---
title: "PagerDuty alternative for small teams"
description: "Spectate vs PagerDuty: on-call, escalation paths, phone calls and incidents with uptime monitoring and status pages included. Unlimited members from €48 a month."
url: https://spectate.net/compare/pagerduty-alternative
last_updated: 2026-10-26
---

# The PagerDuty alternative with monitoring included

> On-call rotations, escalation paths and phone calls you acknowledge with a key press, plus the uptime checks and status pages around them. Priced per monitor, not per responder.

**PagerDuty** (https://www.pagerduty.com, United States (San Francisco), Public company (NYSE: PD)): PagerDuty is an incident response and on-call platform for large engineering and operations teams, with event intelligence, automation and status pages. It takes alerts from monitoring tools and doesn't run uptime checks itself.

**PagerDuty pricing:** PagerDuty Incident Management has a free plan for 5 users. Professional is $25 per user a month ($21 billed yearly), with a public status page for 250 subscribers and other features as add-ons; the PD Reliability Platform starts at $2,800 a year (checked October 2026).

**Spectate pricing:** Starter €0.75 per monitor (from €15 a month), Team €0.60 per monitor (from €48 a month), Business €0.50 per monitor (from €125 a month); whole team included from Team. Prices exclude VAT.

## Spectate vs PagerDuty

### Monitoring

|  | Spectate | PagerDuty |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Built-in uptime monitoring (PagerDuty receives events from monitoring tools.) | Yes | No |
| Server monitoring agent | Yes | No |
| SSL certificate and domain expiry | Yes | No |

### Alerting and on-call

|  | Spectate | PagerDuty |
| --- | --- | --- |
| On-call schedules and escalation | Team and Business | Yes |
| Branches on severity, working hours and labels | Yes | Yes |
| SMS and phone calls | Included credits (10, 50 or 200 a month per plan) | Yes |
| Alerts from Grafana, Prometheus and Sentry | Yes | Yes |
| Event intelligence and automation | No | Paid add-on |

### Incidents

|  | Spectate | PagerDuty |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Incidents with roles and timeline | Yes | Yes |
| Postmortems | Yes | Professional and up |
| Slack channel per incident | Yes | Yes |

### Status pages

|  | Spectate | PagerDuty |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Public status pages (More subscribers need PagerDuty's Status Pages add-on.) | 1, 5 or unlimited | 250 subscribers on Professional |
| Private status pages | Team and Business | Paid add-on |
| Subscribers | 250, 2,500 or 25,000 | 250 on Professional |

### Pricing

|  | Spectate | PagerDuty |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Price for 50 monitors and 5 responders | €48 a month (Team: 50 monitors is under the 80-monitor minimum, so 80 × €0.60 = €48 a month (€480 a year). Unlimited members, so 5 or 50 responders cost the same.) | $125 a month, plus a monitoring tool (Professional: 5 × $25 = $125 a month; billed yearly 5 × $21 = $105. Uptime checks need a separate service.) |
| Per-user pricing | No | Yes |
| Free plan | No | Up to 5 users |
| Billing currency | EUR | USD |

### Data and compliance

|  | Spectate | PagerDuty |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Headquarters | Netherlands | United States |
| Invoiced from the EU, in euros | Yes | No |
| SSO and public API | No | Yes |

## Which one to choose

Choose Spectate when:

- You want on-call for your whole team without per-user licences.
- You want uptime, DNS, mail and server monitoring in the same tool as on-call.
- You want status pages with subscribers and private pages included in the plan.
- You want a smaller tool your team can set up in an afternoon.

Choose PagerDuty when:

- You need enterprise depth: event intelligence, AIOps, runbook automation and hundreds of integrations.
- You need SSO, a public API and a mature compliance programme.
- You have up to 5 users and need only basic on-call: PagerDuty's free plan covers that.
- You need live call routing for a support hotline.

## Switching from PagerDuty

1. Start a 14-day trial; no card needed. It runs on Team, with on-call.
2. Recreate your schedules and escalation paths. There is no importer; most teams need a few minutes per schedule, and help@spectate.net can help.
3. Add uptime monitors, or point Grafana, Prometheus Alertmanager, Sentry or a webhook at a Spectate alert source.
4. Have everyone add a phone number and connect Slack, then run both tools side by side for a week before switching off PagerDuty.

## Frequently asked questions

### Is Spectate cheaper than PagerDuty?

For teams over a few people, yes. Five responders on PagerDuty Professional cost $125 a month, without uptime monitoring. Spectate Team is €48 a month for unlimited members and includes 80 monitors and 5 status pages.

### Can Spectate replace PagerDuty for a large organisation?

Probably not yet. Spectate has no SSO, public API, event intelligence or runbook automation. It is built for small and mid-sized teams that want monitoring, on-call, incidents and status pages in one place.

### Can I import my PagerDuty schedules?

There is no importer. Rotations, overrides and escalation paths take a few minutes each to recreate, and help@spectate.net can help.

### How do phone alerts work on Spectate?

Spectate calls the person on call and they press 1 to acknowledge, which stops the escalation. An SMS costs 1 credit and a call 2; every plan includes credits each month, and packs of 100 cost €19.

Facts about PagerDuty checked in 2026-10 from: https://www.pagerduty.com/pricing/incident-management/. Report a mistake to hello@spectate.net.