An Opsgenie alternative for a rotation that has to land somewhere
Atlassian has announced that Opsgenie is being retired, and is steering customers into Jira Service Management. If the pager was the only part of Opsgenie your team used, that is a migration you did not ask for into a product larger than the one you are leaving.
This is a forced move, which makes it a good moment to ask a question most teams never get to ask: what were we actually using? For a lot of teams the honest answer is schedules, escalation, and a phone that rings. That is what Acked is.
Check your own timeline in Atlassian's notice rather than ours. End-of-life dates move, and a page that hardcoded one would be wrong eventually. What is not going to change is that you need somewhere for the rotation to go.
What Acked does
- On-call schedules. Rotations with layers and overrides, so the right person is on call without anyone maintaining a spreadsheet.
- Escalation that does not give up. An unacknowledged alert climbs the chain until somebody answers, then tells you nobody did.
- Paging that gets through. Push on iOS and Android, including critical alerts that ring past the silent switch and Focus. Email as well.
- Alerts from anything that can POST JSON. Datadog, Prometheus Alertmanager and Grafana have first-class formats. Everything else sends a title and a key.
- Outbound webhooks, signed, for Slack or your own systems.
- A full history. Every state change is an append-only record: who was paged, what they did, when, and every delivery attempt with its outcome.
What Acked does not do
This list is the point of the product, so it is on the page rather than in a comparison table nobody scrolls to.
- No status pages.
- No postmortem or retrospective workflow.
- No service catalog or dependency map.
- No AI incident summaries, copilots or auto-triage.
- No workflow builder, no automation rules engine.
If you need those, buy the platform that has them. That is a real answer and it is the right one for some teams. Acked is for the teams who looked at that platform and realised they were about to pay for a category when what they needed was paging.
The pricing model, which is the actual difference
Per-seat paging prices the thing you least want to economise on. The bill grows with the size of the rotation, so the cheapest configuration is the one where fewer people share the pager. Teams do the math and quietly shrink the rotation to fit the budget, which means the same three people carry it.
Acked charges a flat monthly price per tier and every tier includes unlimited users. Adding the fourth engineer to the rotation costs nothing, so the tool stops being a reason not to.
| Tier | Price | Users | Fits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Unlimited | Under 50 alerts a month. 3 schedules, 1 escalation policy, 30-day history. |
| Team | $49 a month | Unlimited | 50 to a few hundred alerts a month. Unlimited schedules and policies, SSO, 1-year history. |
| Business | $299 a month | Unlimited | Hundreds of alerts a month. SAML, SCIM, RBAC, 3-year history, 99.9% SLA. |
There is no per-user add-on underneath the flat number, and no alert quota that turns into an overage line. The one thing priced by usage is voice calls, because a phone call has a real per-minute cost and pretending otherwise would mean charging everybody for the people who use it.
If you are being moved into Jira Service Management
That is a reasonable destination if your on-call work is already tangled into Jira: tickets, queues, approvals, an internal service desk. The migration path is supported and the two products are meant to fit together.
It is a poor destination if all you had in Opsgenie was a rotation and some integrations. You would be adopting a service management product to keep a pager, and paying per agent for the privilege.
Moving over
Paging is easier to move than most tools because the integration surface is small: monitors point somewhere, and people carry a phone.
- Create a service in Acked. It comes with an ingest URL already minted.
- Add the same URL as a second destination on one monitor. Do not remove the old one yet. Both tools page for a while, which is noisy and which is the point.
- Rebuild the rotation. Schedules and escalation steps are the part worth re-reading rather than copying. Most teams find layers they no longer need.
- Run in parallel through one real incident, or through a deliberate test at an inconvenient hour. A paging tool that has never woken you is a paging tool you have not tested.
- Cut the old destination when the same page has arrived from Acked and you believed it.
See the quickstart for the five-minute version, and sending alerts for payload formats and deduplication.