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PagerDuty

Get paged the moment something breaks, and stay covered on-call for up to 5 users at zero cost.

Developer Tools
4.5freemium

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Overview

PagerDuty gets you paged the moment something breaks in production, with on-call scheduling, escalation policies, and over 700 monitoring integrations, and its free plan supports up to 5 users at no cost. Alerts route by email, push, SMS, or phone based on your on-call schedule, and if the first person doesn't respond, the escalation policy automatically pages the next. PagerDuty Advance adds AI-assisted incident actions to speed up triage, and post-incident review templates help you turn every outage into a documented lesson instead of a one-off scramble. For a solo operator running their own infrastructure, it's the difference between finding out about downtime from a customer versus finding out from a page.

Our Take

PagerDuty is the standard for getting paged the moment something breaks in production, with on-call scheduling, escalation policies, and integrations across more than 700 monitoring tools. The free plan for up to five users is genuinely usable, not crippled, which makes it the obvious starting point for a small engineering team setting up incident response before they need anything more. The practical limits show as the team grows: SMS and phone notifications are capped on the free plan, and per-seat pricing climbs noticeably past five users. Start on the free plan if your team is five or fewer and already using a monitoring stack that needs an alerting layer on top.

Key Features

  • On-call scheduling and escalation policies
  • 700+ monitoring and chat integrations
  • Unlimited API calls on every tier
  • AI-assisted incident actions (PagerDuty Advance)
  • Post-incident review templates
Pros
  • Genuinely usable free tier for small teams up to 5 people
  • Integrates with almost any monitoring stack
  • Scales cleanly into paid tiers as the team grows
Cons
  • SMS and phone notifications are capped on the free plan
  • Per-seat pricing adds up past 5 users
  • Advanced automation and analytics are paid-only

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