When should you choose Rootly?

Incident management and the AI SRE should be one product. Every tool call the agent makes should be logged. You want core plans at a public per user price. Graded by Agentic Index against the same capability axes from each vendor's own published materials. No vendor pays for placement.

When should you choose Traversal?

The system must run on premises or in your own cloud. You need to bring your own model. Actions and memories should wait for approval. Graded by Agentic Index against the same capability axes from each vendor's own published materials. No vendor pays for placement.

How much do Rootly and Traversal cost?

Rootly: Incident Response Essentials and On-Call Essentials at $20 per user per month each. Enterprise and AI SRE are quoted through sales.. Traversal: Contact sales. Investigations are metered in credits, and no rates are published.. Graded by Agentic Index against the same capability axes from each vendor's own published materials. No vendor pays for placement.

Agentic Index

Rootly vs Traversal (2026)

Q: Is Rootly or Traversal better?

Rootly and Traversal both keep memory across incidents. Rootly is an AI native incident management platform whose AI SRE runs on matching alerts, tests competing hypotheses over a knowledge graph with a logged tool call trail and keeps team scoped memory. Incident Response Essentials and On-Call Essentials cost $20 per user a month apiece, and the AI SRE is quoted separately. Traversal is an enterprise AI SRE built on a causal Production World Model, with proactive Workers in Slack and Teams, approval before memories are kept, bring your own model and on premises or BYOC deployment. Choose Rootly to run the incident and the AI SRE together. Choose Traversal to run on your own infrastructure with your own model. Graded by Agentic Index against the same capability axes from each vendor's own published materials. No vendor pays for placement.

Rootly last verified September 29, 2026·Traversal last verified October 22, 2026

Rootly and Traversal both keep memory across incidents. That verdict is the Agentic Index coverage score, graded from each vendor's own published materials.

Rootly is an AI native incident management platform whose AI SRE runs on matching alerts, tests competing hypotheses over a knowledge graph with a logged tool call trail and keeps team scoped memory. Incident Response Essentials and On-Call Essentials cost $20 per user a month apiece, and the AI SRE is quoted separately. Traversal is an enterprise AI SRE built on a causal Production World Model, with proactive Workers in Slack and Teams, approval before memories are kept, bring your own model and on premises or BYOC deployment. Choose Rootly to run the incident and the AI SRE together. Choose Traversal to run on your own infrastructure with your own model.

On the Agentic Index production ops ranking, neither Rootly nor Traversal clears the bar, which asks for all five resolution loop capabilities documented in full. Rootly does not document human oversight and guardrails in full; Traversal does not document workflow orchestration in full, nor observability and auditability. 15 of the 38 vendors in the lane clear it. See the production ops ranking

This comparison is published by Agentic Index, an independent agentic AI vendor research platform. Rootly and Traversal are each graded against the same 14 capability Agentic Index taxonomy, from the vendor's own public materials under the Agentic Index verification standard, alongside 1,084 researched vendors. No vendor pays for placement and no vendor has reviewed this page. How this evidence is graded

At a glance

Rootly

Category: SRE / DevOps agent
Entry price: Incident Response Essentials and On-Call Essentials at $20 per user per month each. Enterprise and AI SRE are quoted through sales.
Free or trial: Two week trial, which Rootly can extend. Startup discounts up to 50 percent off, and pay what you can under 25 employees.
Pricing confidence: public partial

Traversal

Category: SRE / DevOps agent
Entry price: Contact sales. Investigations are metered in credits, and no rates are published.
Free or trial: Enterprise evaluations and paid proofs of value through sales. No self serve trial.
Pricing confidence: contact only

Keep exploring

Choose Rootly if

Incident management and the AI SRE should be one product.
Every tool call the agent makes should be logged.
You want core plans at a public per user price.

Choose Traversal if

The system must run on premises or in your own cloud.
You need to bring your own model.
Actions and memories should wait for approval.

