PagerDuty starts at $21/user/month. For a team of 5, that's $105/month just for the alerting layer, before you pay for monitoring tools that feed into it.
Most small teams don't need escalation policies, runbooks, status page automation, and incident command roles. They need one thing: "tell the right person immediately when something breaks."
Why Small Teams Leave PagerDuty
- Per-user pricing adds up fast. $21-41/user/month means $100-200/month for a team of 5, just for alerting.
- Feature bloat. Incident workflows, post-mortem templates, service catalogs, powerful, but unnecessary for a 5-person team.
- Requires a separate monitoring tool. PagerDuty doesn't monitor anything, it routes alerts from other tools. You need Datadog or New Relic on top.
1. Better Stack: Best Direct Replacement
- Price: Free (10 monitors). Pro from $24/month.
- Includes: Uptime monitoring + on-call scheduling + status pages + log management.
- Alerts: Email, Slack, SMS, phone calls.
Why it replaces PagerDuty: It bundles monitoring AND alerting in one tool. No need for Datadog → PagerDuty → Slack pipeline. One product does all three.
2. Opsgenie (Atlassian): Best for Jira Teams
- Price: Free (5 users). Essentials at $9/user/month.
- Includes: On-call scheduling, escalation policies, Jira integration.
- Alerts: Email, SMS, phone, mobile push, Slack.
Why it replaces PagerDuty: Cheaper per-user pricing ($9 vs $21). Native Jira/Confluence integration. Free tier for small teams.
3. Grafana OnCall: Best Open-Source Option
- Price: Free (open source, self-hosted). Included in Grafana Cloud free tier.
- Includes: On-call rotation, escalation chains, Slack/phone integration.
- Integrates with: Grafana alerting, Prometheus Alertmanager, webhooks.
Why it replaces PagerDuty: Completely free. If you already use Grafana, OnCall integrates natively. No vendor lock-in.
4. Rootly: Best for Incident Management
- Price: Free (up to 5 incidents/month). Pro from $15/user/month.
- Includes: Slack-native incident management, automated retrospectives, status page updates.
- Unique: Runs entirely inside Slack, no separate UI to learn.
Why it replaces PagerDuty: If your team lives in Slack, Rootly is more natural. Cheaper and more focused on small-team workflows.
Comparison Table
| Tool | Free tier | Paid from | Monitoring included? | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Better Stack | 10 monitors | $24/mo | Yes | All-in-one replacement |
| Opsgenie | 5 users | $9/user | No | Jira/Atlassian teams |
| Grafana OnCall | Unlimited (OSS) | $0 | Via Grafana | Open-source on-call |
| Rootly | 5 incidents/mo | $15/user | No | Slack-native incidents |