Product Comparison

Introduction

In today's rapidly evolving IT environment, organizations increasingly rely on comprehensive monitoring and incident management tools to ensure business continuity and service stability. However, as monitoring systems expand, the massive volume of alerts and incident notifications creates unprecedented challenges for IT teams. How to ensure each alert is captured, accurately delivered, and effectively responded to has become crucial for maintaining service quality.

Facing these challenges, the following situations indicate that organizations need to introduce or upgrade their On-Call tools:

Complete Tracking and Resolution: Ensure every incident is tracked, handled, and resolved to prevent issues from escalating and avoid greater asset losses.

On-Call System Establishment: Establish clear on-call rotation mechanisms, including primary and backup schedules, to reasonably distribute responsibilities and prevent alert fatigue.

Response Efficiency: When SRE or development teams spend over 25% of their time on On-Call work, tools are needed to reduce noise and improve work efficiency.

Quantitative Metrics: Establish quantitative metrics for incident response time and personnel workload to drive continuous improvement in service stability.

"What key factors should we consider when purchasing On-Call services?" This guide will provide comprehensive recommendations for On-Call tool procurement. We'll explore from three dimensions: product, service, and pricing, discussing the questions IT managers should ask when seeking efficient collaborative incident management solutions for their development and operations teams. Additionally, for each dimension, we'll provide a comparative analysis of mainstream On-Call providers like Flashduty and Pagerduty to help you make informed decisions.

Product

Integration Capabilities

As a process handling center, incident management systems store all alert and incident data. Such systems should support robust data ingestion and outbound capabilities to integrate with various systems or workflows, accelerating response and enhancing collaboration.

Capability	Questions to Ask	Flashduty vs. Pagerduty
Alert Integration	1. Does it support your commonly used alert systems? 2. Does it support custom alert integration? Can custom script monitoring data be reported via standard protocols? 3. Does it support email integration? Can incidents be triggered or closed via email? 4. Does it support change-related integration? Incidents are often caused by changes, integrating change data helps quick troubleshooting. 5. Are integration docs easy to find and clear? Can configuration be completed independently following the documentation?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅ Pagerduty supports most overseas monitoring tools. Flashduty supports mainstream monitoring tools both domestic and international, and also supports the Pagerduty protocol, allowing some tools to push data directly to Flashduty using the Pagerduty method.
Webhooks	1. Does it support outbound webhooks for incident operations to integrate with custom processes or tools? 2. Does it support subscriptions based on event types or sources? For example, subscribing only to incident assignment events from the order system?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅
Open APIs	Does it provide rich Open APIs allowing customers to operate data entities via API?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅ Both provide rich APIs with documentation.

Incident Management

Incident management is the core operation of the system. This dimension mainly examines the richness and flexibility of product features.

Capability	Questions to Ask	Flashduty vs. Pagerduty
Alert Routing	1. Does it support dedicated integrations? Direct routing to services or channels without rules? 2. Does it support shared integrations and flexible routing rules?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅ Pagerduty only supports shared integration_key, without shared integration concept. Flashduty supports setting routing rules on integration page, while Pagerduty requires complex Event Orchestration or Workflow.
Information Enrichment	Does it support custom fields? Add fields, define types and enumeration values to extend incident information	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅
	Does it support extracting new labels through regex from existing information? e.g., extract datacenter info from hostname	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅
	Does it support combining existing information into new labels? e.g., generate runbook URL from service and alert policy	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅
	Does it support importing data tables to generate dynamic labels? e.g., import CMDB data to auto-generate owner info based on host IP	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ❌ Flashduty supports flexible data mapping solutions.
Alert Noise Reduction	Does it support alert grouping into incidents? 1. Group similar alerts for assignment, notification and handling to improve efficiency and reduce alert fatigue? 2. Does it group incidents by time window? 3. Does it support AI-based merging?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅ Pagerduty supports intelligent grouping and policy grouping. Flashduty supports fine-grained policy grouping.
	Does it support incident silencing? Stop alert notifications during market closure or system maintenance?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅
	Does it support incident inhibition? e.g., suppress pod incidents when host has issues?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ❌
	Does it support alert storm warning? Re-notify to increase response when too many alerts are grouped in an incident?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ❌
	Does it support incident flapping suppression? When same incident frequently occurs and recovers, notifications should be appropriately reduced to avoid wasting effort.	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ❌
	Does it support delayed notification? Delay notification by a window to filter out incidents that auto-recover immediately after occurring, reducing wasted effort.	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅
Incident Assignment	Does it support policy-based incident assignment? 1. Does it support assigning to schedules, teams or individuals? 2. Does it support setting group chat or direct message notification methods simultaneously?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅ Flashduty additionally supports team assignment and notification method setting. Pagerduty can only configure direct and group chat globally, cannot match at incident level.
	Does it support condition-based assignment matching? 1. Does it support multiple assignment policies with weights?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ❌ Pagerduty only supports one escalation policy under a Service. Flashduty supports multiple assignment policies in a channel, each policy can take effect at different times or match incident scope.
	Does it support automatic escalation for unresolved incidents? 1. Does it support manual escalation?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅
	Does it support dynamic assignment based on parameters or labels? 1. Dynamically replace responders based on labels to reduce system integration cost? 2. Dynamically replace group chat info based on labels to reduce configuration maintenance cost?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ❌
Incident Handling	Does it support manual incident creation?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅
	Does it support incident acknowledgment, closure, comments, snooze and merging? 1. Does it support automatic closure after timeout? 2. Does it support automatic unsnooze after timeout?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅
	Does it support incident postmortem?	Flashduty ❌, Pagerduty ✅
	Does it support similar incidents?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅
	Does it support outlier incident alerts?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ❌
	Does it support detailed operation records?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅
	Does it support incident reassignment?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅
	Does it support adding custom actions to incidents? e.g., manually trigger host restart for incident self-healing?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅
	Does it support reopening and notifying after incident closure?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ❌
	Does it support setting custom fields? e.g., mark false positives, add meeting links, etc?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅ Both support multiple types of custom fields. Flashduty supports searching incidents by fields. Pagerduty can only view field settings in incident details.
	Does it have powerful search capabilities?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ❌ Flashduty supports searching by labels, custom fields, title, personnel info. Flashduty supports exact, wildcard and regex matching. Flashduty supports card corner view. Flashduty supports customizing incident list rendering content.
Incident Analysis	Does it support incident and event count statistics by time, team, service and other dimensions?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅
	Does it support incident handling metrics by time, team and service dimensions? Such as MTTA and MTTR?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅
	Does it support personnel incident handling metrics? Such as MTTA? Number of incidents handled?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅
	Does it support statistics for most frequent incident hosts and policies?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ❌
	Does it support statistics for time spent by personnel handling incidents?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅
	Does it support metrics by different time periods (work, rest and sleep)?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ❌
	Does it support custom statistical reports?	Flashduty ❌, Pagerduty ❌
	Does it support periodic statistical report sending?	Flashduty ❌, Pagerduty ❌
	Does it support large screen display of analysis dashboard?	Flashduty ❌, Pagerduty ❌
	Does it support downloading detailed data?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅

