Visibility in this ranking can be paid for. Payment gives a vendor more visibility, higher up on the review pages; it never adds a vendor, and it never changes a word of the review. The largest vendors in incident management and on-call software
cannot hold places 1 to 3. Places 1 to 3 go to challengers, vendors outside the best-known brands in a category,
wherever the category has them; the established names follow from place 4 in their ranked order. How it works: placement disclosure ·
editorial process.
The 12 tools, reviewed
#1 ilert
On-call, alerting and incident response from Cologne · Germany · ilert.com
German-hosted Free tier Status pages
ilert is a Cologne company that says its platform is made and hosted in Germany, follows GDPR and holds ISO 27001.
- Pricing: Per user / month. Free for up to 5 users. Free plan: free plan.
- Best for: Small teams wanting EU hosting
- Strengths: On-call scheduling; Alerting by push, SMS and voice; Incident management.
Where it falls short
Prices are listed in US dollars, and Pro and Scale require at least three users, which counts against the smallest rotas.
Wrong for
A large enterprise that needs the deepest catalog of integrations and a vendor on every procurement list should look at PagerDuty, and a team that wants incidents run entirely inside Slack should compare incident.io.
Visit ilert →
#2 incident.io
Slack and Teams native incident response · United Kingdom · incident.io
Chat-native Free tier UK company
incident.io is a London company whose registered name is Pineapple Technology Ltd. Its pitch is that the incident happens where people already talk: declaring, assigning roles and updating the timeline are done in Slack or Microsoft Teams. The free Basic plan includes single-team on-call, a status page and essential automation, which is more than most vendors give away.
- Pricing: Per user / month. Basic is free with single-team on-call and a status page. Free plan: free plan.
- Best for: Slack-first engineering teams
- Strengths: Slack and Teams incident response; On-call schedules; Alert routing.
Where it falls short
On-call is priced separately from response, so a responder on Pro who also takes pages costs $25 plus $20 a month. The investigation and autonomous agent features are add-ons rather than part of the plan.
Wrong for
A NOC or IT operations group with a phone bridge and a ticketing-first process should look at xMatters or SIGNL4, and a team that wants a single flat per-seat price should compare ilert.
Visit incident.io →
#3 Rootly
Incident response and on-call in Slack, Teams and Google Chat · United States · rootly.com
Chat-native Retrospectives Startup program
Rootly is a San Francisco company that runs incidents in Slack, Microsoft Teams or Google Chat. Incident Response and On-Call are two products at $20 per user a month each, with a catalog, insights, workflows and AI-written timelines and retrospectives included in the response price. Shift swaps and overrides are handled in the mobile app, and rotations support holidays, PTO and shadowing.
- Pricing: Per user / month. Incident Response is $20 per user a month and On-Call is $20 per user a month. Free plan: none.
- Best for: Teams wanting structured incident process
- Strengths: Incident response in chat; On-call paging; AI scribe and retrospectives.
Where it falls short
There is no self-serve free plan on the pricing page, and getting started goes through a demo request. A responder who uses both products costs $40 a month before any bundle discount.
Wrong for
A team of three to five engineers that only wants paging and a free tier should start with ilert or the free plan at Grafana Cloud IRM, which cost nothing at that size.
Visit Rootly →
#4 Spike
Low-cost on-call and alerting for small teams · India · spike.sh
Low price WhatsApp alerts Opsgenie migration
Spike is run by FatSync Software Private Limited from Pune, India. Its Standard plan at $7 per user a month includes on-call scheduling, a status page, Slack and Discord ChatOps, WhatsApp and Telegram alerts, and 100 phone and SMS alerts a month shared across the account.
- Pricing: Per user / month. Standard is $7 per user a month and Business $14 (billed monthly), with Enterprise by quote. Free plan: free trial.
- Best for: Budget-conscious small teams
- Strengths: On-call scheduling; Alert routing; Escalations.
Where it falls short
The 100-alert cap on Standard is easy to exceed in a noisy month, which pushes a team to Business. Incident context, Jira, ClickUp and Linear integrations and multiple teams are Business features. SSO sits behind Enterprise.
Wrong for
A regulated company that needs SSO on every plan and extensive audit tooling should look at ilert's Pro plan or PagerDuty, and one that wants a free plan should compare FireHydrant.
