IncidentRelay vs PagerDuty
IncidentRelay
incidentrelay.ioPagerDuty
pagerduty.comSide by side
| Figure | IncidentRelay | PagerDuty |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $21/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 9 |
| Spec score · On-Call Scheduling Software | 8.4 (#8) | 9.0 (#2) |
| Spec score · On-Call Management Software | 8.2 (#12) | 9.0 (#3) |
| Alert routing | It routes incoming alerts by source, labels, severity and team ownership, then applies escalation policies and team rules. | PagerDuty provides phone, SMS, email, push, and chat-based notifications with automated escalation and prioritization. |
| Integrations | Documented alert sources include Alertmanager, AWS SNS and CloudWatch, Grafana, Azure Monitor, Zabbix, Sentry, LibreNMS and generic webhooks. | PagerDuty advertises more than 750 integrations and lists monitoring, cloud, ITSM, collaboration, security, and developer tools. |
| Intended users | The maker presents IncidentRelay for SRE and DevOps teams seeking self-hosted incident management and on-call workflows. | PagerDuty says its platform serves developers, reliability engineers, customer success, security, and C-suite teams. |
| Security | Its webhook delivery guidance says HTTPS is required by default, private and special network addresses are denied unless allowlisted, and secret headers are encrypted and not returned by APIs. | PagerDuty says it continuously monitors its systems to protect customer data and reports FedRAMP authorization at the Low baseline. |
Plans
PagerDuty
- FreeFree
- Incident Management FreeFree
- Professional annual$21 a month
- Professional monthly$25 a month
- Business annual$41 a month
- PD Reliability Platform Starter$2,800 a year
- PD Reliability Platform Essential$12,000 a year
- Incident Management ProfessionalPrice not published
- PD Reliability Platform UltimatePriced on request
In their own words
IncidentRelay
IncidentRelay is open-source software for self-hosted on-call management and incident response. It routes incoming alerts by source, labels, severity, and team ownership, then applies team rules and escalation policies. Teams can manage schedules, shifts, rotations, overrides, and escalation chains; responders can acknowledge, resolve, silence, or escalate alerts and temporarily shelve alert groups. Versioned event rules can enrich, group, route, suppress, and automate events, with execution history showing matches and results. Documented inputs include Alertmanager, AWS SNS and CloudWatch, Grafana, Datadog, Azure Monitor, Zabbix, Sentry, LibreNMS, PagerDuty Events API v2, RMON, heartbeats, and webhooks. Notifications include chat services, email, voice calls, outbound webhooks, and browser/PWA push. The automation interface provides Swagger UI, OpenAPI JSON, route-intake tokens, and personal API tokens. On-call calendars can be exported through CalDAV and ICS. Deployment options include Docker Compose, Kubernetes with Helm, RPM packages, and manual systemd installation. The IncidentRelay plan costs nothing; it is open-source and self-hosted.
PagerDuty
PagerDuty manages incidents from detection through resolution using automation and real-time collaboration. Its AIOps tools are described as reducing alerts, automating repetitive tasks, and accelerating resolution, while PagerDuty Automation standardizes workflows across people, tools, and systems. Teams can use on-call scheduling, escalation policies, stakeholder updates, ChatOps incident actions, and post-incident reviews. PagerDuty lists more than 750 integrations, with connections through email, API, or MCP; examples include AWS, Slack, Anthropic Claude Connector, Microsoft Teams, Cursor, and Datadog. Its iOS and Android apps support incident response, schedules and overrides, incident context, and automated response tasks, but require a PagerDuty account. The free Incident Management plan covers up to five users, one on-call schedule, and one escalation policy. Paid incident management starts at $21 per user per month with annual billing, and a 14-day trial is listed. PagerDuty says it serves developers, reliability engineers, customer success, security, and C-suite teams. It reports SOC 2 Type II examinations and ISO 27001 certification for its services.