Grafana OnCall alternative and Grafana IRM alternative for on-call teams

IncidentBot is a Grafana OnCall alternative for teams that ran the open source OnCall build and lost phone, SMS and push paging when Grafana archived it on March 24, 2026. You get on-call schedules, escalation policies, SMS and voice paging, Slack incident channels with roles, public and private status pages and postmortem drafts in one hosted product, priced per seat. Your Grafana alerts keep firing as they do today; they just page through IncidentBot. Plans start at 24 USD per user billed annually.

Run a sample incident

What changed for Grafana OnCall OSS

Grafana put OnCall OSS into maintenance mode on March 11, 2025 and archived the repository on March 24, 2026. On the same date Grafana ended the Cloud Connection that self-hosted installs used for mobile push, SMS and phone call notifications. A self-hosted OnCall can still route alerts to Slack and email, but the channels that wake someone up at 3 a.m. no longer come from Grafana. There are no new features and no security fixes coming either.

Grafana's own answer is Grafana Cloud IRM, the hosted product that merged OnCall and Grafana Incident. For many teams that is the right move. The teams that start comparing usually fall into one of three groups:

Self-hosters who do not want their pager tied to a Grafana Cloud account, or who are not allowed to send alert data to it.
Teams on Grafana Cloud IRM who need a native public or private status page. IRM publishes customer updates through an Atlassian Statuspage integration, so the status page is a second vendor and a second bill.
Teams where many people touch incidents. Grafana bills every monthly active IRM user, and that includes anyone who is on a schedule, receives a page, changes an alert group or creates or edits an incident.

Who switches, and who should stay

Teams that switch are usually 10 to 150 engineers with monitoring in Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog or CloudWatch who want paging, the incident process in Slack and status pages from one vendor. Teams that should stay on Grafana Cloud IRM: small teams already paying for Grafana Cloud Pro who only need paging and escalation, and teams who want incidents next to their dashboards in the same UI. IRM is cheaper on list price, and the table below says so.

Grafana Cloud IRM vs IncidentBot at a glance

Grafana details below come from grafana.com pricing and the Grafana IRM documentation, checked in October 2026. Confirm on their site before you sign, since packaging changes.

What you check	Grafana Cloud IRM	IncidentBot
Seat price	Pro starts at 20 USD per active IRM user per month, plus the 19 USD Grafana Cloud Pro platform fee, which covers the first 3 active IRM users	Starter 24 USD per user annual, 49 USD monthly. Team 49 USD annual, Business 99 USD annual
Free option	Free tier limited to 3 active IRM users per month	No free plan; the incident simulator runs without an account
Who counts as a paid user	Anyone on a schedule or escalation chain, anyone paged, and anyone who changes an alert group or creates or edits an incident in the month	Responders with a seat. Unlimited read-only stakeholders on every plan, never billed
Phone and SMS	No extra charge, throttled if volume is abnormally high	Starter: 100 SMS and voice notifications per user. Team and Business: unlimited (fair use)
Self-hosted option	OnCall OSS archived March 24, 2026, no cloud SMS, phone or push since then	Hosted only
Status pages	Through the Atlassian Statuspage integration, priced by Atlassian	1 public on Starter, 3 public or private on Team, unlimited on Business
Incident channels in Slack	Incident declaration, Slack and Microsoft Teams integration	/incident opens a channel with commander, comms and scribe roles, severity and the service runbook
Postmortems	Post-incident review and timeline	Postmortem draft from the timeline on Team and above, action items to Jira and Linear
Dashboards and metrics	The whole Grafana Cloud stack in one account	Not offered; alerts come from your monitoring by integration or webhook
Enterprise terms	Custom pricing with a 25,000 USD minimum annual commit	Business plan with SSO and SAML, audit log and SLA reporting at a published price

Where Grafana Cloud IRM wins: a lower seat price, phone and SMS with no per-message charges, and incidents next to the dashboards your team already reads. Where IncidentBot wins: native public and private status pages, stakeholders who never become billable users, a hosted pager that does not depend on a Grafana Cloud account, and an incident process in Slack with roles, severity and runbooks built in.

Grafana OnCall alternative pricing for a 10 and a 40 responder team

List prices per month at monthly or annual billing. The scenario is a team that pages every responder and publishes one public status page for customers. Grafana prices come from grafana.com and Atlassian Statuspage prices from atlassian.com.

