PagerDuty alternative: Vigil
Updated · prices checked September 2026
Small teams look for a PagerDuty alternative when they pay $21–49 per person to route alerts from tools they also pay for. Vigil folds monitoring and simple on-call into one flat plan with unlimited team members. Be honest about the trade: PagerDuty's phone paging, layered schedules and incident workflows are far deeper, and Vigil can still open PagerDuty incidents if you keep it.
Why people look for a PagerDuty alternative
PagerDuty pricing September 2026
- Free: up to 5 users, 100 international phone/SMS notifications a month, 1 on-call schedule, 1 escalation policy.
- Professional: $21 per user per month billed yearly, $25 monthly. More schedules and escalation policies, Slack and Teams chat, an external status page (up to 250 subscribers).
- Business: $41 per user per month billed yearly, $49 monthly.
- Enterprise: custom. Add-ons without public prices: AIOps, stakeholder licences, status pages, live call routing, PagerDuty Advance.
Source: as of September 2026, from pagerduty.com/pricing/incident-management. Vendors change prices; the PagerDuty site is authoritative.
Vigil pricing
- Free: 20 monitors at 5-minute checks, 1 server, 1 status page, 3 team members, 7 days of history, Telegram/Slack/Discord alerts. Commercial use allowed. Free forever.
- Starter $19/month: 50 monitors at 1-minute intervals, 3 servers, 3 status pages, unlimited team members, 30 days of history.
- Pro $49/month: 200 monitors at 1-minute intervals, 15 servers, unlimited team members, 10 status pages with custom domain, password and white-label, 2,000,000 log lines, 5 Kubernetes clusters, RUM, 150 AI analyses, 90 days of history.
- Business $149/month: 1,000 monitors, 100 servers, unlimited team members, 10 identity providers (SSO, SAML, SCIM), 10 private locations, 1-year history.
- Every feature, including SSO, SLOs and private locations, is on every plan; the plans differ only in numbers.
- New accounts start on a 14-day Pro trial with no card, then stay on Free unless you choose a plan. Yearly billing gets 2 months free, no overage charges.
- Self-hosted $149/month per instance on your own server or air-gapped network.
- Add-ons on paid plans from $4: +50 monitors ($5), +5 servers ($5), +5 status pages ($4), +1M log lines ($4).
Flat monthly prices, no per-host, per-GB or per-run meters. Full plan matrix.
Feature and price comparison
✓ included · ~ partial or paid add-on · ✕ not offered. Vigil figures are for the $49 Pro plan unless stated.
| PagerDuty | Vigil | |
|---|---|---|
| Uptime / API monitors and fastest interval | ✕ No monitoring; receives events from other tools | ✓ 20 Free (5-minute checks) / 50 Starter / 200 Pro / 1,000 Business. 1-minute checks on paid plans, 12 monitor types (Uptime, API check, API flow, Browser check, Heartbeat, TCP port, Domain & DNS, App health, Dependency, Content change, Price / number, Keyword) |
| Servers (infrastructure agent) | ✕ Not offered | ✓ 1 / 3 / 15 / 100 servers included. Single-file agent for Linux and macOS, PowerShell agent for Windows: CPU, memory, disks, network, processes, services, Docker, packages, vulnerabilities, disk forecasts |
| Logs | ✕ Not offered | ✓ 10k / 250k / 2M / 10M lines included. File and journald shipping, full-text search, live tail, log-alert rules |
| APM / traces | ✕ Not offered | ~ Any OpenTelemetry SDK can send traces, metrics and logs over OTLP; Vigil's own lightweight SDKs cover Python and Node. Endpoints with p95 and Apdex, stored slow traces, slow queries, N+1 detection, service map. Not a full APM suite: no profiling |
| Kubernetes | ✕ Not offered | ✓ 1 cluster on Free and Starter, 5 on Pro, unlimited on Business. DaemonSet manifest; incidents for CrashLoopBackOff, OOMKilled, NotReady, pressure |
| Real User Monitoring | ✕ Not offered | ✓ Web Vitals p75, page views, JS errors. 1 site Free, 2 sites / 100k views Starter, 10 sites / 1M views Pro, 50 sites / 10M views Business |
| Status pages: private, custom domain, white-label | ~ External status page from Professional (up to 250 subscribers); fuller status pages are an add-on | ✓ Private by default, password or private-link sharing, custom domain with automatic HTTPS, white-label and custom CSS on every paid plan. 1 / 3 / 10 / 50 pages |
| Team seats | ~ 5 users free; $21–25 per user on Professional, $41–49 on Business | ✓ 3 on Free, unlimited on every paid plan. Owner / admin / member / viewer roles |
