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WelcoYour alerts, by text.

A PagerDuty alternative for SMS alerts on small Canadian IT teams

Welco is a PagerDuty alternative for SMS alerts: the admin on call gets one short text when Nagios, PRTG or Zabbix fires. Nobody pays a seat fee to be on the list, however many admins your team adds. Your monitors email the alert, and Welco texts the right cellphone. For phone calls, escalation and incident response, PagerDuty is still the stronger tool.

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  • No seat fee for each admin
  • Nothing for admins to install
  • Runs beside PagerDuty while you test

Works by email with

  • Nagios
  • PRTG
  • Zabbix

Compared with

  • PagerDuty

Published:

Setting up alerts with PagerDuty takes 4 steps. With Welco it takes 4.

With PagerDuty

  1. Add a user for each responder
  2. Create a service for each tool
  3. Decide who gets paged and when
  4. Watch the free plan's monthly cap

With Welco

  1. Verify your business once
  2. Invite admins, each replies YES
  3. Send monitor emails to Welco
  4. Night alerts go to the on-call phone
Animation: a PagerDuty setup and a Welco setup are built side by side.
  • PagerDuty is incident management for DevOps and SRE teams, priced per user.
  • Its Free plan covers 5 users and 100 SMS or phone notifications a month, as listed in October 2026.
  • Professional is listed at US$21 per user a month, billed yearly.
  • Welco does one job, alert emails to texts, and charges no seat fees. It has no phone calls or escalation.

Who should pick PagerDuty, and who should pick Welco

PagerDuty is a serious incident tool, and many teams need all of it. Others bought it only to get a text. Find your team below.

  • Pick PagerDuty: customers use your software around the clock

    Incident response for DevOps and SRE teams is what PagerDuty was built for.

  • Pick PagerDuty: only a phone call wakes your admin

    PagerDuty plans include phone notifications. Welco never calls.

  • Pick PagerDuty: unanswered alerts must move to the next person

    Welco has no escalation chains or rotation schedules.

  • Pick Welco: a short text is all your team reads

    The on-call admin reads the host and the problem on the lock screen. Nobody on the team opens an incident page.

  • Pick Welco: the alert list keeps growing

    Each new name on a per-user plan adds a monthly fee. In Welco, adding the service desk lead for long-weekend alerts costs nothing extra.

  • Pick Welco: your monitors already send email

    Nagios, PRTG, Zabbix and WhatsUp Gold all email alerts out of the box. Even Datadog can send alert emails.

PagerDuty and Welco side by side

PagerDuty prices are as listed on pagerduty.com in October 2026. All prices are in US dollars (USD). Customers in Canada pay in US dollars too. You can also compare alert tools beyond PagerDuty.

Built for

PagerDuty
Incident management for DevOps and SRE teams
Welco
Alert texts for IT, plant and building staff

Free plan

PagerDuty
Up to 5 users, with 100 SMS or phone notifications a month
Welco
Plans are listed on the Welco pricing page

Paid price

PagerDuty
Professional US$21 per user a month (yearly) or US$25 (monthly). Platform plans listed from US$2,800 to US$48,000 a year
Welco
No per-user fees, no hardware, no setup fee

Phone calls

PagerDuty
Yes, phone notifications are part of the plans
Welco
No. Texts only

How alerts get in

PagerDuty
A large directory of integrations, mostly DevOps tools
Welco
Any alert email, from Nagios to a UPS card in a branch closet

What people install

PagerDuty
A user account each
Welco
Nothing. Texts land in the phone's own messages

Sources: PagerDuty pricing (read Oct 5, 2026)

Monitoring texts through PagerDuty, then through Welco

Here is what a three-admin IT team, say at a regional credit union, gives up and gains when only the texting moves.

Texts through PagerDuty

  • A paid seat for every admin who should hear about an outage.
  • A service to build for each monitoring tool you run.
  • A free tier that stops at 5 users and a monthly notification cap.
  • Incident pages that a small team never opens.

