Splunk On-Call is the on-call and incident alerting tool formerly called VictorOps, now part of Cisco through the Splunk acquisition. It is built for IT and DevOps teams, mostly existing Splunk and Cisco customers. 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: Still sold. Cisco completed its acquisition of Splunk on March 18, 2024.
Side by side
| Feature | Pagerless | Splunk On-Call |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | You + 1 backup, 3 apps, no card | No free plan; a free trial |
| Paid | Team planned: per alert sent, no per-seat price (not open yet) | From $5 per user per month billed annually, for up to 10 seats |
| Phone and SMS | Phone calls through your own Twilio at Twilio's price; no SMS | Not stated on the pricing page |
| 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 Splunk On-Call if
- You already run Splunk and want on-call alongside it.
- You want a low per-seat price for a team of up to 10.
Choose Pagerless if
- You want a free plan for you and a backup.
- You want the alert to explain what broke and offer the fix.
Moving from Splunk On-Call to Pagerless
Step 1
Run
npx pagerless connect.Step 2
Move each routing key's alerts to Pagerless.
Step 3
Set the escalation order.
Questions
Is Pagerless a good Splunk On-Call 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, Splunk On-Call 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 Splunk On-Call fact on this page comes from the sources below, checked on October 22, 2026. Prices change; check their page before deciding.