PagerDuty vs incident.io: 2026 On-Call and Pricing Compared

PagerDuty is the better choice when alerts come from dozens of monitoring tools and you need routing rules, noise reduction, and a pager that large companies already trust. incident.io is the better choice when the hard part is running the incident itself: the channel, the roles, the updates, and the post-mortem, all inside Slack or Microsoft Teams. Hyperping, my company, is the third option for teams whose alerts mostly come from uptime checks and who want the checks, on-call, and the status page on one flat plan.

A lot of on-call contracts are up for review this year. Atlassian stopped selling Opsgenie on June 4, 2025 and turns it off on April 5, 2027, and PagerDuty now sells its plans above Professional for an annual platform fee.

I checked every price in this guide in September 2026. The number that usually settles the shortlist is what a real rotation costs. Fifteen engineers on call cost $315/month on PagerDuty Professional and $375/month on incident.io Team with on-call, before any monitoring tool. On Hyperping Pro the same 15 people cost $119/month, and that includes the uptime checks and 3 status pages.

General information about PagerDuty, incident.io, and Hyperping

Why trust this guide

I'm Léo, founder of Hyperping, so I have a stake in one of these three. Hyperping isn't a Slack-native response platform, and it doesn't do AIOps. If either of those is your main need, this guide will tell you to buy PagerDuty or incident.io.

I read both vendors' pricing pages, PagerDuty's status page documentation, and incident.io's seat-type documentation between September 23 and 25, 2026. I also read the newest G2 reviews for both. This month's sample is small (15 reviews for PagerDuty, 10 for incident.io), so I quote reviews as examples and don't count themes. I haven't run PagerDuty or incident.io in production. When something comes from the vendor's own page and not from my testing, I say so.

PagerDuty vs incident.io: the short answer

PagerDuty is paging-first. It was built to sit behind Datadog, Prometheus, Nagios, and hundreds of other tools, merge their alerts, and wake one person. Its pricing FAQ counts every user on the account as a paid user, including anyone who only receives notifications. Professional is $21/user/month billed annually and includes unlimited SMS and phone alerts. Noise reduction (Event Intelligence), runbook automation, and extra status pages are add-ons.

incident.io is response-first. When an alert fires, it opens a channel in Slack or Teams, assigns roles, posts updates to the status page, and drafts the post-mortem from the timeline. Pricing is split into two seats that you buy independently: a responder seat ($15 on Team) for people who manage incidents, and an on-call seat ($10 on Team) for people who can be paged. Viewers are free on every plan.

That split makes incident.io cheaper than it looks when only some of the rotation manages incidents. Take 15 engineers on call, of whom 5 usually run the incident: that's $225/month on incident.io Team, against $315/month on PagerDuty Professional. If all 15 manage incidents, incident.io costs $375.

Pick PagerDuty if alerts arrive from many systems and noise is the problem, if you need ServiceNow or other enterprise ITSM integrations, or if procurement wants the vendor it already knows. Pick incident.io if your team lives in Slack, you run incidents every week, and the time goes into coordinating people, not into routing alerts.

Which problem are you trying to fix?

"Opsgenie shuts down in April 2027 and we need a pager"

Opsgenie teams usually rely on two things: routing alerts from many sources, and paging with escalation. PagerDuty covers both with the largest integration catalog of the three. incident.io's standalone on-call product is $20/user/month and includes migration support. If your Opsgenie alerts came mostly from uptime checks, Hyperping replaces the checks and the pager together. The Opsgenie end-of-life timeline lists what stops working on each date.

"Our incidents happen in six Slack threads at once"

This is the problem incident.io was built for. From an August 2026 G2 review:

"I love that incident.io is fully integrated with Slack, which feels like having a peer that guides you during incidents. It removes all friction and lets engineers focus on the incident while the integration handles updating the status page and taking notes for post mortems."