Feature	R Rootly	T Traversal
Action & orchestration
Integrations & Tool Calling Ability to connect agents to real systems through native integrations, OAuth-authenticated actions, custom tools, APIs, webhooks, or MCP-compatible tools.
RootlyIntegrations & Tool Calling AI SRE tests hypotheses through tool calls to connected observability, cloud and code tools (Datadog, Grafana, New Relic, Dynatrace, Sumo Logic, AWS, Google Cloud, GitHub). Custom tools and a Private Agent can change state where exposed, and workflow actions act in Slack and other systems. Sourcedocs.rootly.com/ai/ai-sre/overviewread 2026-09-29
TraversalIntegrations & Tool Calling Traversal connects to about 30 observability tools (Datadog including RUM and Flex Logs, Dynatrace, Splunk, Grafana, Prometheus, CloudWatch, AppDynamics, Sentry) plus AWS, Azure Resource Manager and Monitor, Azure DevOps, Kubernetes through scoped read only kubectl, GitHub, GitLab, Confluence, Notion, Jira, Linear, ServiceNow, PagerDuty, incident.io, FireHydrant, Slack, Teams and external MCP servers, which it queries with scoped read access. SourceTraversal docs llms.txt index and changelog; docs.traversal.com/changelogread 2026-10-22
Workflow Orchestration Ability to sequence, branch, retry, route, and combine deterministic workflow nodes with autonomous agent steps.
RootlyWorkflow Orchestration Workflows combine trigger events, run conditions and sequenced actions with waits and repeats across six types (incident, alert, action item, pulse, retrospective, standalone), and AI SRE runs an evidence first loop that tests competing hypotheses through many tool calls before a verdict. Sourcedocs.rootly.com/workflows/workflowsread 2026-09-29
TraversalWorkflow Orchestration The Causal Search Engine walks the Production World Model across many hops, and Workers take plain language instructions and schedules per channel. There is no multi step builder, branching or coordination between agents, and the investigation flow is Traversal's own. Sourcedocs.traversal.com/using-traversal/workersread 2026-10-22
Triggers & Channel Coverage How agents wake up and where they work: schedules, webhooks, message events, CRM events, inbox events, chat, email, voice, and collaboration tools.
RootlyTriggers & Channel Coverage Investigations start when an incident is created or when an investigation rule set to Auto-run matches an alert as it arrives, with no person involved. Alert and incident workflows fire on trigger events and schedules, across Slack, Teams, web and mobile. Sourcedocs.rootly.com/ai/ai-sre/overviewread 2026-09-29
TraversalTriggers & Channel Coverage Workers act without being asked. Incident Workers activate when high severity incidents are declared, Alert Workers monitor alert channels continuously, and Custom Workers run on plain language missions and schedules, in Slack and Microsoft Teams. Auto deploy rules start Workers in new channels, and in Teams a Worker can join meetings whose names match a rule. Sourcedocs.traversal.com/using-traversal/workersread 2026-10-22
Knowledge & context
Knowledge Grounding & RAG Ability to ground agent behavior in company data through document ingestion, retrieval, external knowledge APIs, semantic search, or RAG layers.
RootlyKnowledge Grounding & RAG The Atlas knowledge graph persists services, datastores, cloud resources and their dependencies, built from catalogs, infrastructure as code, cloud platforms and observability tools, refreshed on connector or catalog changes and daily, and AI SRE reads the graph during investigations. Sourcedocs.rootly.com/ai/atlas/knowledge-graphread 2026-09-29
TraversalKnowledge Grounding & RAG The Production World Model is a continuously updated, AI readable, causal representation of the production system, exposed as a Wiki regenerated as the environment changes with history kept, beside searchable uploaded docs and runbooks in the Knowledge Bank. Uploaded PDFs are read including their diagrams, and a Skill can be attached to any investigation. Sourcedocs.traversal.com/using-traversal/knowledge-bankread 2026-10-22
Memory & State Persistence Ability to persist context across a run, conversation, workflow, user, team, or longer-term memory layer.
RootlyMemory & State Persistence Atlas Memory holds context notes that AI SRE proposes from its runs and an Owner or Admin activates. Notes are scoped to a team, so investigations on other teams cannot recall them. They do not expire, can be edited, deprecated or quarantined, and are recalled only when Active as hypotheses to check. Sourcedocs.rootly.com/ai/atlas/memoryread 2026-09-29
TraversalMemory & State Persistence Memories are learnings the agent drafts mid investigation when corrected or told to remember, and they are kept only after a person approves, in an organization wide Knowledge Bank where knowledge persists indefinitely. Traversal does not say how a memory is deleted. Sourcedocs.traversal.com/using-traversal/knowledge-bankread 2026-10-22
Control & trust
Human Oversight & Guardrails Approval steps, consent checkpoints, escalation rules, structured guardrails, policy constraints, and pause/resume controls.
RootlyHuman Oversight & Guardrails The customer constrains AI SRE by the tools it exposes and by Private Agent local policy, but Rootly warns not to treat AI SRE as read-only. Custom tools and private agent operations run without a confirmation step, results carry no approval buttons, and changes go through the customer's own review. Sourcedocs.rootly.com/ai/ai-sre/overviewread 2026-09-29
TraversalHuman Oversight & Guardrails Traversal cannot change a customer's systems or data unless the customer grants it write access, and integrations are read only by default. Self healing is an option a customer turns on, after which Traversal drafts a fix as a pull request for review and checks it against production. Workers never modify alerting, paging or routing, and memory proposals are kept only when a person approves. Sourcedocs.traversal.com/responsible-use/securityread 2026-10-22
Security, Identity & Governance RBAC, SSO, auditability, encryption, least-privilege tool access, compliance posture, and data handling policy.
RootlySecurity, Identity & Governance Access controls include granular RBAC across incident roles, services, teams and components, SSO and SAML on Essentials, and SCIM and audit logs on Enterprise. Compliance covers AICPA SOC 2 Type 2, HIPAA, GDPR and CCPA. Sourcerootly.com/securityread 2026-09-29
