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Developer Tools · head to head

Hookdeck vs PagerDuty

Hookdeck logo

Hookdeck

Developer Tools

Event gateway that receives, queues, retries and replays inbound webhooks

From
Free
Free plan
Yes
Full reviewWebsite
PagerDuty logo

PagerDuty

Technology

Real-time operations for real-time business

From
$21/month
Free plan
No
Full reviewWebsite

The short version

  • Only Hookdeck has a free tier, so it costs nothing to try first.
  • Each has a real cost: Hookdeck pricing meters delivered events, so fan-out multiplies the bill: one inbound event routed to four services counts as four deliveries.; PagerDuty aIOps, status pages, and live call routing are expensive add-ons not included in base plans, significantly increasing total cost
  • They diverge on capability: Hookdeck covers Ingest and persist, PagerDuty covers Incident response.
  • Prices and features above were last checked on 31 August 2026.

Where they differ

Only the attributes on which Hookdeck and PagerDuty actually diverge.

Attributes where Hookdeck and PagerDuty differ
AttributeHookdeckPagerDuty
Starting priceFree$21/month
Pricing modelPer month by delivered event countUnknown
Free tierYesNo
PlatformsWeb, Linux, macOS, WindowsWeb, Ios, Android, Api
CategoryDeveloper ToolsTechnology
FoundedUnknown2009

Identical on both: user rating (Not yet rated).

What each one covers

Drawn from each product's published feature list. An absence here means we hold no record of it - not that the product lacks it.

Only in Hookdeck

  • Ingest and persist
  • Automatic retries
  • Filters and fan-out
  • Transformations
  • Local development CLI
  • Rate limiting

Only in PagerDuty

  • Incident response
  • On-call management
  • Alert grouping
  • Escalation policies
  • Mobile incident management
  • Postmortems
  • Status pages
  • Event intelligence

What people use each for

The jobs each tool is most often brought in to do.

Hookdeck

  • A payments integration where losing a Stripe event during a deploy causes an order to go unfulfillednot PagerDuty
  • Fanning one provider webhook out to several internal services without each subscribing separatelynot PagerDuty
  • Debugging a partner integration by replaying the exact failing payload after shipping a fixnot PagerDuty
  • Receiving production-shaped webhooks on a developer laptop without running a public tunnelnot PagerDuty

PagerDuty

  • Incident managementnot Hookdeck
  • On-call schedulingnot Hookdeck
  • Real-time alertingnot Hookdeck
  • Service reliabilitynot Hookdeck
  • Digital operationsnot Hookdeck

Where each one falls short

Documented limitations, not opinions. Every one is a constraint you would hit in normal use.

Hookdeck

  • Pricing meters delivered events, so fan-out multiplies the bill: one inbound event routed to four services counts as four deliveries.
  • Free-tier retention is three days, which is shorter than the time it typically takes to notice a failing integration, so the payloads needed for a replay are often already gone.
  • It becomes a single point of failure in front of every third-party integration, and an outage there means every provider webhook queues or fails at once.
  • The transformation layer runs JavaScript in a constrained environment, so anything that needs a database lookup or an external call has to happen downstream instead.
  • For a team already running Kafka or SQS the value is mostly the console and the replay UI, which is a hard cost to justify against infrastructure they already operate.

PagerDuty

  • AIOps, status pages, and live call routing are expensive add-ons not included in base plans, significantly increasing total cost
  • Complex escalation policies require workarounds for scheduling patterns beyond basic weekly rotations
  • 5-user minimum requirement forces costs even for small teams, with forced Business tier upgrades adding $12,000+ annually for larger teams

Pricing, plan by plan

Hookdeck

Free
  • DeveloperFree
    • Up to ten thousand events per month
    • Three-day retention
    • One user
  • Team$39/month
    • Ten thousand events included
    • Unlimited users
    • Pay as you go metering above the included events
  • Growth$499/month
    • Ten thousand events included plus metered usage
    • Thirty-day retention
    • Uptime and latency SLAs
  • Enterprise$undefined/year
    • Negotiated event volume
    • Custom retention
    • Dedicated support

PagerDuty

$21/month

No published plan breakdown. See the PagerDuty review.

Which should you pick?

Choose Hookdeck if

  • You need ingest and persist.
  • You want to start without paying.
  • You work on Web, Linux, macOS, Windows.
  • You also want automatic retries.
Hookdeck review

Choose PagerDuty if

  • You need incident response.
  • You work on Web, Ios, Android, Api.
  • You also want on-call management.
PagerDuty review

Questions people ask

Is Hookdeck or PagerDuty better?
Neither clearly leads. Hookdeck starts at Free and PagerDuty at $21/month, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
Which is cheaper, Hookdeck or PagerDuty?
Hookdeck has a free tier; the other does not. Paid plans start at Free for Hookdeck and $21/month for PagerDuty.
Does Hookdeck or PagerDuty run on more platforms?
Hookdeck runs on Web, Linux, macOS, Windows. PagerDuty runs on Web, Ios, Android, Api.
Can I use Hookdeck for free?
Yes. Hookdeck has a free tier, so you can try it without paying. PagerDuty starts at $21/month.
What is Hookdeck best used for?
Hookdeck is most often used for a payments integration where losing a stripe event during a deploy causes an order to go unfulfilled, fanning one provider webhook out to several internal services without each subscribing separately, debugging a partner integration by replaying the exact failing payload after shipping a fix, receiving production-shaped webhooks on a developer laptop without running a public tunnel. Of those, a payments integration where losing a stripe event during a deploy causes an order to go unfulfilled and fanning one provider webhook out to several internal services without each subscribing separately are not what PagerDuty is typically brought in for.
What can Hookdeck do that PagerDuty cannot?
Hookdeck covers Ingest and persist, Automatic retries, Filters and fan-out, Transformations. PagerDuty covers Incident response, On-call management, Alert grouping, Escalation policies.

Answered from the vendors’ own pages

Hookdeck: Is there a free plan?

Yes, ten thousand events a month with three-day retention and one user.

PagerDuty: What is the minimum cost to use PagerDuty?

PagerDuty requires a minimum of 5 users per account. The Professional plan starts at $21 per user per month ($105/month minimum), with annual billing providing 16% discount.

Source
Hookdeck: How is usage counted?

By delivered events, so a single inbound webhook fanned out to three destinations counts as three.

PagerDuty: What integrations does PagerDuty support?

PagerDuty integrates with 750+ monitoring, ticketing, and collaboration tools including Datadog, Slack, Jira, ServiceNow, New Relic, and Nagios.

Source
Hookdeck: Can I replay a failed webhook?

Yes, individually or in bulk from the console, with the original payload.

PagerDuty: How much does AIOps cost in PagerDuty?

AIOps Intelligence is sold separately as an add-on starting at $699 per month, and is not included in any of the base plans.

Source
Hookdeck: Does it work for outbound webhooks too?

Yes, the same queueing, retry and observability applies to webhooks you send.

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