Grafana OnCall is Grafana's on-call tool. The open-source edition was archived on March 24, 2026, and its cloud phone, SMS and push stopped; Grafana Cloud IRM is the hosted successor. It is built for teams already on Grafana or Grafana Cloud. Pagerless is on-call for people who build apps, often with AI: it decides whether a problem should wake you, explains what broke in plain words, and gets the fix ready for one tap.
Status: OnCall OSS: maintenance mode from March 11, 2025, archived March 24, 2026.
Side by side
| Feature | Pagerless | Grafana OnCall |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | You + 1 backup, 3 apps, no card | Grafana Cloud Free: IRM limited to 3 active users a month |
| Paid | Team planned: per alert sent, no per-seat price (not open yet) | Pro: $19 a month platform fee including 3 active IRM users, then from $20 per active user |
| Phone and SMS | Phone calls through your own Twilio at Twilio's price; no SMS | IRM: no extra cost for outgoing calls or SMS; whether the free tier includes them is not stated |
| Schedules and rotations | No: an escalation order (you, then your backup) | Yes |
What Pagerless does differently
- Decides how loud to be. Wake, tell or log for every problem; four floors (app silent, crash loop, 5xx burst, payments failing) always wake someone, and an unsure decision is never quieter than tell.
- Explains what broke. Every problem gets a plain-words diagnosis from the scrubbed samples and recent deploys.
- Gets the fix ready. Undo the update, restart or add capacity on 20+ hosts with one tap and Face ID.
- Sets up in one command.
npx pagerless connectfinds services, jobs and AWS alarms in your repo.
Choose Grafana OnCall if
- Your alerts already live in Grafana and you want on-call next to your dashboards.
- You are on Grafana Cloud and within the free 3 users.
Choose Pagerless if
- You self-hosted OnCall OSS and lost phone and SMS when Cloud Connection ended.
- You want alerts from inside your app without running Grafana.
- You want AI diagnosis and one-tap undo.
Moving from Grafana OnCall to Pagerless
Step 1
Run
npx pagerless connectin each repo.Step 2
Point a Grafana webhook contact point at Pagerless: firing alerts open problems, resolved ones close them. See Grafana.
Step 3
Set the escalation order and turn off the old OnCall.
Questions
Is Pagerless a good Grafana OnCall alternative?
For one person or a small team that wants to be woken only when it matters, yes: it is free for you and a backup, calls through your own Twilio and offers one-tap undo. For large teams that need rotations and schedules, Grafana OnCall fits better today.
Does Pagerless have on-call schedules?
Not yet. Each app has an escalation order: you first, then your backup after 5 minutes without an answer.
How current is this comparison?
Every Grafana OnCall fact on this page comes from the sources below, checked on October 22, 2026. Prices change; check their page before deciding.