The stress, sudden disruptions, and high stakes of resolving issues while on call is one of the most challenging aspects of an engineer’s job. Many organizations, from startups to large enterprises, still struggle with their on-call experience, which leads to longer resolution times and lower employee retention rates. Constant context switching, managing multiple tools, and racing against time to resolve issues can cause frustration, burnout, and inefficiency.

Managing on-call schedules is a critical challenge for many industries, including healthcare, IT, customer support, and emergency services. As technology evolves, on-call scheduling software has become an essential tool for streamlining workflows, reducing burnout, and improving team efficiency. In 2025, the best on-call scheduling software not only simplifies schedule creation but also integrates with other tools, enhances communication, and ensures compliance with labor laws.

In today’s fast-paced business environment, ensuring that critical issues are addressed promptly is essential for maintaining operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. On-call management software plays a pivotal role in organizing and scheduling teams to respond to emergencies or urgent situations at any time, but especially after business hours when offices and operations centers are not or sparsely staffed.

For a fast-paced work environment, effective on-call management is crucial for maintaining seamless operations. Whether you’re in IT or any other industry that requires constant availability, the on-call system ensures that teams can respond to critical incidents efficiently. However, achieving optimal on-call management isn’t just about being available—it’s about collaboration, communication, and ensuring team health.

When things go wrong with your software systems, you need a reliable way to alert the right people and manage incidents. To help you make the best decision, we have summarized the G2 reviews of some of the most popular on-call management tools.

On-call rotations are crucial for ensuring that technical teams are ready to tackle incidents, outages, or emergencies outside of regular hours. (Check our detailed guide on understanding on-call rotations in incident management). This system assigns specific team members to be available for immediate response, ensuring someone is always on duty to address critical issues.

We’ve posted before about how engineers on call at Honeycomb aren’t expected to do project work, and that whenever they’re not dealing with interruptions, they’re free to work on whatever will make the on-call experience better. However, all of our engineering rotations rely on hand-off meetings where they update the Slack groups with everyone who’s on call. During my last shift, a small problem kept causing friction for some of our incident management automation.

Teams need robust scheduling tools that enable them to create and manage on-call rotations, ensuring that there's always someone available to respond to urgent issues. Round-robin scheduling is a common approach, where team members take turns being on call. ‍