TraversalSecurity, Identity & Governance Customers sign in with SSO over OIDC or SAML 2.0, with Member and Admin roles and invite only or domain based access. Service accounts give scripts and MCP clients an organization owned identity with a role and rotating keys. SCIM is not supported, and Traversal publishes no audit log. SOC 2 Type II sits alongside GDPR and HIPAA alignment, third party penetration testing and a trust center. Sourcedocs.traversal.com/get-started/authenticationread 2026-10-22
Observability & Auditability Traces, logs, execution histories, metrics, audit events, and debugging detail for production agent behavior.
RootlyObservability & Auditability Each AI SRE result keeps an Investigation path of hypotheses confirmed or ruled out, the query sent and result returned for every tool call, and evidence cards with sources, and finished reports stay as written. Sourcedocs.rootly.com/ai/ai-sre/reading-the-resultread 2026-09-29
TraversalObservability & Auditability A result shows the root cause with confidence, evidence citations linking to source tools, anomalies and an incident timeline. Each Worker keeps an activity feed of its channel's messages and the tool calls it makes, and admins can review service account sessions from the last seven days. Traversal publishes no audit log of actions and no retention period for these records. Sourcedocs.traversal.com/using-traversal/worker-featuresread 2026-10-22
Deployment & Data Residency Deployment modes and options, including SaaS, dedicated cloud, VPC, on-prem, hybrid, local runtime, and self-hosting.
RootlyDeployment & Data Residency Rootly runs entirely on AWS, with no region named or selectable. The Private Agent and Edge Connector run in the customer's network only to give the cloud service outbound access, and their results enter Rootly's systems. Sourcedocs.rootly.com/configuration/subprocessorsread 2026-09-29
TraversalDeployment & Data Residency Deployment options are private on premises, Bring Your Own Cloud with data residency in the customer's cloud account, single tenant SaaS and PrivateLink. SourceTraversal security page and docs llms.txt index (deployment options); traversal.com/securityread 2026-10-22
Solution readiness
Prebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Ready-made workflows, packaged employees, templates, blueprints, industry solutions, and role-specific agents that reduce time-to-value.
RootlyPrebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Three separately sold products each do their own job, Incident Response, On-Call and AI SRE, and AI SRE is offered for use with Rootly or standalone, so each stands on its own. There is no workflow template library. Sourcerootly.com/pricingread 2026-09-29
TraversalPrebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Incident, Alert and Custom Workers are variants of one worker product deployed to different channels, and Skills are procedures the customer's team writes. Traversal offers a prompt library but no agent or template catalog. Sourcedocs.traversal.com/using-traversal/workersread 2026-10-22
Platform extensibility
Model Flexibility & Routing Ability to work across multiple foundation models, route tasks to different models, or let buyers bring their own providers and keys.
RootlyModel Flexibility & Routing OpenAI, Anthropic and Amazon Bedrock are named for inference, with Braintrust as an AI gateway routing LLM requests. That is multi provider routing inside Rootly, and customers cannot choose a model. Sourcedocs.rootly.com/configuration/subprocessorsread 2026-09-29
TraversalModel Flexibility & Routing With Bring Your Own Model, customers run Traversal with their preferred LLMs, including self hosted or customer managed models. Sourcetraversal.com/securityread 2026-10-22
APIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility Composability layer: stable APIs, SDKs, MCP tool consumption/serving, custom tools, and integration into internal systems.
RootlyAPIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility A REST API at api.rootly.com/v1 (JSON:API) with bearer API keys or OAuth 2.0 covers incidents, alerts, schedules and escalation policies, alongside a Chat API for AI, a downloadable OpenAPI specification, official SDKs and a Rootly MCP server. Sourcedocs.rootly.com/api-reference/overviewread 2026-09-29
TraversalAPIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility An API at api.traversal.com uses API key authentication and covers anything a member can do in the web app, including a Sessions API (create, list, get, stream, follow up) and a Knowledge Files API (create, replace, delete), plus MCP access that lets coding agents check a change against production. Service accounts hold keys for scripts and pipelines. Sourcedocs.traversal.com/api/overviewread 2026-10-22
Testing, Debugging & Optimization Testing, debugging, scoring, retries, fallbacks, quality gates, and optimization loops for improving agent workflows before and after deployment.
RootlyTesting, Debugging & Optimization Users rate each result on how accurate the investigation was and add comments, and reruns create new investigations beside the old ones, but a rating does not change the report, and there is no evaluation harness, scored test set or learning loop. Rootly AI Labs benchmarks are the vendor's own research. Sourcedocs.rootly.com/ai/ai-sre/overviewread 2026-09-29
TraversalTesting, Debugging & Optimization Traversal publishes its own benchmarks on high severity production incidents as marketing. Customers get no evaluation harness, scored test or rerun comparison. Sourcedocs.traversal.com/using-traversal/understanding-resultsread 2026-10-22
Specialist automation
Browser & Computer Use Browser, desktop, or remote/local computer control for workflows that cannot be handled through stable APIs alone.
RootlyBrowser & Computer Use Work runs through tool calls, workflows, a Private Agent, an API and an MCP server, with no browser, desktop or computer control. Sourcedocs.rootly.com/ai/ai-sre/overviewread 2026-09-29
TraversalBrowser & Computer Use Traversal works through observability and code integrations, Slack, Teams, an API and MCP, with no browser, desktop or computer control. Sourcedocs.traversal.com/using-traversal/workersread 2026-10-22

