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PagerDuty vs VictorOps: What are the differences?
Developers describe PagerDuty as "Incident management with powerful visibility, reliable alerting, and improved collaboration". PagerDuty is an alarm aggregation and dispatching service for system administrators and support teams. It collects alerts from your monitoring tools, gives you an overall view of all of your monitoring alarms, and alerts an on duty engineer if there's a problem. On the other hand, VictorOps is detailed as "We make on-call suck less & help teams to solve problems faster". VictorOps is a real-time incident management platform that combines the power of people and data to embolden DevOps teams so they can handle incidents as they occur and prepare for the next one.
PagerDuty and VictorOps belong to "Monitoring Aggregation" category of the tech stack.
Some of the features offered by PagerDuty are:
- Alerting that works (and wakes you up)- When your systems go down, PagerDuty will wake you up. You choose how you want to be alerted - via phone, SMS or email, to multiple numbers, with retries.
- Integrate all your existing monitoring tools- PagerDuty works great with almost all monitoring tools including: Nagios (and Icinga), Keynote, New Relic, Pingdom, Circonus, Red Gate SQL Monitor, Server Density, Zenoss, Monit, Munin, SolarWinds and many others. If it can send email, it will work with PagerDuty.
- Native apps with push notifications- iOS and Android native apps with push notifications and a cross-platform mobile website ensure you can respond to alerts wherever you are, even on the go.
On the other hand, VictorOps provides the following key features:
- On-call schedule management - easily set up rotations, teams & escalation policies
- Collaborative problem-solving - get the right eyes on the problem quickly
- Post-mortem reporting
"Just works" is the primary reason why developers consider PagerDuty over the competitors, whereas "Great Team, Great Product" was stated as the key factor in picking VictorOps.
I'm currently on PagerDuty, but I'm about to add enough users to go out of the starter tier, which will dramatically increase my license cost. PagerDuty is, in my experience, quite clunky, and I'm looking for alternatives. Squadcast is one I've found, and another is xMatters. Between the three, I'm currently leaning towards xMatters, but I'd like to know what people suggest.

Disclosure I work at Splunk and VictorOps is a Splunk product. But I would suggest in addition to trying the others adding VO to your list. It's important to note that some of the tools are designed as Incident Response tools, others started as mass notification tools. For on-call stick to those designed for incident response.

I would say to use Squadcast, the configuration is easy, provides a lot of features such as war room, RCA tracking postmortem, RBAC and they are quick to add features on request as well, recently I asked for custom on call reminders and I am sure they will add it really soon.
Pros of PagerDuty
- Just works55
- Easy configuration23
- Awesome alerting hub14
- Fantastic Alert aggregation and on call management11
- User-customizable alerting modes9
- Awesome tool for alerting and monitoring. Love it4
- Most reliable out of the three and it isn't even close3
Pros of VictorOps
- The transmogrifier is a game changer7
- Great Team, Great Product6
- Free tier5
- Much better than ANY of the alternatives. Todd is GREAT3
- Great tiered escalation management3
- Android app with Wear integration2
- On-call routing and the timeline is brilliant2
- Awesome Team always updating1
- Nice UI1
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Cons of PagerDuty
- Expensive7
- Ugly UI3