Pagerduty

PagerDuty is an incident management platform that monitors your infrastructure via integrations with 700+ tools and sends alerts to on-call engineers when something breaks. When an alert fires (say, your website is down), PagerDuty determines who is on-call, sends them a push notification/call/SMS, and if they don't acknowledge in X minutes, escalates to the next person in the chain. It also provides incident response workflows for coordinating team response, post-incident analysis, and ML-based noise reduction so engineers aren't paged for every minor alert.

PagerDuty is better for: enterprise features, advanced AIOps noise reduction, compliance (SOC2, HIPAA), and mature incident response workflows. Opsgenie is better for: Atlassian shops (included in some Jira bundles), cost (significantly cheaper for small teams), and simpler on-call scheduling. PagerDuty starts at $21/user/month (Professional) vs Opsgenie at $9/user/month. For teams already on Atlassian tools with smaller budgets, Opsgenie is often the pragmatic choice.

PagerDuty offers: Free (up to 5 users, basic features), Professional ($21/user/month — core on-call and alerting), Business ($41/user/month — advanced analytics, runbooks), and Enterprise (custom pricing with AIOps and Operations Cloud). For a 10-person engineering team using Professional, that's $210/month. Most growing startups start with Free then move to Professional once on-call complexity justifies the cost.