Compare · RealUptime Monitor
PagerDuty alternative for small teams
PagerDuty prices incident management per user: Professional is $21 per user a month billed annually, or $25 billed monthly, and its Free plan covers 5 users with one on-call schedule and one escalation policy. It does not run checks of its own; alerts arrive from other tools through its integrations. A small team often needs less than that and something more basic: a check that notices the site is down, a rotation that decides who hears about it, and an escalation if nobody answers. This page compares the two on that job, sourced to PagerDuty's own pricing page.
How the price grows with the team
Have
a flat plan price, never per user: up to 10 people on Pro, unlimited on Business
Partial
per user: Professional is $21 per user a month billed annually, $25 monthly; the Reliability Platform starts at $2,800 a year for 10 seats
On-call rotations and escalation policies
Have
rotations, overrides, escalation policies and acknowledgement, on Pro and Business
Have
the core of the product; the Free plan allows 1 on-call schedule and 1 escalation policy
Free plan
Partial
10 monitors, alerts to every channel, no card; rotations and escalation start on Pro
Partial
5 users, 1 schedule, 1 escalation policy, and 100 SMS or phone notifications a month
Built-in uptime checks that raise the alerts
Have
HTTP, TCP, DNS, TLS, heartbeat and server checks from named regions (four regions on Free, eight on Pro, all ten on Business)
Don’t have
alerts come in from other tools through its 750+ integrations; the pricing page lists no checks of its own
Phone-call and SMS notifications
Don’t have
pages by email, Slack, webhooks, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, Opsgenie, incident.io, FireHydrant, Zapier, or your existing PagerDuty; no phone calls of our own
Have
SMS, phone and mobile push; Free includes 100 SMS or phone notifications a month
Public status page
Have
RealUptime Status comes with the same signup and updates from the same checks
Partial
not included on Free; a separately purchased add-on on Professional, with 250 external subscribers
Keep PagerDuty and add the checks
Switching is not the only option. RealUptime pages into PagerDuty as one of its built-in alert destinations, so a team that likes its PagerDuty schedules can keep them and let Monitor be the thing that notices the outage. Escalation steps can name a person or a channel, PagerDuty included. See paging through PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Discord or Teams.
What the same signup covers
RealUptime Monitor runs the checks and the on-call. RealUptime Status tells customers what those checks see. RealUptime Errors catches the exception behind the outage, free for 10,000 events a month. RealUptime Outages shows whether a vendor you depend on is down, and needs no account. One signup provisions the free tier of each, with no card. Coming from Opsgenie instead? Its support ends on April 5, 2027; see where Opsgenie teams go.
Is there a free tier?
RealUptime is free to start and never asks for a card. One signup turns on the free rung of every product: 10 monitors with a public status page, 5 server-agent slots, and 10,000 error events a month kept for 14 days. RealUptime Outages is free to read with no account at all.
PagerDuty: 5 users, 1 on-call schedule, 1 escalation policy and 100 SMS or phone notifications a month.
Is it open source or self-hosted?
RealUptime's core is a hosted service and its source is not published, so there is no self-hosted edition of the platform itself. The parts that run on your side are open source at github.com/RealUptimeHQ. The CLI and the RealUptime Errors SDKs for JavaScript, Python, Go, PHP and Ruby are MIT-licensed. The Grafana data source is Apache 2.0.
PagerDuty: a hosted product that publishes no source and no self-hosted edition.
If self-hosting is a hard requirement, these are the open-source options in this category: Uptime Kuma (MIT), OpenStatus (AGPL-3.0), Healthchecks.io (BSD 3-Clause) and OneUptime (Apache 2.0).
Looking for a PagerDuty alternative?
For the reasoning behind checking from more than one region at all, see why a status page can show all green during a real outage. Comparing more than just this one alternative? The status page tool checklist covers what to test before committing to any of them.