grafana Cloud IRM | 3 active IRM users | ~$20/active user/mo | Per active user | OnCall OSS deprecated Mar 2025 — cloud is the path | Alerting→on-call→incident inside Grafana |
| Rootly | None (demo) | Quote-based | Per user (opaque) | No public pricing | Managed PagerDuty replacement for larger orgs |
| Squadcast | Small free tier | Budget per-user plans | Per user | Smaller ecosystem | SRE-flavored on-call at lower per-seat cost |
| Better Stack (on-call) | Bundled with uptime free tier | ~$25/mo bundle | Flat-ish | Lighter incident workflow than dedicated tools | Uptime + status + basic on-call in one cheap bundle |
| Opsgenie → JSM | — | Sunset | — | End of sale Jun 2025; support ends Apr 5, 2027 | Existing users migrating into Jira Service Management |
Pricing models and free tiers change often — check each vendor for current terms. Compiled July 2026; the most volatile figures verified on official pricing pages.
Official pages: incident.io · PagerDuty · Grafana Cloud IRM · Rootly · Squadcast · Better Stack (on-call) · Opsgenie → JSM
Entry price at a glance
Cheapest paid plan, USD per month — per-user plans shown for a single seat. Hatched bars are usage-based or quote-only; values marked ~ are approximate.
Notes & recent changes
- Opsgenie's sunset is dated: sales ended June 4, 2025, support ends April 5, 2027 — migrations go to JSM Operations or Compass.
- Grafana deprecated OnCall OSS in March 2025; self-hosted on-call via Grafana is no longer a long-term plan.
- incident.io's viewer seats are free — only responders pay, which changes the math for big orgs with few on-call engineers.
Which one should you pick?
- Team lives in Slack → incident.io.
- Enterprise integrations and process → PagerDuty.
- Already on Grafana Cloud → IRM.
- Five engineers and a status page → Better Stack or PagerDuty free.