Incident management and on-call
Each provider is profiled from its own pricing page, with the source recorded against every figure. All four charge per seat, so the seat price is the advertised number and not the deciding one. What decides it is how many times the tool may wake somebody: one free plan gives a hundred texts account-wide and no voice calls at all, one scales the allowance by headcount and cuts it to a quarter outside North America, and one puts worldwide SMS and voice in the seat and stops counting.
Incident management and on-call
| Provider | Entry paid plan | SMS and voice allowance | What is metered |
|---|---|---|---|
| Opsgenie | $9.45 per user per month billed annually, or $11.55 billed monthly — less than half PagerDuty's seat. | The free plan gives 100 SMS account-wide and NO voice notifications — for a tool whose job is waking someone up. Essentials scales with headcount: users × 100 in the US and Canada, users × 25 internationally. Standard is unlimited on both. | Per user per month, with the notification allowance derived from headcount rather than fixed: Essentials gives users × 100 SMS in the US and Canada, and users × 25 internationally. Standard makes both unlimited. |
| PagerDuty | $25 per user per month for Professional, or $21 billed annually — the dearest seat of the four. | 100 international phone or SMS notifications a month on the free plan, account-wide. Professional promises "more" without saying how many — the figure is published for the free tier and not for the paid one. | Per user per month, with the things that make an on-call tool work — notification volume, number of schedules, number of escalation policies — all gated by tier rather than sold separately. |
| Rootly | $20 per user per month for Essentials. | SMS, voice, push and bypass-do-not-disturb on every tier, with no published count for any of them. What is metered instead is live call routing: one phone number on Essentials, five above it. | Per user per month. What the tier buys is scale rather than features: 20 schedules and escalation policies on Essentials against unlimited above it, and one live call-routing number against five. |
| Squadcast | $15 per user per month billed annually, described as a starting price. | SMS and voice worldwide, plus unlimited email and push, all included in the seat price with no published cap and no regional split. | Per user per month, with SMS and voice notifications worldwide included in the seat rather than allowanced — the only one of the four that does not gate notification volume by tier or headcount. |
Which to consider
The cheapest seat in the category by a wide margin, at $9.45 a user billed annually, inside an Atlassian estate where Jira Service Management already lives. Standard makes SMS and voice unlimited, so the allowance stops mattering once you are past Essentials.
The incumbent, and the one most likely to already integrate with whatever you run — 750+ out-of-box integrations on the free plan. Five users, one schedule and one escalation policy free is enough to run a real rota for a small team before paying anything.
Running incidents inside Slack, with enough rotas to matter. Essentials holds 20 schedules and escalation policies at $20 a user — the only vendor here to put a number on that at a paid tier rather than saying "more" — and SMS, voice, push and bypass-do-not-disturb are on every plan.
Paging people in more than one country without watching a meter. SMS and voice are worldwide and inside the $15 seat — no cap, no regional split, no headcount multiplier — which is the only plan here where an engineer in Europe costs the same to page as one in Ohio.