Opsgenie alternative for a small team: replace the rota, keep your pager
Atlassian stopped selling Opsgenie on 4 June 2025 and, as reported, ends support on 5 April 2027. If your team of 3 to 12 people used it mostly to answer "who is on call this week", you may not need a full paging platform to replace it. This guide splits the job into its parts, shows what each part costs to replace, and lists what to write down before you migrate.
Dates come from vendor-written summaries (incident.io, dev.to); check Atlassian's own notice for your plan before you act on them.
Step 1: split Opsgenie into its jobs
Opsgenie did several things at once. Write down which ones your team really used, because each has a different replacement.
| Job | Do you need a paging product? | Where it goes |
|---|---|---|
| Receive alerts from monitoring and wake someone | Yes | A paging or alerting tool, or your monitoring tool's own notifications |
| Escalate if nobody answers | Yes | The same paging tool |
| Decide who is on call this week, fairly | No | A rota planner, a spreadsheet, or a script |
| Record swaps, leave and overrides | No | A rota planner or a shared calendar |
| Show "who is on call now" to the team | No | A calendar feed, a chat message, a status page note |
If your team only used the last three rows, you are paying per user for a pager you were barely using. If you need the first two, you still need an alerting product, and a rota planner can sit next to it.
Step 2: know what the free and paid options cap
- PagerDuty's free plan is reported to cap at 5 users and one on-call schedule (costbench), and paid plans are reported at roughly $21 to $29 per user per month (incident.io, vendor-written). A team of 6 or more with a primary and a secondary rota passes the free cap quickly.
- Other alerting products (Spike, Better Stack, incident.io on-call and similar) are compared in Better Stack's comparison (vendor-written). Prices are usually per user per month.
- Open-source options: Grafana OnCall OSS was archived on 24 March 2026 (Grafana), so check a project's last release before you build on it.
- A spreadsheet or shared calendar costs nothing but loses fairness history and swaps; see how to make an on-call rota fair.
Step 3: write down your current rota before you migrate
Whichever tool you pick, collect these first. It takes about half an hour and removes most migration surprises.
- The people who are in the rota today, and who has left the rotation but still appears in old schedules.
- The shift length and handover time (for example weekly, Monday 09:00 in the team's time zone). A handover at midnight UTC and one at 09:00 local are different rotas.
- Every rota layer: primary, secondary, support desk, release captain. Note which people appear in more than one.
- Overrides in the next 8 weeks: swaps already agreed, planned leave, and public holidays that count for extra.
- Who worked what recently. Count the weekend and holiday shifts each person did in the last 6 to 12 months. A new rota that starts everyone from zero gives last year's heavy-load people no credit.
- Who consumes the schedule: calendar subscriptions, a chat bot, a runbook that says "check Opsgenie". Each needs a new link.
Step 4: carry the fairness history across
Most migrations restart the rota at "everyone is equal". For a team that has run for a year, that quietly erases who covered Christmas. The simplest fix is to put your last 6 to 12 months of shifts in as past shifts, so the next plan starts from what really happened. The free generator accepts history and shows the fairness table before you apply anything, and the open-source oncall-rota library (MIT) takes the same JSON from the command line. Copy the shifts in from your old schedule view or export by hand; Turnkeep does not read Opsgenie exports directly yet.
Where Turnkeep fits, and where it does not
Turnkeep is a rota planner, not a pager. It builds a weighted, fair rota, remembers swaps and leave, and publishes calendar links and a "who is on now" link. It does not receive alerts, escalate, or phone anyone. The free plan covers one rota of up to 4 people. The paid plan is a flat $6 per month per team, not per person, for more people and rotas, live calendar links and longer history. Pair it with whichever alerting you keep, including a free tier, and your team stops paying per seat for a schedule.
If you need alerting and scheduling in one product, a full on-call platform is the better choice and this page is not trying to talk you out of it.