Side-by-side criteria
| Criterion | IncidentRelay | Grafana OnCall / Grafana Cloud IRM |
|---|---|---|
| Project status | Actively developed open-source project with public tags, changelog and documentation. | Grafana says the OnCall OSS project is archived as of 2026-03-24; active development continues in Grafana Cloud IRM. |
| Deployment model | Designed to be self-hosted inside your own infrastructure. | Best current fit is Grafana Cloud IRM for teams already standardizing on Grafana Cloud. |
| Alert routing | Route intake tokens, source checks, label matchers, grouping and service ownership. | Routing and escalation are tied into the Grafana OnCall / IRM workflow and Grafana ecosystem. |
| Scheduling | Rotations, layers, overrides, escalation policies and calendar visibility. | On-call schedules, notification preferences and shift swaps are part of the Grafana on-call workflow. |
| Operational trade-off | You own hosting, upgrades, backups and observability of the on-call system. | Grafana Cloud reduces self-hosting work but puts the incident workflow inside a vendor-hosted platform. |
When IncidentRelay is the better fit
Choose IncidentRelay when you want an actively developed self-hosted system, inspectable source code, route tokens per intake path, and a smaller product focused on alert routing, scheduling, escalation and responder actions.
When Grafana may be the better fit
Choose Grafana Cloud IRM when your team already works in Grafana Cloud and wants incident response to live next to Grafana alerting, dashboards and the broader Grafana Cloud stack.
Source note
Check the current Grafana OnCall documentation before making a migration decision. Grafana OnCall is associated with Grafana Labs. IncidentRelay is not affiliated with Grafana Labs.