# Pagerless vs Grafana OnCall

> An honest side-by-side, with sources. Where Grafana OnCall is the better fit, we say so.

URL: https://pagerless.dev/vs/grafana-oncall
Updated: 2026-10-22

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 connect` finds 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

1. **Step 1** Run `npx pagerless connect` in each repo.
2. **Step 2** Point a Grafana webhook contact point at Pagerless: firing alerts open problems, resolved ones close them. See [Grafana](https://pagerless.dev/integrations/grafana).
3. **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.

Sources:
1. [Grafana: OnCall OSS maintenance mode](https://grafana.com/blog/2025/03/11/grafana-oncall-maintenance-mode)
2. [Grafana OnCall OSS docs (archived)](https://grafana.com/docs/oncall/latest/set-up/open-source/)
3. [Grafana pricing](https://grafana.com/pricing/)
4. [Grafana IRM phone and SMS](https://grafana.com/docs/grafana-cloud/alerting-and-irm/irm/notify-responders/phone-and-sms/)