G2 reviews of incident.io

PagerDuty can create a Slack channel for an incident, but the incident itself lives in PagerDuty's web app. Hyperping sends alerts to Slack and lets you acknowledge them there. It doesn't create incident channels or assign roles.

"We get thousands of alerts a day from Datadog and Prometheus"

Take PagerDuty. Event orchestration and Event Intelligence exist for this: they merge, suppress, and route events before anyone is paged. incident.io groups and routes alerts too, but I didn't find anything as deep as PagerDuty's rules. Hyperping groups failures across its own monitors. Alerts from other tools reach it only through the API, one incident per call.

"Every engineer we add to the rotation costs another $21"

PagerDuty's pricing FAQ says every user on the account is paid, including people who only receive notifications or sit on a schedule. From a July 2026 G2 review:

"The billing is misleading and expensive. The UI makes it seem like the seats are auto-allocated and you can't decrease the number easily."

G2 review

incident.io bills per seat as well, though viewers are free. Hyperping includes 3 seats on Essentials, 10 on Pro, and 20 on Business. Extra seats cost $7, $9, or $12 a month.

"The alert fired and customers still found out before we posted"

All three include a public status page. The question is who updates it. On PagerDuty and incident.io, someone posts the update from the incident. On Hyperping, the monitor that detected the outage can open the incident on the status page directly. Subscribers get it by email, Slack, or SMS.

"Our alerts come from uptime checks, and we pay three vendors for them"

A common small-team stack is UptimeRobot or Pingdom for checks, PagerDuty for paging, and Statuspage for customers. Hyperping replaces all three. It doesn't replace the alert routing for Datadog or Prometheus, so keep PagerDuty or incident.io if those send most of your pages.

On-call scheduling and paging

All three run rotations and escalation policies. They differ in who counts as a paid user and in how the page reaches your phone.

PagerDuty has been in this business longest. Unlimited global SMS and phone calls on Professional is the main reason teams stay, because a pager that reliably wakes people up matters more than any other feature here.

incident.io's scheduler has details the others don't list: shadow rotations for onboarding, holiday calendars, cover requests, a compensation calculator for on-call pay, and WhatsApp as an escalation channel. On Team you get two schedules. More than that needs Pro, where on-call is $20 per user on top of the $25 responder seat.

Hyperping schedules support several rotations with their own timezones, time restrictions, concurrent shifts, and overrides. An escalation step can target a schedule, so only the person on call gets paged. There's no mobile app, and SMS runs on monthly credits ($5 per 20 beyond the allowance). Teams that page often will prefer PagerDuty's unlimited SMS.

Pick PagerDuty for the most mature paging and unlimited SMS. Pick incident.io for scheduling details like shadow rotations and WhatsApp. Pick Hyperping if the rotation is small and you'd rather not pay per person.

Alert sources and noise

This is where PagerDuty's head start is largest. It was built to receive alerts from other tools.

According to PagerDuty's pricing FAQ, Event Intelligence is only sold with a paid plan, and it has to cover every user on that plan. On the Reliability Platform plans, a yearly allowance of Signal Intelligence events is included in the platform fee.

incident.io routes and groups alerts and can turn them into incidents automatically. For most teams under a few hundred alerts a day, that's enough.

Hyperping doesn't compete here. It pages on its own checks, and the outages API can open an incident with an escalation policy from any script. It doesn't deduplicate alerts from other tools or close incidents when those tools recover.

Pick PagerDuty if you have many alert sources and noise is costing you sleep.

Incident response in Slack and Teams

incident.io is the clear pick here. Everything happens in the channel: declaring the incident, setting severity, assigning an incident lead, posting updates that go to the status page, and capturing the timeline for the post-mortem. Viewers can join, post, and even declare incidents for free. Someone becomes a paid responder once they change the status, post updates, assign roles, or edit the post-mortem.

The flip side of that flexibility shows up in reviews too. From a July 2026 G2 review, which incident.io invited:

"It can become too noisy, and it can also end up being misconfigured."

