Last updated: 2026-09-23
Rootly is an AI-native incident management and on-call platform founded in 2020, rated 4.8/5 across 74 G2 reviews. It runs on Slack, Microsoft Teams and Google Chat, ships a GA Model Context Protocol server for Cursor and Claude Code, and is used by Figma, LinkedIn and NVIDIA.
About Rootly
Rootly is an AI-native incident management and on-call platform founded in 2020 in San Francisco, used by engineering teams at Dropbox, Lattice, Webflow, Faire, Figma, LinkedIn and NVIDIA. It has raised $15.2M total, including a round led by Renegade Partners with Google Gradient Ventures and XYZ Ventures. The platform covers the full incident lifecycle: declaring an incident opens a dedicated channel in the connected chat tool, assigns responders through the on-call schedule, and runs the incident's configured runbook.
Rootly's AI has context of the incident channel, on-call history, past incidents and connected telemetry to draft live stakeholder updates, correlate related incidents, suggest a probable root cause, and generate postmortem narratives, all reviewable and editable in the Rootly AI Editor before anything ships. A GA Model Context Protocol server exposes incident data and on-call schedules as tools for Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf and Gemini CLI, and a Terraform provider lets teams configure incident response as code.
Incident Response and On-Call are sold and priced separately on a per-user, per-month basis (see price_notes for exact figures), which meaningfully raises the bill for a team that needs both. Essentials includes AI chat, AI similar-incidents matching, retrospectives, status pages and SSO. Enterprise tiers, sold on request, add custom incident types, private incidents, SCIM and advanced workflows. A standalone AI SRE product for automated root cause analysis is priced separately on a contact-for-pricing basis.
Rootly targets SRE and platform engineering teams evaluating a PagerDuty or incident.io alternative that bundles response coordination, on-call scheduling and postmortems in one product. It also runs discount programs for early-stage startups and very small teams. G2 reviewers rate it 4.8 out of 5 across 74 reviews.
Pricing
Incident Response Essentials and On-Call Essentials are billed separately, each $20 per user per month (roughly $40/user/month combined). Enterprise tiers for both products, and the standalone AI SRE product, are contact-for-pricing. Startups under 100 employees, under $50M raised and under 5 years old get up to 50% off; teams under 25 employees get pay-what-you-can pricing.
No free tier; a roughly two-week trial is offered.
| Tier | Monthly price | What it includes |
|---|---|---|
| Incident Response - Essentials | $20/mo | |
| On-Call - Essentials | $20/mo | |
| Incident Response - Enterprise | Custom | |
| On-Call - Enterprise | Custom | |
| AI SRE | Custom |
Key Features
- AI incident summaries and postmortems: Rootly's AI drafts live stakeholder updates, correlates related past incidents, and generates postmortem narratives using the incident channel, on-call history and code repository context.
- GA Model Context Protocol server: A Model Context Protocol server, generated dynamically from Rootly's OpenAPI spec, exposes incident data and on-call schedules to Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf and Gemini CLI.
- Human-reviewed AI Editor: Every AI-generated summary, root-cause suggestion or postmortem passes through the Rootly AI Editor for a responder to review, edit and approve before it is sent or published.
- Slack, Teams and Google Chat native response: Declaring an incident spins up a channel in whichever chat platform is connected, notifies the on-call responder, and fires off the incident's configured Jira ticket automation.
- On-call scheduling and alert routing: The separate On-Call Essentials product handles alert grouping, a capped number of schedules and escalation policies, shadow rotations, and live call routing through one dedicated number.
- AI SRE root cause analysis: A standalone, separately priced AI SRE product analyzes telemetry and incident history to surface a probable root cause and a recommended fix.
- Incident response as code: A Terraform provider and full REST API let teams define incident types, workflows and escalation policies as version-controlled infrastructure.
Pros
- Independently verified ratings on both G2 and Product Hunt land solidly above average, with reviewers citing the AI Editor's review-before-send step as the reason they trust the automated postmortems and updates.
- A GA MCP server plus a Terraform provider let teams query and drive incidents from Cursor, Claude Code or IaC pipelines, not only the Rootly web app.
- Ships native integrations across chat, ticketing, monitoring, IaC and HR platforms (Slack, Jira, Datadog, Terraform, BambooHR among them), cutting the custom glue code most SRE stacks need.
- Rootly is independently SOC 2 Type II audited and publishes GDPR data-minimization and subject-rights workflows for configuring how long incident data is retained.
Cons
- Incident Response and On-Call are billed as two separate per-user, per-month products rather than one bundled seat, meaningfully raising cost for a team that needs both.
- incident.io's 2026 comparison and multiple G2 reviewers describe Rootly's on-call scheduling and escalation routing as less mature than dedicated tools such as PagerDuty or Grafana OnCall.
- Enterprise-tier pricing for both Incident Response and On-Call, and pricing for the standalone AI SRE product, are undisclosed and require a sales call.
- Google Chat is listed among Rootly's supported chat platforms in places, but is notably absent from its own published integrations list.
Data Handling
- Training-data policy
- Rootly states it does not use customer data, even anonymized, to improve results for other customers. It redacts emails, addresses, phone numbers, card numbers, SSNs and passwords from any data sent to an AI provider, and customers can opt out of AI features entirely.
- Compliance
- SOC 2 Type II · HIPAA · GDPR · CCPA
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does Rootly cost in 2026?
Incident Response and On-Call are sold as separate products, each starting at $20 per user per month on the Essentials tier, so a team running both pays roughly $40/user/month. Enterprise tiers for both products and the standalone AI SRE product are contact-for-pricing. Startups under 100 employees, under $50M raised and under 5 years old get up to 50% off, and teams under 25 employees get pay-what-you-can pricing.
Does Rootly have a free plan?
No, Rootly does not publish a free tier. It offers a roughly two-week trial, and very small teams (under 25 employees) can access pay-what-you-can pricing instead of the standard $20/user/month rate.
What are the best alternatives to Rootly?
PagerDuty is the more mature choice if on-call alerting and escalation is the primary need. incident.io ships a similarly broad Slack-native feature set with more mature on-call scheduling. Lightrun is the pick for teams that want live production debugging and code-level autonomous remediation rather than incident coordination.
How does Rootly compare to incident.io in 2026?
Both bundle incident response, on-call and postmortems in one Slack-native product. incident.io reviewers and its own 2026 comparison describe its on-call scheduling as more mature, while Rootly differentiates with a GA Model Context Protocol server for querying incidents from Cursor or Claude Code and a Terraform provider for incident response as code.
How do you get started with Rootly?
Sign up and connect Slack, Microsoft Teams or Google Chat, then build on-call schedules and escalation policies in the On-Call product. Trigger a test incident to configure runbooks and Jira automation, and review the first few AI-drafted summaries in the Rootly AI Editor before trusting it to run unattended.
Top Alternatives
- Lightrun: Pick Rootly if you need Slack-native incident coordination and on-call scheduling; pick Lightrun if you need live production debugging and autonomous code-level remediation.
- Modern: Pick Rootly if the job is SRE incident response and on-call; pick Modern if the job is AI-automated IT service desk tickets.
- Cicube: Pick Rootly if you need full incident lifecycle management; pick Cicube if the job is narrowly CI/CD pipeline health monitoring.