Compare root9 vs the market leaders

Build your plan and compare root9 features and cost against the market leaders for Alerts, On-Call, and ITSM: PagerDuty, Jira Service Management, Freshservice, ServiceNow and incident.io. One flat price, every user included.

A comparison tool, not a listicle: pick a root9 plan or features, remove the vendors you are not weighing, set your team size, and read the bottom line per vendor. Every competitor cell was checked against the vendor's own pages on 2026-10-15.

Per-user list prices as published on 2026-10-15, billed monthly: PagerDuty Professional $25 ($21 billed annually); Jira Service Management Premium $55.28 ($47.78 billed annually); Freshservice Pro $119 ($99 billed annually); ServiceNow ITSM Pro $135 on third-party estimates; incident.io Pro $25. root9 is flat: SigOps $179, On-Call $229, Incident Response $289, Complete $589 a month, every user included.

What arrives as an add-on: Freshservice Pro Freddy AI Copilot $29 per user; PagerDuty Professional PagerDuty AIOps $699 a month; PagerDuty Professional PagerDuty Advance $415 a month; PagerDuty Professional Status Pages $89 a month; Jira Service Management Premium Atlassian Statuspage $79 a month; incident.io Pro On-call $20 per user; PagerDuty Professional Stakeholder licenses $150 a month. Metered at Jira Service Management: Rovo credits, automation steps and Assets objects; at Freshservice: orchestration transactions and Asset Units; at ServiceNow: Now Assist assists, IntegrationHub transactions and Discovery.

The economics. Every competitor prices per seat and sells the rest in pieces. AI arrives metered or as an add-on, status pages as a second product, automation and assets on meters. root9 is one flat price with every user, alert, rule and entity included, and it names its own limits.

Signal, before the incident exists. This is the block nobody else fills. Alert intake and grouping exist in every column, though PagerDuty's grouping and suppression need the AIOps add-on. Monitor tuning, backtested automation, the shift handoff and the Rundown have no equivalent anywhere.

Identity and memory. The others keep a CMDB or asset store that you populate and pay for by the object. root9's identity graph builds itself from activity and nothing in it is metered. Knowledge and a self-service portal are table stakes at JSM, Freshservice and ServiceNow, and absent at PagerDuty and incident.io.

Agents on the record. root9 ships its agents in the price. JSM meters its agents in Rovo credits, Freshservice sells the Copilot at $29 per agent and keeps the AI Agent for Enterprise, ServiceNow bills in assists, PagerDuty sells Advance from $415 a month, and incident.io includes most of its AI but sells the investigation agent separately.

On-Call. Scheduling is a draw. Context and ceilings are not. A root9 page carries the alert's condition and metric, and you see who will be paged before you send. JSM Premium, Freshservice Growth and PagerDuty include SMS and voice, incident.io charges $20 per user for on-call, ServiceNow brings your own carrier. root9 has no inbound hotline. JSM and incident.io include one (JSM needs a Twilio number), PagerDuty sells one.

Incident. The most even block. Everyone opens incidents, coordinates in chat and runs a review. The difference is where the incident starts. root9 opens it from an alert with the firing history attached, and remembers the fix for the next one.

Change. Change splits the field. PagerDuty and incident.io do not have it. JSM, Freshservice and ServiceNow do, with approvals, calendars and risk scoring. root9 adds a preflight that checks the live environment before deployment, and a performance view that counts the incidents a change caused.

Problem. Problem belongs to JSM, Freshservice Pro, ServiceNow and root9. PagerDuty and incident.io stop at follow-ups. root9 is the only one that opens a problem from an incident with the investigation already drafted, and the only one that ranks problems by the incidents they still cause.

Request, Service Catalogue, Help Center. Catalogues and portals are table stakes in the ITSM tools and absent in the paging tools. The AI answer before the ticket is metered at JSM, Enterprise-only at Freshservice, and included at ServiceNow and root9. Only root9 treats a pile-up of requests as an early warning of an incident.

Collaboration. Everyone is in Slack and Teams. What differs is how much comes back to the record. ServiceNow and Freshservice import conversations, JSM posts selected messages, PagerDuty and incident.io keep the channel alongside. root9 keeps the conversation on the record and in memory, and Patrol nudges a quiet war room, which only incident.io also does.

Automation and integration. Rules exist everywhere. The meter is what differs. JSM counts automation steps, Freshservice counts orchestration transactions, ServiceNow counts IntegrationHub transactions, PagerDuty moves advanced orchestration into AIOps. root9 counts nothing. Single sign-on is included everywhere except Atlassian, where it is a $4.35 per user add-on.

Where the others have more. Where the others have more. Status pages, satisfaction surveys, request SLAs, asset inventory and release management are mature in the ITSM tools and missing or unsold in root9 today. A comparison with one all-green column is not a comparison.

Sources: each vendor's own pricing and documentation pages, checked cell by cell on 2026-10-15. Corrections to [email protected]. Plans and pricing.

Does root9 charge per user? No. Every root9 plan is one flat monthly price with every user included: SigOps $179, On-Call $229, Incident Response $289 and Complete $589 a month. PagerDuty, Jira Service Management, Freshservice, ServiceNow and incident.io all price per user.

What does root9 Complete include? Everything in Incident Response, which is alert management, on-call with unlimited domestic SMS and voice, incident records, and Slack and Teams collaboration, plus Change, Problem, Request and a Service Catalogue, Knowledge and a Help Center, ITSM automation on every record type, and the Preflight, Root Cause and Fulfillment agents. $589 a month, every user included.

How much does PagerDuty Professional cost per user? $21 per user per month billed annually, $25 billed monthly, as published on 2026-10-15. Alert grouping and suppression need the AIOps add-on from $699 a month, AI assistance is PagerDuty Advance from $415 a month, status pages are $89 per 1,000 subscribers a month, and stakeholder licenses start at $150 per 50 a month.

How much does Jira Service Management Premium cost per user? Atlassian's headline is $55.28 per user per month, and its pricing tables list $61.60 for the 1 to 15 agent tier from 13 October 2026. Premium includes on-call with unlimited SMS and voice, and meters AI at 700 Rovo credits per user per month, automation at 6,500 steps per agent per month, and Assets at 50,000 objects. Status pages are a separate product from $79 a month.

Is AI included in Freshservice Pro? No. Freshservice Pro is $99 per user per month billed annually and the Freddy AI Copilot is a $29 per user per month add-on. The Freddy AI Agent is on the Enterprise plan only.

What does a 15-person team pay for on-call and incident management? Billed monthly, as published on 2026-10-15: root9 Incident Response $289, flat. PagerDuty Professional $1,639 with AIOps, Advance and stakeholder licenses. incident.io Pro $675+ with the On-call add-on, plus an AI investigation add-on to quote. Jira Service Management Premium $829+, plus metered AI, automation and assets. Freshservice Pro $2,220+ with the Freddy AI Copilot, plus metered automation and assets. ServiceNow ITSM Pro about $2,025+ on third-party estimates, plus paging and integration items to quote.

Which of these include a status page? Freshservice Pro and incident.io Pro include one. Jira sells Atlassian Statuspage separately from $79 a month, PagerDuty sells Status Pages at $89 per 1,000 subscribers a month, ServiceNow offers Service Portal outage widgets, and root9 does not offer one today.

Where do these numbers come from? Each vendor's own pricing and documentation pages, checked cell by cell on 2026-10-15. The page shows the date on every number, and a price or plan that has moved can be reported to [email protected].