[jjtang1]

[Promotional warning]

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.

[cadamsdotcom]

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.

https://rootly.com/landing/pagerduty-vs-rootly-on-call

[jjtang1]

Appreciate the love sir! Canva and RevenueCat are still one of my fav teams to work with!

[coremoff]

FYI that page linked does not work in firefox

[jjtang1]

That’s not good. On it! Thanks for catching.

[darkwater]

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.

[1] https://rootly.com/landing/pagerduty-vs-rootly-on-call

[jjtang1]

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.

[dmgodbout]

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".

[hitekker]

Thank you for the clear disclaimer. It’s an elegant way to conserve or draw attention in a forum.

One small bit: maybe include a link to your website? That would make it easier to clickthrough and looksee

[jjtang1]

I thought maybe a link was TOO promotional haha.

https://rootly.com/ || and Opsgenie comparison (features): https://rootly.com/comparisons/opsgenie-vs-rootly-on-call

[karamanolev]

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.

[jjtang1]

15 eng prob falls nicely into our startup offering, would be pretty discounted: https://rootly.com/startups

You get on-call + incident response + status pages. And a pretty "defaults only" experience ootb.

[jedberg]

Hey there, this page: https://rootly.com/humans-of-reliability

Is weirdly broken (at least for me) on Safari on desktop. Every mouse movement or key click causes all the tiles to enlarge.

It's fine on Chrome and Firefox.

[jjtang1]

Oof. On it!

[jjtang1]

You profile is pretty interesting. Lmk if you want to come on the pod!

[shandrew]

Ha, fancy running into you two here.

+1 to checking out rootly, they have the friendliest people in the incident business

[jjtang1]

You’re too kind :)

[bovermyer]

Well, I find myself looking at alternatives suddenly.

However, one make-or-break feature - does Rootly have a Terraform provider? We rely heavily on Terraform for building out our Opsgenie setup.

[sirinett]

I'd recommend you take a look at ilert and yes there is a terraform provider: https://www.ilert.com/product/ilert-terraform-provider

[jorams]

Seems so, a quick search turned up this[1]

[1]: https://registry.terraform.io/providers/rootlyhq/rootly/late...

[jjtang1]

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.

We take extensibility pretty seriously. Outside the basics, we just released our own agent ready API (https://rootly.com/blog/introducing-rootlys-api-ai-agent-fir...), MCP, docs are now LLM ready (https://docs.rootly.com/llms-full.txt).

[bovermyer]

That's pretty cool! I'll add Rootly to my list of options for our vendor evaluation.

[jjtang1]

Cool! Mention JJ in the demo booking and I’m happy to personally join :)