Platform Capabilities

Platform capabilities mainly focus on member management, on-call response and notification capabilities. The system should have basic audit and single sign-on functionality. More notification channels and better localization support are preferred, and on-call management should meet organization-specific scenarios.

Capability	Questions to Ask	Flashduty vs. Pagerduty
Schedule Management	Does it support rotation by day, week or custom periods?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅
	Does it support limiting on-call hours within rotation periods?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅
	Does it support skipping specific dates for rotation (e.g., different rules for workdays and non-workdays)?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ❌
	Does it support different rotation rules for different time periods?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅ Flashduty allows setting period end times.
	Does it support temporary schedule changes?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅
	Does it support on-call roles? e.g., primary and backup?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ❌
	Does it support multiple people on-call simultaneously? Rotating together?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ❌
	Does it support fair rotation? e.g., Is it fair if John always has Sunday duty in a 7-person daily rotation?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ❌
	Does it support rotation notifications including advance notice?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅ Flashduty supports more notification methods
	Does it support schedule calendar export?	Flashduty ❌, Pagerduty ✅
Notification Channels	Does it support mainland China voice and SMS?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅ Pagerduty Limited support, unstable
	Does it support fixed caller ID?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅
	Does it support email notifications?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅
	Does it support mainstream IM applications?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅ Flashduty supports: Feishu/Lark, Dingtalk, WeCom app integration.
	Does it support international mainstream IM applications?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅ Both support Slack and Microsoft Teams apps. Flashduty additionally supports Zoom and Telegram bots.
	Does it support mobile apps?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅
	Does it support custom notification templates?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ❌ Flashduty supports rich template syntax.
Single Sign-On	Does it support single sign-on? Which protocols?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅ Flashduty supports SAML, OIDC; Pagerduty supports SAML, OAuth2
Operation Audit	Does it support operation auditing?	Flashduty ✅, Pagerduty ✅

Pricing

Providers generally offer multiple subscription options. However, we mainly consider which one offers better value while meeting our needs. It's important to ensure actual usage doesn't exceed budget and pricing methods are simple.

Comparison Item	Flashduty	Pagerduty
Pricing Page	price.flashcat.cloud	price.pagerduty.com
Charging Method	Seat fee + excess communication fee	Seat fee + Add-Ons
Version Differentiation	Pro ¥199/user/month full features (including AIops)	Business version $41/user/month, Add-Ons charged separately (e.g. AIops)
Charges only for active users?	Yes, active users defined as members who view or handle incidents in the month, receiving notifications only doesn't count as active	No, handling alerts requires full license, receiving alerts only requires stakeholder license pack, minimum 50 users at $3/user/month
Free Trial	Pro 14-day free trial, can apply for extension	Business version 14-day free trial

Service

The service dimension mainly examines providers' service response methods and timeliness, with instant messaging being far better than other methods.

Comparison Item	Flashduty	Pagerduty
Does it support Email support?	✅	✅
Does it provide dedicated support?	✅, supports dedicated IM service groups	Requires separate purchase
Does it provide expert remote support?	✅, supports remote meetings for problem solving	Requires separate purchase
Service hours	Standard: 58, Pro: 78	Unknown
Does it provide Status Page?	Yes, status.flashcat.cloud	Yes, status.pagerduty.com
Does it provide Roadmap?	Yes, roadmap.flashcat.cloud	No

Finally

We recommend looking for solutions that can be customized according to your needs and adapt to your different workflows. This largely depends on your satisfaction with the provider's alert and notification workflows, integrations, scheduling and escalation, pricing, and various other features. We suggest conducting a comprehensive trial evaluation before making your choice.

Product Comparison

Introduction#

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Integration Capabilities#

Incident Management#

Platform Capabilities#

Pricing#

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