Is AlertKick cheaper than PagerDuty?

For most teams, yes, and the gap widens with headcount. PagerDuty is about $21 to $41 per user per month; AlertKick is £39 or £149 a month flat, and includes the monitoring. A two-person rota on a handful of servers may find PagerDuty's free tier fine; a ten-person rota pays about $210 a month on PagerDuty Professional before monitoring, against £149 on AlertKick Business with 25 hosts included.

Does AlertKick make phone calls like PagerDuty?

No. AlertKick pages over mobile push, SMS, WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, email, and webhooks. Critical pushes bypass Do Not Disturb on Android. There is no automated voice call channel, and that is the most common reason to stay on PagerDuty.

Can I keep my existing monitoring and only replace PagerDuty?

Yes. Point Prometheus Alertmanager, Grafana, Datadog, CloudWatch, Sentry, or any of the 28 sources at AlertKick and use it purely as the on-call and escalation layer. The bundled monitoring is optional.

What does the PagerDuty importer bring across?

Users (matched by email), on-call schedules (daily and weekly rotations with timezone and handover), and escalation policies (each rule becomes a level with its timeout and repeat). Multi-layer schedules import their primary layer; hourly rotations, restrictions, and team targets are flagged in the preview rather than silently changed.

Does AlertKick charge per user at all?

No. Each plan has a user allowance - 2 on Free, 5 on Professional, 25 on Business - and no per-seat charge. A bigger allowance is a plan step, not a per-head line.

alternatives · alertkick vs pagerduty

PagerDuty charges per responder. AlertKick charges per server.

Both page the person on call, walk an escalation policy until someone acknowledges, and accept alerts from the monitoring you already run. The difference is the bill: PagerDuty grows with every engineer you add to the rota, AlertKick grows with the infrastructure raising the alerts - and includes the monitoring if you want it.

Start free Import from PagerDuty

Free plan · no card · commercial use allowed

PagerDuty list prices are as of 2026, from pagerduty.com/pricing: Professional about $21 per user per month billed annually, Business about $41, with status pages, AIOps, and analytics sold as add-ons. Check the vendor page before you budget.

at a glance

The same job, two different shapes.

PagerDuty is an incident response platform that routes alerts from monitoring you buy separately. AlertKick is the on-call layer with the monitoring built in. Both are fair ways to solve the problem; they suit different teams.

	PagerDuty	AlertKick
Pricing model	Per user per month. Professional about $21, Business about $41 (annual billing). Status pages, AIOps, and analytics are add-ons.	Per server. Free, £39 a month for 5 hosts, £149 a month for 25 hosts. No per-seat line on any plan.
Free plan	Free tier for up to 5 users with limited features.	Free for 2 users with rosters, escalation policies, 28+ alert sources, and paging over mobile push, email, Telegram, and Slack. Commercial use allowed, no card.
On-call schedules	Multi-layer schedules, restrictions, overrides, and a mature scheduling UI.	Daily and weekly rotations of any length, a roster per team, overrides and paired swaps, timezone-aware handovers, and calendar feeds. Multi-layer schedules import their primary layer.
Escalation policies	Levels with timeouts, repeats, and targets of users, schedules, or teams.	Levels with timeouts and repeats, each level on its own channel; targets are people, rosters, round-robin over a roster, or a channel such as Slack.
Paging channels	Push, SMS, automated voice calls, email, Slack, Teams, and more, with configurable retry cadence per person.	Mobile push (critical bypasses Do Not Disturb on Android), SMS, WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, email, and webhooks. No automated voice calls.
Monitoring	None. PagerDuty routes events from monitoring tools you run or pay for separately.	Included on the same plan: uptime, SSL, DNS, and TCP checks, heartbeats, an agent for host metrics and containers, and eBPF security detection.
Alert sources	Several hundred native integrations plus the Events API.	28 sources: Prometheus Alertmanager, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, Google Cloud, Sentry, Zabbix, Nagios, Icinga 2, Checkmk, CI systems, email, and a generic webhook. Deduplicated per source with auto-resolve on recovery.
Incident workflow	Incident roles, stakeholder updates, postmortems, service dependencies, analytics, and AIOps event intelligence.	Alerts, incidents, acknowledge and resolve everywhere, maintenance windows, AI triage that reads each alert in context, and an AI after-action summary. No postmortem templates, incident roles, or stakeholder update workflow.
Status pages	Available as a paid add-on.	Included: hosted public status pages driven by your monitors.
AI assistants	PagerDuty Advance, sold as an add-on.	An MCP server with 38 tools for Claude, Cursor, and other MCP clients, plus WebMCP for ChatGPT in the browser. Included.
Identity	SAML SSO and SCIM provisioning on higher tiers.	Email, Google, and GitHub sign-in. No SAML or SCIM yet.
Migration	n/a	Import users, schedules, and escalation policies from PagerDuty with a read-only REST key. Preview everything first; the key is never stored.

AlertKick user allowances per plan are 2 (Free), 5 (Professional), and 25 (Business). They are allowances, not prices - nobody is billed per seat. More than 25 is a conversation, not a per-head invoice.

read this part first

Where PagerDuty is the right call.

Switching pagers to save money and then hitting a gap at 3 AM is a bad trade. If two or more of these apply, stay where you are.

