Oncall vs Robusta

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?
FeatureOncallRobusta
CategoryMonitoring & StatusMonitoring & Status
LicenseBSD-2-ClauseMIT
LanguagePythonPython
Setup difficultyMediumMedium
Min. RAM256 MB256 MB
Deploymentdocker, bare-metalkubernetes, helm
GitHub stars★ 1,256★ 3,072
First released20172021
ReplacesPagerDutyDatadog, PagerDuty

Why pick each one

Choose Oncall if…

  • Simple scheduling model
  • Battle-tested at LinkedIn
Oncall details

Choose Robusta if…

  • Makes alerts actionable
  • Strong Kubernetes focus
Robusta details

Frequently asked questions

Is Oncall or Robusta better?

Neither is universally better. Robusta has the larger community; both share a medium setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.

Are Oncall and Robusta free and open-source?

Yes. Oncall is licensed under BSD-2-Clause and Robusta under MIT. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run Oncall and Robusta with Docker?

Oncall: yes. Robusta: check the project docs for container support.

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