G2 reviews of incident.io

PagerDuty handles Slack and Teams, but the incident record, the timeline, and the analytics live in its web app. Stakeholder licenses give non-responders read-only access for less than a full seat.

Hyperping posts alerts to Slack, Teams, Discord, Telegram, and Google Chat, and you can acknowledge from Slack to stop the escalation. There are no incident channels, roles, or workflows. For a team that has a few incidents a month, that's often fine. For a team that has several a week, it isn't.

Status pages

All three include one public status page on the entry paid plan. The limits differ after that.

PagerDuty's status page documentation lists one public page and 250 subscribers on Professional. More subscribers, private pages, and audience-specific pages come in two add-on packages that you price with sales.

incident.io includes unlimited subscribers on every plan, including the free one. That's the most generous subscriber count of the three. Internal pages start on Team, and unlimited internal pages need Pro.

Hyperping has status pages as a core product, not an add-on: sections and nested service groups, manual components for dependencies you don't monitor, maintenance windows, password and email-code access on Pro, multi-language pages on Pro, and white labeling and unlimited subscribers on Business. Because the page is attached to the monitors, a failed check can show on the page without anyone typing an update.

"We are also using Hyperping's status pages. First to communicate with our customers. And also we are using this as a sales collateral to show that we are available, that the availability is high."

Refiner customer story

Pick incident.io for one public page with a large subscriber list. Pick Hyperping for several pages, private pages, or pages that update from monitoring.

Post-incident reviews and AI

incident.io writes the post-mortem draft from the timeline it captured in the channel. On Pro, you can customize the post-incident flow and keep several post-mortem documents per incident. Its AI investigations look at the incident and connected data to suggest a cause.

PagerDuty's AI features are sold as PagerDuty Advance credits and, on the Reliability Platform, as AI actions included in the platform fee.

Hyperping has no AI investigation and no post-mortem editor. It does report MTTA and MTTR from Essentials up.

Pick incident.io if post-mortems are a weekly job.

Detecting the outage

PagerDuty and incident.io wait for another tool to tell them something broke. Hyperping is that other tool.

If you choose PagerDuty or incident.io, budget for a monitoring tool too. UptimeRobot Team is $39/month for 100 monitors at 30 seconds. The best uptime monitoring tools guide covers more options.

Hyperping confirms a failure from your other selected regions before it opens an incident, which is how it avoids paging someone for one flaky location. Alma, a French fintech, runs Hyperping next to Datadog for this reason:

"Hyperping's reputation in our company is that it's more reactive than Datadog. We usually get notifications from Hyperping before Datadog."

Alma customer story

Developer tooling

All three can be managed from code and queried from an AI agent. PagerDuty and incident.io maintain their own Terraform providers. Hyperping's is community-maintained, and its MCP server can read outages, on-call, and SLA figures, create or update monitors, declare and escalate incidents, and publish status page updates.

PagerDuty vs incident.io vs Hyperping pricing

PagerDuty bills per user or with a platform fee. incident.io bills two kinds of seat. Hyperping bills a plan with seats included.

PagerDuty's pricing page no longer lists the $41 Business plan quoted in older comparisons. Above Professional, it now sells the PD Reliability Platform for a yearly platform fee:

incident.io Pro is $25 per responder and $20 per on-call user. On-call alone, with no response product, is $20/user/month. Enterprise is custom.

Hyperping Pro is $74/month billed annually ($89 monthly) with 10 seats, 3 status pages, 3 schedules, and 250 monitors. Business is $249/month billed annually ($299 monthly) with 20 seats, 10 status pages, unlimited schedules, and 1,000 monitors.

What on-call costs for 5, 15, and 40 engineers

These are my estimates from public prices at annual rates, in dollars per month. Everyone in the headcount is on a schedule. PagerDuty and incident.io also need a monitoring tool, which isn't included here.

