PagerDuty vs Opsgenie: what on-call coverage costs per responder

The product you were comparing against is being switched off

Atlassian ended sales of Opsgenie on 4 June 2025. The company's own notice states that from that date customers can no longer purchase or sign up for Opsgenie, whether directly from Atlassian or through partners and resellers, and that plan upgrades and downgrades stopped at the same point. Existing customers can still buy additional seats until end of support, and renewals are allowed so long as the subscription term concludes before that date.

End of support is 5 April 2027. On that date, per the same page, access to Opsgenie is shut off, the product is no longer accessible, and any un-migrated customer data is deleted. Atlassian tells customers they have two years to plan and complete a migration to either Jira Service Management or Compass, and says Opsgenie's alert, on-call and incident response features are available in Jira Service Management.

That changes the buying question. A team renewing on-call tooling this quarter is not choosing between two live products on features; it is choosing whether to move Opsgenie workloads into Jira Service Management or onto PagerDuty, and paying for the migration either way. The comparison below therefore prices PagerDuty against the Opsgenie model it replaces, because that model is what the migration budget is being measured against.

PagerDuty's per-user price is not the price most teams pay

PagerDuty publishes $21 per user per month for Professional, and a free tier that includes basic chat, limited email, push, SMS and phone notifications, one on-call schedule and one escalation policy. The free plan caps users per escalation level at five and gives 100 SMS or phone notifications a month. Professional raises the escalation level cap to five users as well, but includes SMS and phone notifications rather than metering them at 100 a month.

Above Professional the pricing stops being per seat and becomes an annual package. Starter is $2,800 a year for up to five seats, Essential $12,000 a year for 10 seats, Plus $48,000 a year for 20 seats, and Ultimate is custom-priced for 50 seats. Each package carries a fixed allowance of events, live call routing lines and AI actions, and PagerDuty sells credit packs on top for teams that need more seats, events or actions, applicable to Starter, Essential, Plus and Ultimate.

The arithmetic matters at the boundary. Twenty responders on Professional at $21 each is $420 a month, or $5,040 a year, which is less than the $12,000 Essential package and well under Plus at $48,000. The packages only win once the bundled events, call routing lines and AI actions replace things a team would otherwise buy separately, or once the seat count pushes past what per-user pricing allows. PagerDuty states that seats are calculated using the highest number of seats used during the previous month, so a spike in responders sets the bill for the following period.

What the escalation and status-page features cost on top

The features operations teams actually lean on are not all inside the seat price. PagerDuty lists AIOps, PagerDuty Advance, Runbook Automation, Status Pages and Live Call Routing as add-ons purchased separately. A team that needs a public status page or automated runbooks is pricing those on top of whichever tier it picks, and PagerDuty does not publish those add-on prices on the page reviewed, so the figure has to come from a quote.

Live Call Routing is the exception that is bundled, but only from Starter upward. Starter includes one dedicated phone number, Essential two, Plus three and Ultimate three; the free and Professional tiers do not include a line. For a team that routes inbound customer calls to responders, that single line is often the difference between Professional and Starter, and it is worth comparing the $2,800 Starter package against 20 Professional seats at $5,040 a year before assuming per-user is cheaper.

AI actions are metered the same way. Starter includes 1,000, Essential 4,000, Plus 16,000 and Ultimate 100,000, and PagerDuty defines an AI action as a workflow action marked premium in Services or a PagerDuty Advance action, with some actions consuming generative AI and costs listed in the subscription page. A team that does not use those actions is paying for an allowance it will not spend, which is the strongest argument for staying on Professional.

The responder count is the number that decides it

Opsgenie's model separated two user types. Responder Users, who view, receive notifications, act on alerts and make configurations, were the only users counted in per-user pricing; Stakeholder Users, who are notified of ongoing incidents and follow status by email and mobile push but cannot receive SMS, were free and included in the Enterprise plan. Atlassian also discounted per-user prices by volume.

That distinction is the one to carry into a PagerDuty quote. PagerDuty's seats include stakeholder licences, so the seat count is not purely responders, but the escalation level cap and the notification allowances still scale with the tier rather than the audience. A 900-person organisation with 20 responders and 200 stakeholders is a 20-seat conversation on either model; the difference is that Opsgenie never charged for the 200, and PagerDuty's package allowances are sized to the seats rather than the notified population.

At 20 responders, PagerDuty's Essential package at $12,000 a year works out at $600 per responder per year, against $5,040 a year, or about $252 per responder, on Professional at list. At 100 responders, no published package covers the seat count: Ultimate is listed at 50 seats and custom-priced above that, so the number is unpublished and the thing to ask PagerDuty for is the per-seat rate above 50 and whether events and AI actions scale with it.

Where the migration itself costs money

The Opsgenie deadline creates work that neither price list shows. Atlassian says un-migrated customer data is deleted at end of support on 5 April 2027, so a team that leaves the migration late is rebuilding schedules, escalation policies and integrations rather than moving them. The same page points customers to migration resources for Jira Service Management or Compass, and states that Opsgenie's alert, on-call and incident response features are available in Jira Service Management.

PagerDuty's counter-argument is integration breadth: the company advertises more than 750 integrations and a developer platform with REST, Events and integration APIs, and its documentation describes notification bundling across push, email, phone and SMS so that multiple incidents arriving in a minute produce one summary message. For a team already running PagerDuty elsewhere in the estate, consolidating on-call onto one platform removes a second set of integrations to maintain.

The cost to ask about on both sides is the migration effort itself. Atlassian does not publish a migration price on the page reviewed, and PagerDuty does not publish a migration service price either, so the figure to request from each vendor is the professional services day rate and the number of days they estimate for an estate of your responder count. That number, not the subscription delta, is what usually decides a 2026 renewal.

The decision rule for this renewal

Choose PagerDuty Professional if you run fewer than about 20 responders, do not need a dedicated live call routing line, and want to keep the commitment monthly at $21 per user, because the annual packages only beat per-user pricing once bundled events, call routing lines or AI actions replace spend you would otherwise carry. Choose PagerDuty Starter or Essential if you need one or two live call routing lines and a fixed annual number, since $2,800 and $12,000 a year buy allowances that per-seat pricing does not include.

Stay with Atlassian and migrate to Jira Service Management if your team already runs Jira and Confluence and the Opsgenie features you use are the ones Atlassian says are now available there, because the migration keeps schedules and integrations inside a platform you already license and avoids a second vendor contract. Ask Atlassian for the migration timeline and any professional services cost before committing, since neither is published on the page reviewed.

Wait only if your current Opsgenie term ends before 5 April 2027 and you have a written migration plan with a date, because renewals are permitted up to that end-of-support date but data left behind is deleted on it. For everyone else the decision is live this quarter, and the number to take into the vendor call is your responder count at 20 and at 100, priced against the $2,800, $12,000 and $48,000 annual tiers.