Visit Spike →
#5 Xurrent IMR (formerly Zenduty)
Incident alerting and response, formerly sold as Zenduty · United States · zenduty.com
Lowest entry price Formerly Zenduty Postmortems
The Zenduty site now carries the name Xurrent IMR (formerly Zenduty) and lists Xurrent, Inc. as the company, with a global headquarters in Santa Barbara and offices in Bengaluru, London and Austin.
- Pricing: Per user / month. Starter is $6 per user a month and Growth $16 (billed yearly). Free plan: free trial.
- Best for: Very small teams on a tight budget
- Strengths: Alert correlation; Escalation policies; Incident response in Slack and Teams.
Where it falls short
The notification allowance is 100 per user a month in the USA, Canada and India and 25 per user elsewhere, which can bite teams in Europe. Starter has community support only.
Wrong for
A European team with high SMS and voice volume should look at ilert or SIGNL4, whose pricing pages list unlimited notifications on defined tiers.
Visit Xurrent IMR (formerly Zenduty) →
#6 SIGNL4
Mobile alerting and duty scheduling from Derdack · Germany · signl4.com
German company Mobile alerts Call routing
SIGNL4 is a product of Derdack GmbH in Potsdam, Germany. Its pricing page starts with a free Starter plan for up to five users with push alerts, a native app and an on-call dashboard.
- Pricing: Per user / month. Starter is free for up to 5 users. Free plan: free plan.
- Best for: Operations and industrial alerting
- Strengths: Push alerts; Text and voice alerts; Escalations.
Where it falls short
The plan tables we read center on alerting, escalation and scheduling.
Wrong for
A software team that wants to run incidents and write reviews inside Slack should look at incident.io or Rootly instead.
Visit SIGNL4 →
#7 FireHydrant
Incident response with runbooks and Signals on-call · United States · firehydrant.com
Runbooks Free tier Migrator
FireHydrant, Inc. is based in New York. The Free plan allows up to ten responders with two runbooks, a Slack and Teams chatbot, one public status page and three integrations. Pro at $25 per responder a month billed annually adds five runbooks, unlimited public status pages, a service catalog, on-call scheduling with unlimited escalation policies and webhooks.
- Pricing: Per responder / month. Free for up to 10 responders. Free plan: free plan.
- Best for: Teams that value runbooks
- Strengths: Incident runbooks; Signals on-call; Service catalog.
Where it falls short
Pro limits runbooks to five and integrations to five, and SMS and voice notifications are available for purchase rather than included.
Wrong for
A team of three on-call engineers who need unlimited SMS and voice at a flat price should compare ilert's Pro plan, and a team that wants an open price list for AI features should check each vendor's credits.
Visit FireHydrant →
#8 Grafana Cloud IRM
On-call and incident response inside Grafana Cloud · United States · grafana.com
Grafana stack Active-user billing Free tier
Grafana Cloud IRM combines on-call scheduling and incident response with the dashboards and alerts a Grafana team already has. A firing alert can notify the on-call responder, open an incident from the alert and coordinate the response in Slack, Microsoft Teams or a phone app.
- Pricing: Per active user / month. Free forever for up to 3 active IRM users. Free plan: free plan.
- Best for: Teams already using Grafana
- Strengths: On-call rotations; Alert escalation; Incident declaration from alerts.
Where it falls short
The product is tied to Grafana Cloud. The open source Grafana OnCall repository entered maintenance mode on March 11, 2025 and was archived on March 24, 2026, so there is no supported self-hosted edition to fall back on.
Wrong for
A team that does not use Grafana for monitoring, or that requires a self-hosted paging system, should start with a dedicated vendor such as ilert or incident.io.
Visit Grafana Cloud IRM →
#9 SolarWinds Incident Response
On-call and incident response, the product behind squadcast.com · United States · solarwinds.com
SolarWinds product Regional SMS limits Postmortems
The squadcast.com pricing page now redirects to SolarWinds Incident Response, a product of SolarWinds Corporation in Austin, Texas. Pro at $15 per user a month billed annually includes schedules, escalations, role-based access, postmortems with templates and unlimited email and push. Premium at $24 adds stakeholders, advanced escalations, runbooks, incident workflows, an SLO tracker and status pages.
- Pricing: Per user / month. Pro starts at $15 per user a month and Premium at $24, billed annually; Enterprise by quote; 14-day trial. Free plan: free trial.
- Best for: Teams using SolarWinds tools
- Strengths: Schedules and escalations; Alert correlation; Postmortems with templates.
Where it falls short
On Pro, each user gets 100 combined SMS and voice notifications in the US, India and Brazil but 25 elsewhere, with a per-notification fee after that. Status pages and runbooks require Premium.