At five engineers, incident.io Basic is free and covers one rotation and one status page. PagerDuty's free plan covers five users, but its plan table doesn't list a status page, and Hyperping has no on-call on its free plan. Once you add monitoring, Hyperping Essentials at $38 is the only one of the three that covers both the checks and the pager.

At 15 engineers, the gap comes from the per-user price. incident.io's split seats help if only a few people run incidents. Hyperping Pro includes 10 seats, 3 schedules, and 3 public or private pages, so the internal page doesn't cost extra.

At 40 engineers with most alerts coming from Datadog, Hyperping is the cheapest row but the wrong tool, because it can't take in Datadog's alerts natively. The real choice there is between PagerDuty and incident.io, and it depends on whether you need Event Intelligence.

Things Hyperping doesn't do

If an incident at your company means several teams, a named incident lead, a Slack channel with a timeline, and a post-mortem the next day, Hyperping won't run that process. What it covers is detection, the page, and the customer update. It sends alerts into PagerDuty through a native integration and into incident.io through webhooks, so it can sit in front of either one.

Head-to-head

PagerDuty vs Hyperping

PagerDuty is a pager for alerts that other tools produce. Hyperping produces its own alerts and pages on them. If most of your pages come from uptime checks, Hyperping replaces both the monitoring tool and PagerDuty, and Pro costs $74/month for 10 people where PagerDuty Professional costs $210. If most of your pages come from Datadog, Prometheus, or CloudWatch, keep PagerDuty. The PagerDuty vs Hyperping comparison has the cost table by team size.

incident.io vs Hyperping

These two overlap less than their feature lists suggest. incident.io coordinates people once an incident exists, and Hyperping detects the incident, pages the rotation, and updates customers. A team that runs several incidents a week across services should buy incident.io and point Hyperping's checks at it. A team of 10 with a few incidents a month usually doesn't need a response platform, and Hyperping covers the whole path for less.

Which one should you pick?

If you already pay for Datadog and most alerts come from it, the choice is between PagerDuty and incident.io, and it depends on whether your problem is noise (PagerDuty) or coordination (incident.io). If you already pay for PagerDuty and most of its alerts come from an uptime tool, that pair is what Hyperping replaces.

How to test PagerDuty, incident.io, and Hyperping

PagerDuty has a 14-day trial with no card. incident.io Basic is free with no time limit. Hyperping's free plan has 20 monitors, and every paid plan has a 14-day trial with on-call.

1. Send a real alert into each tool. Point the monitoring tool that pages you today at each trial, or break an endpoint that Hyperping checks, and time how long the page takes to reach a phone.
2. Ignore the first page. Check who gets paged next, after how long, and on which channel.
3. Build two rotations in different timezones, add an override for a day off, and confirm the right person is on call at the handoff.
4. Run one incident end to end in Slack: declare it, assign roles, post two updates, resolve it, and see how much of the post-mortem is already written.
5. Post an incident to the public status page and check what subscribers receive and how long it takes.
6. Count everyone who will be on a schedule or manage incidents 12 months from now, and add the monitoring and status page tools each option still needs.

Migrating off Opsgenie or PagerDuty

The PagerDuty migration guide maps PagerDuty services, escalation policies, and schedules to Hyperping. You can keep PagerDuty connected as a notification channel while part of the team moves. Hyperping migrates customers for free, typically within 48 hours.

For Opsgenie, the Opsgenie shutdown guide covers the options and a week-by-week migration plan. Whatever you pick, run the old and new pagers side by side for two weeks before cutting over.

Related reading

• Best PagerDuty alternatives: more options if neither of these fits
• incident.io alternatives: Rootly, FireHydrant, and others in the response category
• Best on-call scheduling tools: on-call products compared by price and features
• Opsgenie vs PagerDuty: if you're comparing against what you have today

If your pages mostly come from uptime checks and you want the checks, the rotation, and the status page on one bill, try Hyperping free or book a demo.