Siren vs PagerDuty

You're here because you need incident alerting but you're not sure PagerDuty is worth the price. Let's break it down honestly.

The Short Version

PagerDuty is the industry standard. It's mature, feature-rich, and built for enterprises with complex needs and big budgets.

Siren is built for teams who need reliable on-call alerting without the enterprise price tag. If you want phone calls when something breaks, on-call rotations, and escalations—and you don't want to pay per seat—Siren does that.

Pricing

This is where the conversation usually starts and ends.

Siren charges $10/month for 50 incidents, then $0.20 per incident after that. Add your whole team—same price.

PagerDuty charges per user, per month. The math gets painful fast.

Features

What Both Do

• Phone call alerts — When an incident fires, someone's phone rings
• On-call scheduling — Daily or weekly rotations
• Escalations — If the primary doesn't answer, page the secondary
• Incident tracking — See what's open, who acknowledged, when it closed

Where PagerDuty Wins

Let's be honest about this:

• Native integrations — PagerDuty has 700+ integrations with direct API connections to most monitoring tools
• Complex escalation policies — Multi-tier escalation chains, schedule layers, routing rules
• Analytics and reporting — Detailed metrics on response times, incident trends, team performance
• Enterprise features — SSO, audit logs, compliance certifications, SLAs
• Mobile app — Dedicated iOS and Android apps
• Ecosystem maturity — 15+ years in production, battle-tested at scale

If you're a large organization with complex on-call requirements, compliance needs, and budget to match—PagerDuty is purpose-built for you.

Where Siren Wins

• Unlimited seats — Add your whole team without watching the bill climb
• Simple pricing — One plan, no tiers, no "contact sales"
• Universal ingestion — Any tool that sends email can create incidents (Datadog, Grafana, CloudWatch, cron jobs, anything)
• No procurement process — Sign up, verify your phone, start receiving alerts
• Price lock guarantee — Your rate is locked when you add a payment method

How Siren Works

1. You get a Siren email address for each service
2. Point your monitoring tools at it
3. When an alert comes in, Siren pages whoever's on-call
4. If they don't acknowledge, we remind them at 2 minutes
5. If still no response, we escalate to secondary at 5 minutes
6. We keep trying until someone responds or 15 minutes pass

That's it. No configuration rabbit holes.

Who Should Use PagerDuty

• Enterprise teams with 50+ engineers
• Organizations requiring SOC 2 compliance documentation
• Teams needing complex multi-tier escalation policies
• Companies with dedicated SRE/DevOps budgets

Who Should Use Siren

• Startups and small teams watching their burn rate
• Side projects and indie apps that still need real alerting
• Teams that outgrew "just check Slack" but don't need enterprise features
• Anyone who's done the PagerDuty pricing math and winced

Infrastructure

You might assume $10/month means "runs on a single server somewhere." It doesn't.

Siren runs on geo-redundant infrastructure across multiple regions. Our database is distributed across three locations. We use multiple telephony providers with automatic failover—if one has issues, your alerts still get through.

We don't publish an SLA yet—we're not at that stage. But we built Siren like we'd build it for ourselves: assume things will fail, and make sure pages still go out.

The Bottom Line

PagerDuty is a great product. It's also expensive, and most of what you're paying for are features you may never use.

If you need phone calls when your app is down, on-call rotations so you're not the only one carrying the pager, and escalations when someone misses an alert—Siren does that for $10/month.

No seat licenses. No sales calls. No surprises.

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Siren is built by Split Rock AI. Questions? [email protected]