No. Rootly shows no free plan. It offers a trial of about two weeks, up to 50 percent off for startups and a pay what you can program for companies under 25 employees.

Rootly alternative and Rootly competitors with on-call in one seat price

IncidentBot is a Rootly alternative for US engineering teams that want paging, on-call schedules, Slack incident channels, a status page and postmortems on one published seat price. Rootly sells incident response and on-call as two products at 20 USD per user each, so a team that wants Rootly to both run the incident and wake the engineer pays 40 USD per seat, and private incidents, SCIM and unlimited schedules sit on quoted Enterprise contracts. IncidentBot starts at 24 USD per user billed annually with on-call, SMS and voice paging and a public status page included.

Run a sample incident

What pushes teams to compare Rootly

Engineering lead and an IT manager reviewing a vendor contract next to a laptop

Rootly is a strong product. Its Slack workflows are flexible, the AI timelines and retrospectives save real writing time, and it supports Slack, Microsoft Teams and Google Chat. Teams rarely leave because the incident channel is bad. They leave over the bill and the packaging.

On-call is a second purchase. Incident Response and On-Call are priced separately at 20 USD per user each. Prices are additive, so the pair costs 40 USD per seat, and the seat counts on the two products can drift apart.
Schedules have a ceiling. The entry On-Call plan lists 20 schedules and escalation policies and 1 live call routing number. Unlimited schedules and 5 numbers are on Enterprise, which is quoted.
Private incidents are Enterprise. Security and HR incidents usually have to be hidden from the whole company. On Rootly that feature, together with SCIM and audit logs, is on the custom priced tier.
Renewal uplift. Buyer data from Vendr shows Rootly contracts often carry an automatic 5 to 10 percent yearly increase unless it is negotiated out in the first contract.

Who switches, and who should stay

Teams that switch are usually 10 to 150 engineers at US software companies that page people at night, want the pager and the incident in one product and do not want a quote to unlock basic features. Teams that should stay on Rootly: companies already happy paging with PagerDuty that only use Rootly Incident Response at 20 USD, teams that need Microsoft Teams or Google Chat on an entry plan, startups that qualify for Rootly's discount of up to 50 percent, and anyone buying the AI SRE product for root cause analysis.

Rootly vs IncidentBot at a glance

Rootly details come from the public pricing page on rootly.com, checked in October 2026. Confirm on their site before you sign, since packaging changes.

What you check	Rootly	IncidentBot
How you pay	Per user, per product. Incident Response 20 USD, On-Call 20 USD, so 40 USD for both. AI SRE and Enterprise quoted	Per responder seat, one product. Starter 24 USD annual, 49 monthly. Team 49 annual, 99 monthly. Business 99 annual, 199 monthly
On-call paging	Separate On-Call product. SMS, voice and push, rotations with holiday, PTO and shadow support	Included on every plan. Push, email, Slack, SMS and voice. Starter 100 SMS and voice per user a month, Team and above unlimited (fair use)
Schedules and escalation	20 schedules and escalation policies on the entry On-Call plan, unlimited on Enterprise	Up to 3 on Starter, unlimited from Team
Incident response in chat	Slack, Microsoft Teams and Google Chat, workflows, catalog, AI timelines and retrospectives	`/incident` in Slack on every plan, commander, comms and scribe roles from Team. Microsoft Teams on Business
Status pages	Included with Incident Response	1 public page on Starter, 3 public or private pages with custom domain on Team, unlimited on Business
Private incidents, SCIM, audit logs	Enterprise, quoted	Audit log and SSO on Business, SCIM on Enterprise, both with published prices
Free plan or trial	No free plan shown. Trial of about two weeks	Incident simulator in the browser with no account, then paid plans
Discounts	Up to 50 percent off for startups under 100 employees, pay what you can under 25 employees	50 percent off with annual billing

Where Rootly wins: deeper AI features, support for three chat tools on its entry products, a flexible workflow engine and startup pricing. Where IncidentBot wins: one product and one seat price for paging and incidents, published prices for SSO, audit log and SCIM, and no quote needed for unlimited schedules.

Rootly alternative pricing for a 10 and a 40 responder team

List prices per month. Every responder carries the pager and works incidents. Rootly prices from rootly.com, other vendors from their own pricing pages, annual billing where offered.

