alertescalation.com Add your tool
Lists / Alert routing and correlation

Best alert routing tools in 2026

The layer between monitoring and people: grouping, deduplication, silences, correlation and routing rules across many alert sources. This list has the top 5 of 9 alert routing tools, ranked by a published score. Of these, 4 are open source, 4 have a free plan and 4 can be self-hosted. Checked by hand on 30 September 2026.

How this list is ranked

Each active tool gets a score out of 100. Archived, end-of-sale and maintenance-only tools are left out.

  • Capabilities: up to 75 points for the share of the category checklist that the tool's own documentation confirms. A tool meeting 8 of 10 items gets 60.
  • Free to start: 15 points for a free plan or a free edition.
  • Open or self-hostable: 10 points if it is open source or can be self-hosted.

Each category has a fixed checklist of capabilities (shown in the table below and on every tool page). An item counts only when the tool's own documentation confirms it; anything we could not confirm counts as not met. How long a tool has existed is deliberately not scored, so a new tool is not ranked below an older one for being new. Tools with the same score share a rank (shown as =), are listed A to Z within it, and the list never cuts between them. Nobody pays for a position.

  1. 1

    Keep

    Open source alert management tool that pulls alerts from many monitoring sources, deduplicates and correlates them, and runs workflows on them. Acquired by Elastic in 2025.

    Free plan Open source (MIT) Self-hosted Alert routingRunbooks
    93 9 of 10 capabilities (68), free 15, open 10
  2. =2

    Alerta

    Self-hosted alert console that collects alerts from Prometheus, Nagios, Zabbix, CloudWatch and others, deduplicates and correlates them, and shows them in one web UI with an API and CLI.

    Free Open source (Apache-2.0) Self-hosted Alert routingDashboards
    85 8 of 10 capabilities (60), free 15, open 10
  3. =2

    Prometheus Alertmanager

    Receives alerts from Prometheus and compatible systems, then groups, deduplicates, silences and routes them to email, Slack, PagerDuty, webhooks and other receivers.

    Free Open source (Apache-2.0) Self-hosted Alert routingNotifications
    85 8 of 10 capabilities (60), free 15, open 10
  4. 4

    Robusta

    Kubernetes alert enrichment and routing on top of Prometheus: adds pod logs, events and graphs to alerts and sends them to Slack, Teams and other sinks. Open source core plus a paid SaaS.

    Free plan Open source (MIT) Self-hosted KubernetesAlert routing
    70 6 of 10 capabilities (45), free 15, open 10
  5. 5

    BigPanda

    Event correlation platform for large IT operations teams that ingests alerts from many monitoring tools, groups related ones into incidents and adds topology and change context.

    Paid Alert routing
    68 9 of 10 capabilities (68), free 0, open 0

Side by side

Tool Pricing Free plan Open source Self-hosted Many alert sourcesDeduplicationGrouping or correlationSilences or maintenanceRouting rulesInhibition or dependenciesEnrichmentHands off to on-callAlert consoleTwo-way sync
Keep Free plan Yes Yes Yes YesYesYesYesYes-YesYesYesYes
Alerta Free Yes Yes Yes YesYesYesYes--YesYesYesYes
Prometheus Alertmanager Free Yes Yes Yes YesYesYesYesYesYes-YesYes-
Robusta Free plan Yes Yes Yes Yes-YesYesYes-YesYes--
BigPanda Paid No No No YesYesYesYesYes-YesYesYesYes

Yes: confirmed in the tool's documentation. No: documented as not offered. -: not confirmed. Plans and prices change; check each tool's own site before you decide.

More lists