PagerDuty
Incident management and on-call scheduling platform that routes alerts to the right person via phone, SMS, Slack, and push notifications.
Best for small teams that need structured on-call rotation and escalation for production incidents.
Use Cases
Free Tier
5 users, 100 phone/SMS notifications/month, 1 on-call schedule
How to Maximize the Free Tier
PagerDuty's free plan is best used with email and Slack notifications to preserve your 100 phone/SMS notifications for truly critical alerts. Set up quiet hours in your schedule so non-urgent alerts only go through email. Use the single on-call schedule wisely — create escalation levels within it rather than trying to manage multiple schedules. Integrate with Slack for a lightweight incident channel so the team stays informed without burning phone credits. The free tier works well for a single team; if you need multi-service or multi-team coverage, consider Better Stack as an alternative.
Getting Started
Sign up for free plan → add team members → create an escalation policy → set up an on-call schedule with rotation → integrate with your monitoring tool (Datadog, Prometheus, etc.) → configure notification channels (email, Slack, phone).
Pros
- On-call rotation: Built-in schedule builder with rotation rules, overrides, and escalation policies — no spreadsheets needed
- Multi-channel alerts: Routes incidents via phone call, SMS, push notification, Slack, and email — ensures someone always sees the alert
- Broad integrations: Connects to 700+ tools including Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, and GitHub out of the box
Cons
- Notification cap: Only 100 phone/SMS notifications per month on the free tier — noisy services will exhaust this fast
- Single schedule: Free plan limits you to one on-call schedule — multi-team setups need to upgrade
- Complexity: Full-featured incident management UI has a steep learning curve for small teams that just need basic alerting