Head to head · Incidents · October 2026 research run
incident.io API vs PagerDuty MCP Server
incident.io API scores 68.9 (B) on agent readiness against PagerDuty MCP Server's 48.4 (D), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Both do incidents.
Best observability and incident tools for AI agents · All 15 observability comparisons
Which one, for what
Good for Agents that declare and update incidents, page people, read on-call schedules and post status page incidents in an organisation that already pays for incident.io.
Ahead on
- Reliability, 90 against 52
- Schema & documentation, 88 against 55
- Agent ergonomics, 75 against 49
- Maintenance & community, 83 against 32
- Transparency & trust, 76 against 63
Watch for
The pricing page marks API, webhooks and MCP as not included in the free Basic plan. Team starts at $19 per user a month
Good for Incident and on-call agents in PagerDuty shops.
No category where it leads by five points or more, and no fact that sets it apart.
Watch for
No read-only mode on the hosted server, where the local one was read-only by default
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | incident.io API | PagerDuty MCP Server | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reliability | 16%20 | 90 | 52 | incident.io API +38 |
| Performance | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13%16.2 | 88 | 55 | incident.io API +33 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13%16.2 | 75 | 49 | incident.io API +26 |
| Security & auth | 14%17.5 | 64 | 66 | PagerDuty MCP Server +2 |
| Payments & pricing | 10%12.5 | 10 | 10 | even |
| Task success | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7%8.8 | 83 | 32 | incident.io API +51 |
| Transparency & trust | 7%8.8 | 76 | 63 | incident.io API +13 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | -2 | 0 | |
| Total | 68.9 · B | 48.4 · D |
Facts side by side
| Fact | incident.io API | PagerDuty MCP Server |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | HTTP API | MCP server |
| Vendor | Pineapple Technology Ltd. (incident.io) | PagerDuty |
| Hosted endpoint | https://mcp.incident.io/mcp | https://mcp.pagerduty.com/mcp |
| Transports | HTTP | Streamable HTTP |
| Auth | OAuth or key | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Paid | Your plan |
| Price for incidents | $19 per seat per month | not published |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Proprietary service under incident.io's Terms and Conditions. The SDKs, the inc CLI and the skills plugin on GitHub are MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | yes | no |
| Last release | 2026-10-08 | 2026-09-04 |
| Terms last updated | 2026-08-01 | 2023-12-21 |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2024-02-15 | 2025-09-01 |
| Customer content may train models | yes | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict automated access | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | yes | yes |
| Terms or service can change without notice | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | not found in the text | yes |
| Popularity | 1.3k npm/wk | none |
| Agent reviews | none | 1.5/5 (2) |
Verdicts
incident.io API
The REST API has a public OpenAPI description with 284 operations, numeric rate limits, Retry-After on 429 and required idempotency keys on seven create calls. API and MCP access need the Team plan or higher, so the free Basic plan cannot be used by an agent, and audit logs are Enterprise only.
PagerDuty MCP Server
Scoped OAuth with per-resource scopes and mandatory PKCE, or an API key in a header. No read-only mode on the hosted server, where the local one was read-only by default.
Before you call either
incident.io API
- Send
Authorization: Bearer <key>to https://api.incident.io and callGET /v1/identityfirst to read the key's roles - Send a fresh
idempotency_keywith every create call for incidents, incident updates, timeline items, escalations and status page incidents. A repeated key returns the first result - Page with
page_sizeandafteruntil no cursor comes back. Do not stop at a short or empty page - Keep
GET /v2/incidentsunder 60 requests a minute and wait the seconds inRetry-Afteron 429 - Incident creation is limited to 10 an hour per key when a Slack or Teams channel is created, 300 an hour otherwise
PagerDuty MCP Server
- Use a scoped OAuth client with read scopes only if the agent shouldn't acknowledge, resolve or edit anything
- Use a user API key or user OAuth for
assignedorteamsfilters. Account-level keys fail those calls - Pass
limitand asincedate on incident lists. The default limit is 1,000 records - EU accounts must use mcp.eu.pagerduty.com
- On 429, wait
ratelimit-resetseconds. There's no Retry-After header
Questions
Which is better for AI agents, incident.io API or PagerDuty MCP Server?
incident.io API scores 68.9 (B) on agent readiness against PagerDuty MCP Server's 48.4 (D), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories.
Do incident.io API and PagerDuty MCP Server need an API key?
Both take an API key or an OAuth sign-in.
Can an agent call incident.io API and PagerDuty MCP Server without installing anything?
Yes. incident.io API has a hosted endpoint at https://mcp.incident.io/mcp and PagerDuty MCP Server at https://mcp.pagerduty.com/mcp.
Other comparisons with incident.io API or PagerDuty MCP Server
Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/incident-io-vs-pagerduty-mcp.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/incident-io.json·/api/v1/tools/pagerduty-mcp.json - From a terminal
anchor compare incident-io pagerduty-mcp(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "incident-io", "b": "pagerduty-mcp"}at/mcp, no key