Setup	10 responders, per month	40 responders, per month
Grafana Cloud IRM Pro (19 USD fee covers 3 users, then 20 USD per active user)	159 USD	759 USD
Grafana Cloud IRM Pro plus Statuspage Startup (99 USD)	258 USD	858 USD
Grafana Cloud IRM Pro plus Statuspage Business (399 USD)	558 USD	1,158 USD
IncidentBot Starter (1 public page, 100 SMS and voice per user)	240 USD	960 USD
IncidentBot Team (3 public or private pages, unlimited SMS and voice)	490 USD	1,960 USD

Read it honestly. If you only need paging, Grafana Cloud IRM costs less than any IncidentBot plan at both sizes. Add a customer status page and IncidentBot Starter is cheaper than IRM plus Statuspage Startup at 10 responders, while IRM stays ahead at 40. The bigger swing is the active user rule: when support leads, product managers and account managers update incidents, each of them becomes a 20 USD IRM user that month, while in IncidentBot they follow as free stakeholders. Count those people before you compare, then put your own numbers into the calculator on on call management software pricing. The full Statuspage plan list is in our Statuspage pricing breakdown.

From a Grafana alert to a status update in one record

Your Grafana alert rules stay where they are. Only the contact point changes.

Add IncidentBot as a webhook contact point in Grafana Alerting or as a receiver in Prometheus Alertmanager. Firing and resolved states map to open and resolved alerts on a service, and duplicate notifications group into one alert.
The alert pages the on-call engineer through an escalation policy by push, SMS, voice, email and Slack. Paging runs outside Slack, so a chat outage never silences an alert.
/incident opens a dedicated channel, sets severity, assigns commander, comms lead and scribe, and posts the runbook attached to the service.
The comms lead drafts the update from the live incident and publishes it to the public page, the internal page or both on the status page app. Nothing goes to customers on its own.
When the incident closes, the timeline becomes a blameless incident postmortem draft with the impact window, response times and action items synced to Jira or Linear.

Moving off Grafana OnCall in five steps

A paging migration is a translation, not a rebuild. Most teams finish in two to three weeks.

Inventory: export your OnCall schedules, escalation chains, integrations and the Grafana contact points that page people. Note every override and hand-off time.
Rebuild rotations: recreate calendars with on call scheduling software, keep the schedule names so responders recognize them, and copy escalation chains into escalation policies.
Re-point alerts: add IncidentBot as a second contact point in Grafana Alerting or Alertmanager, one service at a time, so both tools receive the same alerts.
Parallel run: keep OnCall routing to Slack for one to two weeks while IncidentBot pages the same people by phone and SMS, and have every engineer install the mobile app and confirm a test page.
Cut over: remove the OnCall contact points, shut down the self-hosted install or the IRM add-on, and publish your status page on your own domain.

Other Grafana OnCall alternatives and competitors

The usual Grafana OnCall alternatives are Grafana Cloud IRM itself, PagerDuty, Opsgenie (end of support April 5, 2027), incident.io, Rootly, Squadcast, Better Stack and a handful of new open source forks. PagerDuty is the closest paging-first peer, see the PagerDuty alternative. Slack-first teams look at the incident.io alternative, teams that want monitoring and on-call in one bill compare the Better Stack alternative, and teams already paying for Datadog weigh its pager against a Datadog On-Call alternative. The best incident management software guide lists the criteria that separate them.

Is Grafana OnCall being discontinued?

Yes, for the open source edition. Grafana OnCall OSS entered maintenance mode on March 11, 2025 and was archived on March 24, 2026. The repository is read-only, and SMS, phone and mobile push through the Cloud Connection stopped on the archive date. Development continues only in the hosted Grafana Cloud IRM.

What is the replacement for Grafana OnCall?

Grafana's own replacement is Grafana Cloud IRM, which merges OnCall and Grafana Incident in Grafana Cloud. Teams that want to keep their pager independent of Grafana Cloud move to a separate incident management tool such as IncidentBot, PagerDuty or incident.io and point their Grafana alerts at it.

How much does Grafana Cloud IRM cost?

Grafana Cloud IRM has a free tier for up to 3 active IRM users a month. Pro starts at 20 USD per active IRM user per month on top of the 19 USD Grafana Cloud Pro platform fee, which includes the first 3 users. Enterprise is custom with a 25,000 USD minimum yearly commit. Checked in October 2026. The Grafana IRM pricing breakdown shows who counts as an active user and the monthly bill for 5, 15 and 40 users.

Can I still self-host Grafana OnCall?

You can still run the archived code under its AGPLv3 license, but you get no new features or security fixes, and SMS, phone calls and mobile push that relied on the Cloud Connection no longer work. That leaves Slack and email, which is not enough for a pager that must wake someone up.

Does IncidentBot work with Grafana alerts?

Yes. Add IncidentBot as a webhook contact point in Grafana Alerting or as a receiver in Prometheus Alertmanager. Firing alerts open alerts on the matching service and page the on-call engineer, and resolved notifications close them.

Can we try it before we migrate?

Yes. The incident simulator runs a sample incident in your browser: an alert, escalation through a policy you build, a Slack channel, a status page draft and a postmortem skeleton.

Keep your Grafana alerts and get a pager that rings

Create your account, connect one Grafana contact point and run both tools side by side until every page lands.