Setup	10 responders, per month	40 responders, per month
Rootly Incident Response only (paging done elsewhere)	200 USD	800 USD
Rootly Incident Response plus On-Call	400 USD	1,600 USD
Rootly Incident Response plus PagerDuty Professional for paging	410 USD	1,640 USD
incident.io Team plus on-call add-on	250 USD	1,000 USD
IncidentBot Starter (on-call, voice paging, 1 public page)	240 USD	960 USD
IncidentBot Team (unlimited paging, 3 pages, incident roles)	490 USD	1,960 USD

Read it honestly. If you already page with another tool and only want better incidents in Slack, Rootly Incident Response at 20 USD is cheaper than any IncidentBot plan. The math turns once Rootly has to wake people up: the Rootly pair costs 40 USD per seat, and IncidentBot Starter covers paging, schedules, escalation and a public status page for 24 USD, which saves 640 USD a month at 40 responders. IncidentBot Team costs more than the Rootly pair; it is the plan for teams that page often and want unlimited voice, private status pages and incident roles without an Enterprise quote.

The seat calculator on IncidentBot pricing gives your exact number, and Rootly pricing breaks down every Rootly plan with the cost for 5, 15 and 40 users.

From an alert to a postmortem in one product

Engineer at a desk testing a page on a phone while rebuilding escalation rules

Your monitoring stays where it is. Only the place alerts are sent changes.

Datadog, Prometheus Alertmanager, Grafana, CloudWatch, Sentry and anything that can call a webhook or send an email open alerts on the matching service. Repeat alerts group into one on Team and above. The routing rules are on the incident alerting page.
The alert pages the on-call engineer through an escalation policy by push, SMS, voice, email and Slack and moves to the next tier if nobody acknowledges. Rotations, overrides and handoff reminders live in on call scheduling software.
/incident opens a dedicated Slack channel, sets severity SEV1 to SEV4, assigns commander, comms lead and scribe, and posts the runbook attached to the service. The Slack incident management app page lists the commands.
The comms lead publishes the customer update on the status page app from the same incident record, so nobody copies text between tools.
When the incident closes, the timeline becomes a blameless incident postmortem draft with action items synced to Jira and Linear.

Moving off Rootly in five steps

Most teams finish in two to three weeks and run both tools side by side for one full rotation, so nobody misses a page.

Inventory: export your Rootly schedules, escalation policies, services, workflows and status page components. Note which workflows people actually use; most teams rely on a handful.
Rebuild the pager: recreate rotations and escalation policies, and have every engineer install the mobile app and confirm a test page by push, SMS and voice.
Re-point alerts: add the IncidentBot webhook or inbound email address to each monitoring tool next to the current destination, one service at a time.
Rebuild the response: map Rootly severities to SEV1 to SEV4, attach runbooks to services and recreate the status page with its components and subscribers.
Cut over: after one clean rotation, remove the old destinations, move the status page domain and give notice on both Rootly products before the renewal date, since the renewal may include an automatic increase.

Other Rootly alternatives and competitors

The tools teams compare most often next to Rootly are incident.io, FireHydrant, PagerDuty, Opsgenie and Jira Service Management. incident.io is the closest match on Slack-first incidents; see the incident.io alternative page and incident.io pricing. FireHydrant is now part of Freshworks, covered on the FireHydrant alternative page. PagerDuty is the incumbent pager most Rootly customers pair with, see the PagerDuty alternative. Opsgenie reaches end of support on April 5, 2027, and the Opsgenie alternative page covers the move. For a shortlist by team type see best incident management software.

Who are Rootly's competitors?

Rootly's main competitors are incident.io, FireHydrant, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Jira Service Management and xMatters, plus smaller tools such as IncidentBot, Squadcast and Better Stack. incident.io is the closest on Slack-first incident response, and PagerDuty is the incumbent most teams compare for on-call paging.

How much does Rootly cost?

Rootly Incident Response costs 20 USD per user per month and Rootly On-Call costs 20 USD per user per month. Prices are additive, so both products cost 40 USD per user. AI SRE and Enterprise are quoted. Startups can get up to 50 percent off. Checked on rootly.com in October 2026.

Is Rootly free?

No. Rootly does not show a free plan on its pricing page. It offers a trial of about two weeks, up to 50 percent off for startups under 100 employees and a pay what you can program for companies under 25 employees.

Does Rootly include on-call?

Only as a separate product. Rootly On-Call costs 20 USD per user per month on top of Incident Response, and its entry plan lists 20 schedules and escalation policies and 1 live call routing number. Unlimited schedules are on Enterprise.

Is Rootly better than PagerDuty?

For incidents run in Slack, many teams prefer Rootly's workflows and AI retrospectives. For paging, PagerDuty is the more established pager, and its Professional plan costs 21 USD per user billed annually. Many companies run both, which is the cost a single product like IncidentBot replaces.

Can we try IncidentBot before we switch?

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. No account is needed.

One seat price for the pager and the incident

Create your account, point one alert source at IncidentBot and keep Rootly running until your first clean rotation.