Prices checked September 2026
PagerDuty's paid plans start at $21 per user a month billed annually. These eight tools do on-call scheduling, escalation and paging for less — some for a quarter of that. Every price below comes from the vendor's own pricing page.
By listed per-user price, the cheapest paid options are Oncallz ($4, billed quarterly), All Quiet ($4.99), Zenduty ($6) and Spike.sh ($7). Oncallz is cheapest, but SMS and calls go through your own Twilio or Vonage account; All Quiet includes unlimited SMS and calls.
If you need free, TaskCall has a free plan for up to 5 users, Grafana Cloud IRM is free for 3 active users, and PagerDuty itself is free for up to 5 users with 100 phone/SMS notifications a month.
| Tool | Starting price (per user / month) | Free plan | Phone & SMS | 10 responders / month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oncallz | $4, billed quarterly | Free to start, no credit card | Via your own Twilio (SMS, calls) or Vonage (SMS); carrier bills you, no markup | $40 + carrier usage |
| All Quiet | $4.99 (Standard) | No; 14-day trial | Unlimited SMS and phone calls | $49.90 |
| Zenduty (Xurrent IMR) | $6 (Starter, billed monthly) | No; 14-day trial | Starter/Growth: 100 per user a month in the US, Canada and India, 25 elsewhere | $160 (Growth; Starter caps at 5 users) |
| Spike.sh | $7 (Standard) | No; 14-day trial | Standard: 100 phone/SMS alerts in total; Business: unlimited | $70 |
| TaskCall | $9 (Starter) | Yes, up to 5 users (email and push) | Starter and up: unlimited global SMS and voice, with a fair-use clause | $90 |
| Grafana Cloud IRM | $20 per active user + $19 platform fee (Pro) | Yes, 3 active IRM users | No extra cost for calls and SMS (fair use) | $159 (fee covers the first 3 users) |
| incident.io | $20 (On-call only) | Yes, Basic (single-team on-call) | Not specified on the pricing page | $200 (On-call only) |
| Better Stack | $29 per responder, billed yearly ($34 monthly) | Yes: 10 monitors & heartbeats, 1 status page, Slack & email alerts | Unlimited phone calls and SMS for responders | $290 (billed yearly) |
Starting price = cheapest paid plan with on-call, at the billing shown. "10 responders" is our arithmetic from the listed prices, using the cheapest plan that allows 10 users. Checked September 2026; sources below.
Best for: the lowest per-seat price with every feature included
One plan, $4 per user a month, with schedules, escalation policies, phone-call acknowledgement from the keypad, AI incident investigation (with your own AI key), Slack and Teams notifications, post-mortems and a REST API. The trade-offs: you bring your own Twilio or Vonage account, Android is still in closed beta, there is no SSO, and it is a young product. English and Turkish interface.
Best for: a low price with SMS and calls included
Standard is $4.99 per user a month and Pro is $9.99; both list unlimited SMS and phone calls. That makes it the cheapest option here if you do not want to manage a carrier account. The pricing page does not show a separate annual rate.
Best for: very small teams, or teams wanting Slack/Teams incident response
Zenduty's pricing page now carries the Xurrent IMR name. Starter is $6 per user a month for up to 5 users; Growth is $16 for up to 50. Annual billing saves 16%. Call and SMS allowances vary by country, so check yours.
Best for: small teams with low phone/SMS volume
Standard is $7 per user a month and Business $14, with one month free on annual billing. The Standard plan's phone and SMS allowance is small, so busy rotations will likely need Business.
Best for: a real free tier, then unlimited SMS and calls
Free covers up to 5 users with email and push alerts. Starter at $9 adds unlimited SMS and voice calls worldwide; TaskCall says it may restrict unusual activity. Business is $19 and Digital Operations $29; stakeholder seats are $3.
Best for: teams already on Grafana Cloud
Grafana's free tier includes 3 active IRM users. Pro is a $19 monthly platform fee covering the first 3, then $20 per active IRM user. Grafana says outgoing calls and SMS cost nothing extra. Note that the self-hosted Grafana OnCall OSS was archived on March 24, 2026, so the managed IRM is now the supported route.
Best for: Slack- or Teams-centred incident response
On-call alone is $20 per user a month. The Team plan is $15 billed annually ($19 monthly) plus $10 per user for on-call. The free Basic plan includes single-team on-call and a status page. More expensive than the others here, but strong on chat-based incident workflows.
Best for: uptime monitoring, status pages and on-call in one bill
A responder licence is $29 a month billed yearly and includes unlimited phone and SMS alerts; team members who only view telemetry are free. Slack or Teams incident workflows cost $9 per responder a month. Not cheap per seat, but it replaces a separate uptime monitor and status page.
PagerDuty's Free plan covers up to 5 users with 100 international phone/SMS notifications a month. Professional is $21 per user a month billed annually ($25 monthly) and Business $41 ($49 monthly). For 10 users that is $210 to $490 a month.
PagerDuty alternative →Each tool had to offer on-call schedules, escalation and phone or SMS paging, and publish a per-user price we could read on its own pricing page in September 2026.
We left out tools we could not verify: iLert (its prices did not load when we checked), Xurrent's standalone plans (no public pricing), Opsgenie (no longer sold; support ends April 5, 2027) and the self-hosted Grafana OnCall OSS (archived). Squadcast's pricing page now redirects to SolarWinds Incident Response, listed from $15 per user a month billed annually.
By listed price per user, Oncallz at $4 a month (billed quarterly), then All Quiet at $4.99, Zenduty at $6 and Spike.sh at $7, as of September 2026. Oncallz uses your own Twilio or Vonage account for SMS and calls.
Yes. TaskCall is free for up to 5 users, Grafana Cloud IRM for 3 active users, and incident.io and Better Stack have free plans with limits. PagerDuty itself is free for up to 5 users.
All Quiet lists unlimited SMS and calls from $4.99, TaskCall from $9, Better Stack for responders, and Grafana Cloud IRM at no extra cost. Zenduty and Spike.sh's cheapest plans include a capped allowance.
Oncallz sends SMS through your Twilio or Vonage account and calls through your Twilio account, so you pay the carrier directly at its rates with no markup. That keeps the seat price at $4.
We read each vendor's own pricing page in September 2026 and link every one at the bottom of this page. Prices change, so confirm with the vendor before you buy.
Start free, connect one alert source, and see whether it covers what your team needs.
Vendor pricing pages, read in September 2026.