Texts through Welco

  • No per-user fees, so the weekend helper joins at no extra cost.
  • Your Welco address added to each monitor as one more email contact.
  • Rules that text DOWN and CRITICAL alerts and leave warnings in email.
  • Nights and weekends on one phone with on-call routing.

A branch access point goes down at night

Most small IT teams don't need an incident. They need to know that a branch device stopped answering pings, and who should look.

Alert email from whatsup@it.example.ca, subject “Ping is Down on Managed Device: branch-07-ap”. Welco trims it to one text of 86 characters: “Welco: [branch-07-ap] Ping down on managed device at 9:48 PM. Reply STOP to opt out.”

Text received: Welco: [branch-07-ap] Ping down on managed device at 9:48 PM. Reply STOP to opt out.

Characters225861 credit

Animation: the alert email "Ping is Down on Managed Device: branch-07-ap" is trimmed into one text: "Welco: [branch-07-ap] Ping down on managed device at 9:48 PM. Reply STOP to opt out."

The admin on call sees the device and the time. The rest of the email stays in the inbox.

See your next server alert as a text

Verify your business and point one monitor's alert email at Welco.

7-day free trial, 15 message creditsCard required for verificationNo charge for 7 daysEmail reminder before billing

Text my team our server alertsBook a demo

Where Welco fits as a PagerDuty alternative for SMS

Welco fits the IT shop that bought an on-call tool just to get texts.

Move your monitoring texts off PagerDuty in 15 minutes

Start with one monitor. Keep PagerDuty running until the texts prove themselves.

  1. List what pages you today

    Write down each monitor that sends to PagerDuty and which alerts you actually act on. That list becomes your Welco rules.

  2. Sign up and verify

    Create your Welco account and verify the business. You get a Welco address for alerts.

  3. Invite the admins

    Each admin opens your invite, enters their own cellphone number and replies YES. No alert reaches a phone before that.

  4. Approve the monitor and change its alert email

    Approve the address the monitor sends from. Then add your Welco address to its email notification, next to the current one.

  5. Set off-hours routing and test

    Add a rule for nights, weekends and statutory holidays. Turn on test mode and fire a test alert to see the result without sending a text.

Frequently asked questions

Can Welco replace PagerDuty for a three-person IT team in Canada?

Yes, if what you use PagerDuty for is texts. Welco turns your monitors' alert emails into texts and sends nights to the person on call. It won't call phones, escalate or track acknowledgments. If your team depends on those, keep PagerDuty for them.

Does Welco charge for each admin who gets alert texts?

No. Welco has no per-user fees, so adding a fifth or a fifteenth admin adds no seat fee. Plans are priced in US dollars, and credits go by text length, so short alerts cost the least. The 7-day trial with 15 credits lets you watch real monitor alerts land before you pick one of the Welco plans.

Can I run Welco and PagerDuty at the same time?

Yes. Most monitors can email more than one address. Add your Welco address beside the PagerDuty one, then compare for a few weeks. Many teams keep PagerDuty for a few critical services and send everything else to Welco as plain texts.

Will Welco call my phone the way PagerDuty can?

No. Welco sends text messages only, and it never places a phone call. If a voice call is the only thing that wakes your on-call admin, PagerDuty's phone notifications are a better fit for those alerts.

Which of my monitors can feed Welco instead of PagerDuty?

Any tool that can send an email. Teams send from Nagios, PRTG, Zabbix, LibreNMS, WhatsUp Gold and APC UPS cards today. If your tool can email an alert, it can send to Welco. Cloud tools with no email option are better served by PagerDuty's integration directory.

What do I give up by moving texts from PagerDuty to Welco?

You give up phone calls, escalation, schedules and incident tracking. You keep the part many small teams use most: a short text to the right admin when a monitor fires. If nobody on your team opens PagerDuty's incident pages, you may not miss much. If they do, keep it for those services.

Keep the texts, drop the seat count

Point your monitor's alert email at Welco and the on-call admin gets the text.

Text my team our server alertsBook a demo

7-day free trial, 15 message creditsCard required for verificationNo charge for 7 daysEmail reminder before billing