Wrong for
A small European team with many pages a night should look at ilert or SIGNL4 for unlimited notifications, and a buyer that wants an independent vendor should avoid acquired products.
Visit SolarWinds Incident Response →
#10 xMatters (Everbridge)
Structured notification and incident response for IT operations · United States · xmatters.com
Everbridge Service-desk integrations 42 languages
xMatters now appears on the Everbridge site as Everbridge xMatters.
- Pricing: Per user / month. Free for up to 5 users. Free plan: free plan.
- Best for: IT operations with ticketing
- Strengths: Global on-call scheduling; Escalation policies; Incident timeline.
Where it falls short
Starter requires a demo request and caps the account at 25 users, and the advanced plan has no published price. SMS and voice are metered per user per month on paid tiers.
Wrong for
A start-up with five engineers should skip it for a free plan from ilert or FireHydrant, and a team that wants the incident run in Slack should look at incident.io.
Visit xMatters (Everbridge) →
#12 Atlassian Opsgenie
Atlassian's alerting and on-call product, being retired · Australia · atlassian.com
End of sale Atlassian Migration
Opsgenie was a widely used paging tool in Jira teams, and many existing runbooks and escalation policies live in it. Atlassian's page states that on March 4, 2025 it announced Opsgenie would not be available for purchase from June 4, 2025, that customers can keep using it without interruption until April 5, 2027, and that it will then shut off access.
- Pricing: Quote only. No longer sold; existing customers can renew and add seats until April 5, 2027, when access ends. Free plan: none.
- Best for: Existing customers planning migration
- Strengths: On-call schedules; Alert routing; Escalation policies.
Where it falls short
Nobody can buy Opsgenie today, plan upgrades and downgrades ended on June 4, 2025, and the product disappears on April 5, 2027.
Wrong for
Any new buyer should not consider it at all and should pick from the other eleven, and an existing customer should start migrating to ilert, FireHydrant or Spike, or to Jira Service Management inside the Atlassian stack.
Visit Atlassian Opsgenie →
Questions and answers
What is the best incident management and on-call software in 2026?
ilert ranks first of 12, best for small teams wanting EU hosting. incident.io is second (slack-first engineering teams) and Rootly third (teams wanting structured incident process). Places 1 to 3 go to challengers, vendors outside the best-known brands, wherever the category has them.
Is Opsgenie still available, and what should I do about it?
Opsgenie can no longer be bought. Atlassian ended sales on June 4, 2025, existing customers can keep using it until the end of support on April 5, 2027, and then access is shut off.
What is the difference between on-call software and incident management software?
On-call software handles the first half of an outage: receiving an alert, deciding who is on duty and reaching them.
Which of these tools have a free plan?
Seven of the twelve: ilert (up to 5 users), incident.io (a Basic plan with single-team on-call), FireHydrant (up to 10 responders), Grafana Cloud IRM (3 active IRM users), SIGNL4 (up to 5 users), xMatters (up to 5 users) and PagerDuty (5 users, one schedule).
How much do SMS and phone-call alerts add to the bill?
It depends on the vendor. ilert's free plan includes 100 SMS and voice notifications and its Pro plan removes the limit.
Can I run incident management software on my own servers?
Mostly no. All twelve products reviewed here are sold as hosted services. The open source route has also narrowed: Grafana's OnCall repository was archived on March 24, 2026 and the maintainers point to Grafana Cloud IRM.
Which tools are headquartered in Europe?
ilert (Cologne, Germany), SIGNL4 from Derdack GmbH (Potsdam, Germany) and incident.io (London, UK) are the three European vendors in this ranking. ilert states that it is made and hosted in Germany and holds ISO 27001.
How long does migration from PagerDuty or Opsgenie take?
The mechanics are quick; the clean-up is not. FireHydrant advertises a migrator that imports PagerDuty or Opsgenie configuration in minutes, and Rootly and Spike publish migration offers.
Do I need a separate status page tool?
Not necessarily. Status pages come with ilert (one on the free plan), incident.io (on its free Basic plan), FireHydrant (one public page on Free) and Xurrent, SolarWinds and PagerDuty on defined tiers or add-ons.
When is PagerDuty the right choice despite the price?
When you need the widest integration catalog and a vendor large enough to be on every procurement list. PagerDuty lists more than 750 integrations and has a Free plan for 5 users, with Professional at $21 per user a month billed annually.
What does xMatters do that the others do not?
xMatters is built around structured, multi-team notification and service-desk integration.