Your escalation depends on a phone ringing

PagerDuty places automated voice calls that get through when a text does not. AlertKick has no voice channel; its loudest step is SMS or WhatsApp alongside a critical push. If a robocall is a hard requirement, stop here.

You need a deep, specific integration

PagerDuty has several hundred native integrations, including two-way sync with ITSM and ticketing systems. AlertKick covers the common monitoring sources and a generic webhook; check your exact tools against the list before anything else.

You run incidents at enterprise scale

Incident roles, stakeholder communications, postmortem workflow, service dependency mapping, and analytics across hundreds of services are things PagerDuty does properly. AlertKick has alerts, incidents, and AI summaries, not that workflow.

Procurement requires SOC 2, SAML, and SCIM

PagerDuty has the certifications and identity features a security review will ask for. AlertKick is not SOC 2 certified yet and signs in with email, Google, or GitHub.

what changes when you switch

Where AlertKick is the better fit.

Teams without a dedicated SRE function, paying two bills - one for the pager and one for the monitoring that feeds it - and watching the pager bill grow with every hire.

The rota can be as long as it should be

Adding a sixth, tenth, or twentieth person to the rotation costs nothing. Per-seat pricing quietly pushes teams to keep the rota short and burn the same two people out; per-server pricing removes the incentive.

One bill instead of two

Uptime checks, heartbeats, host metrics, and eBPF security come on the same plan as the on-call. There is no separate monitoring subscription to route from, and no DIY Prometheus stack for somebody to babysit.

Channels people actually use

WhatsApp and Telegram are first-class escalation levels, not workarounds. Slack gets a thread per alert. Each person sets quiet hours, and critical alerts can be allowed through.

The move is a preview, not a rebuild

Paste a read-only key and see every schedule and policy that will be created, with the ones that cannot map one-to-one flagged and explained, before anything is written.

the maths for one team

Ten engineers, twenty-five servers.

Take a team of ten sharing one rotation across twenty-five production hosts, with Prometheus and Grafana already raising the alerts.

Line	PagerDuty Professional	AlertKick Business
On-call and escalation	10 users at about $21 a month each, billed annually: about $210 a month	Included
Monitoring the 25 hosts	Separate tool or a self-hosted stack somebody maintains	Included: 25 hosts with the agent and eBPF security, 50 monitors and 50 heartbeats
Status page	Add-on	Included
Adding the eleventh engineer	About $21 a month more	£0
Monthly total	About $210 plus the monitoring bill	£149

The seat cost is the visible number. The monitoring underneath it - a SaaS subscription, or the engineer-hours keeping a self-hosted stack fed - is the one that quietly costs more.

PagerDuty figures are 2026 list prices for annual billing; month-to-month costs more and volume discounts apply at larger seat counts. AlertKick Business includes 25 users; Professional at £39 includes 5 users and 5 hosts.

how the move goes

Moving off PagerDuty without a bad week.

step 1

Create a read-only key

In PagerDuty, create a read-only REST API key. On the AlertKick Migrate page, paste it - it is used for the fetch and never stored.
step 2

Preview the import

AlertKick lists every user, schedule, and escalation policy it will create, and flags anything that cannot map one-to-one (multi-layer schedules, team targets) with the reason next to it.
step 3

Import and point one source at it

One click creates the rosters and policies. Point a single low-stakes alert source at AlertKick and press Send Test Alert on each imported policy to watch it climb the ladder.
step 4

Run both, then cut over

Keep PagerDuty running alongside for a couple of weeks. Move sources across one at a time, then cancel the seats.

Questions teams ask before switching

Is AlertKick cheaper than PagerDuty?: For most teams, yes, and the gap widens with headcount. PagerDuty is about $21 to $41 per user per month; AlertKick is £39 or £149 a month flat, and includes the monitoring. A two-person rota on a handful of servers may find PagerDuty's free tier fine; a ten-person rota pays about $210 a month on PagerDuty Professional before monitoring, against £149 on AlertKick Business with 25 hosts included.
Does AlertKick make phone calls like PagerDuty?: No. AlertKick pages over mobile push, SMS, WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, email, and webhooks. Critical pushes bypass Do Not Disturb on Android. There is no automated voice call channel, and that is the most common reason to stay on PagerDuty.
Can I keep my existing monitoring and only replace PagerDuty?: Yes. Point Prometheus Alertmanager, Grafana, Datadog, CloudWatch, Sentry, or any of the 28 sources at AlertKick and use it purely as the on-call and escalation layer. The bundled monitoring is optional.
What does the PagerDuty importer bring across?: Users (matched by email), on-call schedules (daily and weekly rotations with timezone and handover), and escalation policies (each rule becomes a level with its timeout and repeat). Multi-layer schedules import their primary layer; hourly rotations, restrictions, and team targets are flagged in the preview rather than silently changed.
Does AlertKick charge per user at all?: No. Each plan has a user allowance - 2 on Free, 5 on Professional, 25 on Business - and no per-seat charge. A bigger allowance is a plan step, not a per-head line.
What does AlertKick not do that PagerDuty does?: Voice calls, a several-hundred-item integration catalogue, incident roles and stakeholder communications, postmortem workflow, service dependency mapping, SAML SSO and SCIM, and SOC 2 certification. If two or more of those are requirements, PagerDuty is the right tool.