UptimeWarden vs PagerDuty: Do You Need Both? (2026)

PagerDuty does not monitor anything. It receives alerts from the tools that do and decides who is paged, in what order, and what happens if they do not answer. UptimeWarden monitors your services and includes that paging layer for the incidents it creates. So the question is rarely "which one"; it is "do I need PagerDuty in front of my monitoring, or is the paging inside the monitor enough?" This is written by the UptimeWarden team, with PagerDuty's pricing read from its page on 5 September 2026.

What PagerDuty charges

Per user, per month:

Plan	Price	On-call schedules	Escalation policies	Status page
Free	$0, up to 5 users	1	1	not stated
Professional	$25 ($21 annually)	multiple	multiple	external, up to 250 subscribers
Business	$49 ($41 annually)	multiple	multiple	external, up to 500 subscribers
Enterprise	custom	multiple	multiple	premium status pages

The Free plan includes 100 international phone or SMS notifications a month and PagerDuty's catalogue of 750+ integrations. It is a real free plan for a team of five with one rota and one escalation policy. The moment you need a second schedule (a separate rota for the database team, say) you are on Professional, and a team of eight on Professional is $200 a month before any monitoring tool.

What UptimeWarden charges

Per plan, users not counted:

Plan	Price	Monitors	Fastest check	On-call and escalation
Free	$0	20	3 minutes	not included
Hobby	₺150/mo	35	2 minutes	included
Starter	$7/mo	50	2 minutes	included
Professional	$29/mo	100	1 minute	included
Enterprise	custom	unlimited	30 seconds	included

On-call rotations, ordered escalation ladders and acknowledgement (including one-click acknowledgement from the alert email) are included from Hobby up, and the number of people on the rota does not change the price.

When you need PagerDuty

When alerts come from more than one place. If Datadog, CloudWatch, Sentry and your monitoring tool all need to page the same rota with one set of rules, that is PagerDuty's job and UptimeWarden does not do it; UptimeWarden pages on its own incidents.

When the organisation is large. Multiple teams, dozens of schedules, escalation that crosses team boundaries, and compliance requirements around incident response are what PagerDuty's Business and Enterprise tiers exist for.

When you already run it. If PagerDuty is the standard in your company, point UptimeWarden at it: incidents go out through the webhook and Slack channels, and PagerDuty does the routing as it does for everything else.

When the paging inside the monitor is enough

When the alerts you care about are "the service is down" and "the certificate is expiring," which is most small teams. UptimeWarden creates the incident, pages the rota, escalates if nobody acknowledges, and posts to the status page, in one place and one plan.

When you would be on PagerDuty Free anyway. Five users, one schedule and 100 SMS a month is a fair description of a small team's needs, and UptimeWarden's Starter plan gives the same team the schedule and the monitoring for $7 a month.

When per-user pricing is the thing you are avoiding. A team of eight on UptimeWarden Starter is $7 a month. The same eight on PagerDuty Professional is $200 a month, and they still need a monitor.

Side by side

	UptimeWarden	PagerDuty
Monitors your services	yes	no, receives alerts from other tools
Routes alerts from many sources	own incidents only	yes, 750+ integrations
On-call schedules	included from Hobby	1 on Free, more on paid
Escalation policies	included from Hobby	1 on Free, more on paid
Pricing unit	plan	user
Status page	1 on Free, up to 10 on Professional, unlimited on Enterprise	on Professional and above, subscriber-capped
Forecasting	Professional and above	no

The practical answer

Start with the monitor's own paging. If you later find yourself wiring three other tools into it, that is the day you need PagerDuty, and UptimeWarden will feed it. Until then, the Hobby plan is a working on-call rota for a small team at ₺150 a month.