Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Being “on call” sounds simple: you’re not actively working, but you need to be available if something goes wrong. The real question many employees ask is: do you actually get paid for being on call? The short answer is: it depends. Your pay may hinge on labor laws, company policies, and how restricted your time really is.

At incident.io, we are building a product that our users rely on 24/7, all year round. This means it is crucial that it is always working, and that is where our on-call rotation comes in. We believe that everyone should be on-call because it tightens the feedback loop between shipping new features and maintaining what we have, leading to more pragmatic engineering decisions.

Managing developer on-call rotations and escalations isn't just about who gets woken up at 2 a.m. — it's about ensuring reliability, minimizing downtime, and scaling operational excellence. With so many tools out there, choosing the right on-call solution can be tough. We've analyzed 10 of the most trusted on-call scheduling platforms in 2025 — comparing usability, pricing, integrations, automation, and support — to help you choose the best tool for your engineering or DevOps team.

You’re likely here because you heard the news: Atlassian ended new sales for OpsGenie on June 4, 2025, with a complete shutdown scheduled for April 2027. For years, OpsGenie has been the backbone of on-call management for countless teams. It might have been your team’s trusted solution too. But now, that chapter is closing. The pressure to find an OpsGenie alternative for on-call is real. However, you can’t just pick any tool and hope it works for your team.

If you’re stuck between choosing Spike vs. PagerDuty for your on-call management, you’re at the right place. I wrote this blog post to end your confusion and help you make a better choice. I’ve presented a comparative analysis for these two tools across 4 key criteria (keep reading to find what they are). For each criterion, there’s either a winner or a tie. When it’s a tie, each tool gets one point. If there’s a winner, that tool gets two points.

Imagine it’s 2 AM and a critical system flatlines without warning. A bleary-eyed on-call engineer scrambles to restore service, shielding customers from a major outage that could torpedo your next Service Level Objective (SLO) review. Yet when daylight returns, debates over fair on-call compensation start all over again: What’s “just” pay for sleepless nights, unpredictable pings, and rapid-fire incident responses?

Looking for the best on-call scheduling software for your team? Or maybe you’re exploring alternatives to your current tool? Signing up for different on-call tools and testing them all takes weeks. That’s a lot of time you probably don’t have, especially when you need reliable on-call coverage now. That’s why I did the heavy lifting for you. I signed up for and tested the 5 popular on-call scheduling tools in the market: Spike, PagerDuty, Incident.io, Splunk Oncall, and OpsGenie.

I use Slack daily. It works perfectly fine. Outages rarely happen. Even if they happen, they are resolved quickly. And this is the same for many other tools. But how are they all doing it—Keeping services running and resolving issues quickly? The secret: On-Call Schedules. On-call schedules make sure someone is always available to handle emergencies, so your systems stay reliable.