PagerDutyPricing

PagerDuty Pricing 2022

All software companies need to offer some kind of resolution support for their services. If you don’t choose the right one for your team size and an array of services you’ll find incident management a lot harder than it normally is. PagerDuty’s incident response software is a startup-friendly IT alert management service with affordable pricing and a plethora of features.

What is PagerDuty?

PagerDuty is a tech company that makes software to aid IT and cloud computing teams. They are predominantly used in medium to large companies with between 50 and 1000 employees.

The industries PagerDuty is the most popular in include computer software and IT. This makes sense because they offer services for IT and developer teams. One of their most popular services, incident response, is for consumers to connect with IT departments.

If you are interested in learning more about PagerDuty you can see their tutorial below. The video shows how to best set up your incident response to streamline daily tasks.

A Day in the Digital Life With PagerDuty - Automate Incident Response to Accelerate Critical Work

What Is PagerDuty’s Pricing Model?

PagerDuty hosts a number of different products for cloud computing teams. These products include incident response, AIOps, process automation, and business operations.

We are only going over their incident response service. Incident response communication is one of the main products they are known for, but if you’re interested in the others as well you can find their pricing page here. They offer straight-to-the-point pricing, which is a pretty refreshing change from the norm.

The Free tier comes with quite a few features for your five-person team. It offers on-call scheduling, unlimited API calls, and over 650 integrations for chat and monitoring. The plan allows you to manage user permissions and access to the mobile app for both Android and iOS systems. It even allows you to use PagerDuty’s knowledgebase community.

Their on-call management features are surprisingly stacked for a free plan. It has unlimited email and push notifications, 100 SMS notifications per month, and a service directory that your IT management team can access during calls. They limit you to one escalation policy. Your escalation policy ensures the right person is notified in real-time. For a small team, their features aren’t too limiting, but for a large one, they would be a bad choice.

Their incident response features will also be especially helpful for your IT team. They include an incident timeline, ChatOps (with Slack and Microsoft Teams), and monitoring with DevOps integrations like Datadog and CloudWatch. These internal communication options can expedite the real-time operations of your team’s workflow.

The Free plan even has event management features like event routing rules and analytics data you can export. Most free plans don’t allow any analytics reporting or exports. These operations management tools can help a small business with incident management pretty effectively.

Teams that are larger and need more features for their real-time operations will be less impressed. The free plan doesn’t have advanced incident response options like postmortems, ticketing, or video conference features. The plan also lacks customer service support from PagerDuty.

For the Professional tier you get everything previously mentioned in the Free tier. The main new enhancements are fewer limits, more incident response features, and administration tools. In the Professional plan you get unlimited SMS, notifications, and escalation policies.

For admin and security features the plan stores up to one year of your data and offers single sign-on (SSO) for logins. In terms of incident response, you get additional ticketing features with integrations like Jira.

Aside from that, it’s fairly the same as the Free plan. They have the same capabilities for analytics and event management. The Professional tier adds email customer support.

If your team is made up of five or fewer people and your workflow doesn’t require unlimmited messaging then Professional isn’t necessary. In terms of capability, it’s very similar to Free.

Teams with high-volume workloads should move up a plan, because Free and Professional wouldn’t be able to handle advanced analytics and communication needs. The plan also only offers email for PagerDuty support. This could be frustrating for large teams, especially when you’re already paying over $20 per seat.

The Business plan has everything Professional offers and significantly more. It comes with all the advanced incident management features, all event management features, all security and admin features, and almost all analytics features. You will also be able to add-on any available features you want in this plan, such as premium customer support or live call routing.

The only analytics features it won’t have are interactive dashboards, service performance, and team benchmarking. This is pretty great on top of the fact it has unlimited access to past data with no cut-off. If you need simple metrics this is the best option, but if tracking your team’s performance is at the top of the list you should move up.

The Business tier is the best choice for larger teams that want a myriad of features and functionality for their fast-paced workflow. The plan is great for all forms of communication, notifications, and alerting.

When it comes to the Digital Operations tier there is no upfront pricing. They base this plan on your business, so the cost will vary per user. The plan has everything from Business but adds more analytics. Similar to Business, if it’s missing an important feature you can add it on or access it through the 650 integrations available.

What Is The Difference Between PagerDuty and ServiceNow?

ServiceNow is one of PagerDuty’s main competitors. ServiceNow is a tech company that offers a series of products to improve your IT management. Their most similar product to PagerDuty’s incident response is their IT Service Management (ITSM) product. They don’t offer upfront pricing, so we can’t compare costs.

In terms of information about ServiceNow’s individual features, they aren’t as clear as PagerDuty is. The structure of the system is meant to use AI automation to eliminate middleman tasks like connecting calls to the right departments. PagerDuty’s incident response also has automated communications like monitoring, notifications, and alerts for the team. PagerDuty does not have virtual agents, but they do have chatbots through their ChatOps feature.

ServiceNow is also more centered on streamlining phone calls with automation tools such as virtual agents. This way consumers can access self-service features and your team can avoid unnecessary questions.

Chatbots can often feel less personable than human support and be frustrating when you want to fix a technical problem. ServiceNow reassures that its virtual agents use natural language processing (NLP) to feel more personable. The product also comes with workflow monitoring tools so you can predict future customer issues and alleviate future problems.

In terms of user reviews, ServiceNow and PagerDuty are both pretty close. You can see the comparison between them here. You're going to notice that the features from both software do not match up and that’s partly because there’s less information on PagerDuty’s incident response product.

The end-user reviews will still be able to help you gauge satisfaction with their services. If you find that you like both services, ServiceNow can integrate with PagerDuty.

More Resources

If you want to see more software for IT alert management, you can find our list here. For those that have used any of the platforms discussed here please leave a review to help other buyers make informed decisions.