Alertmanager vs Oncall
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
Not the right match-up?
Alertmanager
Handles alerts from Prometheus with routing and silencing
VS
Oncall
Calendar-based on-call scheduling and team management
| Feature | Alertmanager | Oncall |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Monitoring & Status | Monitoring & Status |
| License | Apache-2.0 | BSD-2-Clause |
| Language | Go | Python |
| Setup difficulty | Medium | Medium |
| Min. RAM | 64 MB | 256 MB |
| Deployment | docker, kubernetes, binary | docker, bare-metal |
| GitHub stars | ★ 8,572 | ★ 1,256 |
| First released | 2015 | 2017 |
| Replaces | PagerDuty, Opsgenie | PagerDuty |
Why pick each one
Frequently asked questions
Is Alertmanager or Oncall better?
Neither is universally better. Alertmanager has the larger community; both share a medium setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.
Are Alertmanager and Oncall free and open-source?
Yes. Alertmanager is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Oncall under BSD-2-Clause. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Alertmanager and Oncall with Docker?
Alertmanager: yes. Oncall: yes.