| Alert channels (incl. Telegram) | ✓ Phone, SMS, push, email, Slack and Teams; 750+ integrations | ✓ Telegram, Slack, Discord, Teams, Google Chat, Matrix, ntfy, Gotify, Pushover, webhooks (HMAC, templates), email, phone push. Tickets to PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Jira, ServiceNow, Zendesk (1 ticketing channel on Free, more on paid plans). No SMS or phone calls on the hosted service; the self-hosted edition pages by SMS and call through your own Twilio account |
| Self-hosted option | ✕ SaaS only | ✓ Full product on your server or air-gapped network, $149/month per instance, one-line installer, signed releases |
| AI incident analysis | ~ AIOps and PagerDuty Advance are paid add-ons | ✓ One-click root cause, fix and postmortem draft from the incident's evidence. 5 / 30 / 150 / 1,000 analyses a month |
| Small team: 3 servers, 50 monitors, 5 people | 5 users on Professional $105–125/month, plus a monitoring tool for servers and uptime | ✓ $19/month on Starter (3 servers, 50 monitors, unlimited team members included) |
Small-team estimate uses public list prices and the cheapest tier that covers 3 servers, 50 monitors at 1-minute intervals and 5 people. Where a vendor meters by run, GB or hour we show the arithmetic so you can redo it with your own numbers.
What PagerDuty does well
- The deepest on-call scheduling there is: layered rotations, overrides, escalation policies, reliable phone and SMS paging worldwide.
- 750+ integrations: almost every monitoring tool can page through it.
- Incident workflows, roles, response plays and enterprise-grade reliability.
Where Vigil is ahead
Limits of PagerDuty that Vigil does not have:
- It routes alerts; it does not monitor. You still need uptime, server and log monitoring.
- Per-user pricing: 5 people on Professional is $105–125/month before add-ons.
- Vigil includes the monitoring plus simple on-call (rotations, overrides, escalation, acknowledgements) for the whole team on one flat plan.
When to pick PagerDuty instead
Pick PagerDuty if people must be woken by phone reliably, you run layered rotations across several teams, you need incident roles and workflows, or every tool in your stack already pages through it.
What Vigil does not do
- Browser checks use a short line-by-line script run in headless Chromium (with screenshots), not full Playwright test code kept in git.
- No SMS or phone-call alerting on the hosted service (the self-hosted edition can page by SMS and call through your own Twilio account); hosted alerts go to chat apps, phone push, email, webhooks and ticketing tools.
- On-call is simple: rotations, overrides, escalation and acknowledgements, without the scheduling depth of PagerDuty or incident.io.
- Vigil's own APM SDKs are Python and Node; other languages send traces through any OpenTelemetry SDK over OTLP. There is no profiling, and it is not a substitute for a full APM suite.
- Checks run from Vigil's servers plus private locations you host; there is no menu of dozens of public regions.
Moving from PagerDuty to Vigil
1. Recreate schedules
Add your rotations and overrides in Vigil's on-call page; team members get an ICS feed for their calendar.
2. Set escalation
Configure acknowledgements and escalation to a second channel set after N minutes unacknowledged.
3. Route alerts
Point monitors at on-call channels, or keep PagerDuty for phone paging and let Vigil open PagerDuty incidents.
Run both side by side during the trial: Vigil's alert ingestion accepts Alertmanager and Grafana-style webhooks, so existing alerts can appear on a Vigil status page while you move over.
Frequently asked
Can Vigil replace PagerDuty?
For a small team whose alerts come from Vigil's own checks and that is happy with push, Telegram, Slack or email: often yes, with rotations, overrides, escalation and acknowledgements. If you need phone calls and SMS or complex multi-team schedules, keep PagerDuty.
Can Vigil send alerts to PagerDuty?
Yes. On paid plans Vigil opens PagerDuty incidents from its alerts, so you can keep PagerDuty for paging and use Vigil for monitoring.
Does Vigil call phones?
Not on the hosted service. The self-hosted edition can page by SMS and phone call through your own Twilio account.
How is Vigil priced for on-call?
On-call is part of every plan: 1 rotation on Free, 2 on Starter ($19), 10 on Pro ($49), unlimited on Business ($149), with unlimited team members on paid plans.
Ready to leave PagerDuty?
Start free: every new account gets 14 days of Pro, no card. When the trial ends the account stays on Free (20 monitors) unless you choose a plan, and everything you set up stays.
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