Pricing snapshot

Sourced from the Index pricing dataset · open each vendor's profile for full detail.

Pricing	R Rootly	T Traversal
Entry price Lowest public entry point	Incident Response Essentials and On-Call Essentials at $20 per user per month each. Enterprise and AI SRE are quoted through sales.	Contact sales. Investigations are metered in credits, and no rates are published.
Pricing confidence How public the numbers are	Public, partial	Contact only
Billing Primary billing axis	Seats, per user per month, for Incident Response and On-Call, with each product priced separately. Enterprise tiers and AI SRE are custom priced, per product or bundled.	Credits per investigation. The credit cost and contract terms are set through sales.
Variable cost Workload / overage exposure	Low variable cost	Medium variable cost
Free tier / trial Try before you buy	No free tierTrial	No free tierTrial
Buying motion Self-serve vs sales call	Sales call	Sales call
Pricing verified When this pricing was last checked	Sep 29, 2026	Oct 22, 2026

Product updates

Newest first, each linked to its source.

Rootly

October 28, 2026 · Agent capability

Responders can now mention @Rootly in Slack to find who is on call for any team, now or when an incident started, and to create a schedule override or post a shift for a teammate to pick up.
Source
October 7, 2026 · Human approval / guardrails

AI Instructions are now available in every Rootly organization: admins set a global instruction plus instructions for each feature that the Rootly Agent, incident summaries, AI in Retrospectives and Proactive Intelligence follow.
Source
September 23, 2026 · Workflow orchestration

Rootly added workflow actions that create Slack Canvases and update them as incident status, severity, roles, and tasks change.
Source

All 6 Rootly updates →

Traversal

October 14, 2026 · Integrations

Traversal investigations can now connect to Azure Resource Manager and Azure Monitor through one connection, covering resource inventory and configuration, change history, health, identity metadata and Azure Monitor logs and metrics, authenticated through Microsoft Entra Workload Identity Federation with reader roles on chosen subscriptions.
Source
October 2, 2026 · Integrations

Traversal's investigation agent can now query Datadog Real User Monitoring to count affected users and isolate a regression by route, release, browser, device or region, then follow the trail into backend traces and logs.
Source
September 16, 2026 · Integrations

Traversal launched a Microsoft Teams integration that brings its AI SRE into Teams, connected to the same Production World Model as its web and Slack surfaces.
Source