Damn. As a founder in the incident management space (Rootly) I've had a lot of respect for Opsgenie. They had unique features like heartbeats and ran a lean but mighty team before selling to Atlassian. We saw them the most in Europe by far.
Okay here comes to promotional part (don't hate me). If anyone is looking for a modern alternative to Opsgenie that isn't as expensive as PagerDuty, Rootly is worth checking out (Slack-native, holiday scheduling, request coverage, clean mobile app, etc).
Previous to Rootly I worked at Instacart where I helped us transition from PD to Opsgenie. Afterwards, still not being happy I built Rootly.
Today, we've helped Trivago, Motive, Yahoo, and quite a few others make the switch. Pretty easy with our importer tool, etc.
Seconding this and offering an honest testimonial as a huge fan of JJ and Rootly’s team.
I championed and led the introduction of Rootly’s incident management product at two tech companies and counting. Rootly scales well - the Slack bot replaced chains of comms we used to have humans to handle. It’s reliable. And the attention to detail in their product feels like a love letter to SRE.
Rootly has the product chops to make a top notch incident management product. The domain modeling they’ve done for Rootly Oncall is solid - it feels like a superset of PagerDuty and Opsgenie.
Anyone moving off Opsgenie would benefit from a close look at it.
Reading the comparison with PD [1] and having been a Pagerduty customer...even if it's promo material for a competitor, it resonates a LOT with my experience with PD (and boy, I do have experience with it).
The web UI and the limitations around overrides, paging groups, escalation policies etc are all real and makes me wonder: how is it possible that a behemoth in the space like PD is stagnating like that? I understand, big enterprises as clients which are notoriously slow, being the incumbent and being a big corporation yourself, but still, I don't get it.
Not trying to dunk on my competition but that is one thing that always surprised me too. Speed to deliver/innovate. I see large corporations all the time like even Slack (Agent marketplace), AWS (Bedrock), deliver at a high clip. PD truly had the opportunity to be a Datadog sized company given the brand name. Now it's a reputation impossible to shake.
There are some pretty low hanging fruit stuff that would make the PD experience palatable (e.g. ability to page teams not just services, allow for partial overrides). These things for us were <1 week projects.
I do think PD is trying to rectify it by acquiring Jeli, giving it away for free in their new pricing plan, etc. Def feeling the squeeze a bit if I had to guess.
PM from PD, chiming in here. tl;dr: we hear you and understand some of the challenges raised by that comparison sheet and frankly, we appreciate that folks like Rootly have challenged us to innovate in our core product more. And yeah, we're also pretty psyched to have the Jeli crew onboard, we think they're pretty smart, too. : ) As JJ calls out below, we've revamped our pricing plans to bring more incident management to all of our plans and spent a lot of time rethinking our chat experiences! (Again kudos to the Jeli crew!)
To not give too much of our roadmap away in a public forum, some of the basic components of overrides, paging groups and the web UI - keep your eyes peeled this year, one of our big focus areas is looking at how not only do we eliminate some of these gaps around on-call management and UI, but also going beyond just filling these table stakes. As you might imagine, PagerDuty scaled pretty aggressively (while also keeping our high reliability standards in place - customer trust is our #1 priority, after all we need to be up when everyone else is down), and we've had to make some investments to unlock our roadmap for this upcoming year.
Real talk though, happy to continue the conversation/ meet up over a zoom. Send me an email: dgodbout[@]pagerduty.com. There are humans over here at PagerDuty who care a lot about folks like yourself and I consider myself lucky to get build products for people who are responsible for ensuring things just "work".
We're a small team (15 engineers) running a popular local service in Eastern Europe. We'll be checking that out.
I don't get the pricing of PagerDuty and OpsGenie. It seems too expensive for us. We're only a few people on-call and we need something simple, barebones, that just works and works reliably.
Ah yes. Terraform is super popular for us (almost 1m downloads). We also built a pretty cool "Terraformer" tool that lets you create workflows in UI and translate that to .tf easily.
Damn. As a founder in the incident management space (Rootly) I've had a lot of respect for Opsgenie. They had unique features like heartbeats and ran a lean but mighty team before selling to Atlassian. We saw them the most in Europe by far.
Okay here comes to promotional part (don't hate me). If anyone is looking for a modern alternative to Opsgenie that isn't as expensive as PagerDuty, Rootly is worth checking out (Slack-native, holiday scheduling, request coverage, clean mobile app, etc).
Previous to Rootly I worked at Instacart where I helped us transition from PD to Opsgenie. Afterwards, still not being happy I built Rootly.
Today, we've helped Trivago, Motive, Yahoo, and quite a few others make the switch. Pretty easy with our importer tool, etc.