Pricing Comparison
| Plan | PagerDuty | OpsGenie |
|---|---|---|
| Free | 14-day trial only | Free for up to 5 users |
| Starter / Essential | $21/user/mo | $9/user/mo (Standard) |
| Business | $41/user/mo | $29/user/mo (Enterprise) |
| Enterprise | Custom (often $60+) | Custom |
The pricing gap is significant. A 10-person on-call team costs $210/month on PagerDuty Professional vs. $90/month on OpsGenie Standard — and OpsGenie's free tier covers teams up to 5 people entirely. For smaller teams, OpsGenie is the obvious cost choice.
On-Call Scheduling
Both tools handle the core on-call scheduling use cases. Where they differ:
| Feature | PagerDuty | OpsGenie |
|---|---|---|
| Schedule builder | Advanced (layers, overrides, restrictions) | Good (visual timeline, override management) |
| Escalation policies | Flexible, multi-tier | Multi-tier, good condition support |
| Schedule restrictions | Yes (time-of-day, day-of-week) | Yes (working hours, custom intervals) |
| Calendar export (iCal) | Yes | Yes |
| Slack-based overrides | Yes (via integration) | Yes (via integration) |
Alert Routing and Noise Reduction
Alert noise is the biggest pain point in incident management. Both tools offer deduplication and suppression, but PagerDuty's enterprise plans offer more sophisticated automated routing:
- PagerDuty Event Intelligence (Enterprise): ML-based alert correlation, intelligent grouping of related alerts, and automated responder recommendations. Reduces alert volume dramatically on complex systems.
- PagerDuty Automation Actions: Runbook automation triggered by alerts — remediate common issues without human intervention.
- OpsGenie alert deduplication: Rule-based deduplication and suppression. Effective for standard use cases; lacks ML-based correlation.
- OpsGenie Heartbeat Monitoring: Built-in heartbeat checks detect dead processes — a useful feature missing from many competitors.
Better Stack: monitoring + on-call in one tool
Better Stack combines uptime monitoring with on-call scheduling and alerting — no need to stitch PagerDuty to your monitoring tool separately. Free tier available.
Try Better Stack Free →Integrations
Both tools integrate with hundreds of monitoring, logging, and DevOps tools. Key integration differences:
| Integration | PagerDuty | OpsGenie |
|---|---|---|
| Jira | Third-party integration | Native (same company) |
| Confluence | Limited | Native runbook integration |
| Datadog | Bidirectional, strong | Bidirectional |
| Prometheus/Alertmanager | Yes | Yes |
| AWS CloudWatch | Yes | Yes |
| Better Stack | Yes | Yes |
| ServiceNow | Deep enterprise integration | Basic integration |
Status Pages
- PagerDuty: Includes PagerDuty Status Pages as an add-on (not included in base pricing). External-facing status pages that update automatically when incidents are created.
- OpsGenie: No built-in status page feature. You'd need to use Atlassian Statuspage (separate product, separate pricing) or a third-party tool.
If status pages are important to you, factor in the total cost. Atlassian Statuspage starts at $29/month separately, while PagerDuty bundles it (at enterprise pricing).
Analytics and Reporting
| Feature | PagerDuty | OpsGenie |
|---|---|---|
| MTTD / MTTR reporting | Advanced (Business/Enterprise) | Basic (paid plans) |
| On-call load reports | Yes | Yes |
| Service performance dashboard | Detailed (Business+) | Basic |
| DORA metrics integration | Yes | Limited |
Alert Pro
14-day free trialStop checking — get alerted instantly
Next time your services goes down, you'll know in under 60 seconds — not when your users start complaining.
- Email alerts for your services + 9 more APIs
- $0 due today for trial
- Cancel anytime — $9/mo after trial
Alternatives to Consider
Before committing to either, consider these alternatives:
- Better Stack: Combines uptime monitoring + on-call alerting in one product. Simpler to set up, more transparent pricing ($0-99/mo for small teams). Best for teams that want monitoring and alerting without stitching together separate tools.
- Incident.io: Modern incident management focused on Slack-native workflows and postmortem tooling. Strong cultural fit for engineering-led organizations.
- Grafana OnCall: Open-source, self-hosted, integrates directly with the Grafana stack. Free if you already self-host Grafana.
- API Status Check Alert Pro: Lightweight on-call alerting built specifically for API monitoring — best for teams whose primary concern is API uptime.
The Bottom Line
PagerDuty wins on features and enterprise depth. OpsGenie wins on price, Atlassian integration, and simplicity for smaller teams.
The honest advice: most teams < 50 engineers don't need PagerDuty's advanced features and will be well-served by OpsGenie at 40-60% of the cost. Enterprise teams on complex systems with large on-call rotations will likely find PagerDuty's automation and analytics worth the premium.
If you're in the middle, evaluate both on free trials before committing. Both offer good trials and the workflow differences become obvious within a week of real use.