Tissue Mast vs Grafana OnCall
Grafana OnCall OSS was the free on-call tool a lot of small teams ran next to Alertmanager. It entered maintenance mode on 11 March 2025 and was archived on 24 March 2026. The repository points to Grafana Cloud IRM, which is free for three people.
Grafana Cloud IRM is free for up to three active IRM users a month. The Pro tier starts at $20 per active user and carries a $19 a month platform fee, so the fourth person turns $0 into about $99 a month.
Tissue Mast is $19 for one person, $79 for up to ten and $149 for up to 25, flat. The free account is one person with ten probes and ten vitals; the pager app itself is free with no account at all.
What each one is
Two sentences each, before any numbers.
- Grafana OnCall / Cloud IRM
- OnCall was the open-source on-call scheduler and escalation tool in the Grafana range, taking alerts from Alertmanager and Grafana Alerting. It is archived. Grafana Cloud IRM is the hosted successor, bundling on-call, incident response and SLOs inside Grafana Cloud, priced per active user.
- Tissue Mast
- An uptime monitor with a pager attached. Probes fetch your URLs from eight locations, vitals page you when a cron job does not check in, and a channel is a URL anything can post to. A page rings the Mast Pager app on iPhone through silent mode and Do Not Disturb, and escalates through a rotation until someone answers.
Side by side
Every figure below came off the other company’s own pages, on one day, and is dated underneath.
| Grafana OnCall | Tissue Mast | |
|---|---|---|
| The open-source version | Archived 24 March 2026; read-only, no maintenance. | Not open source. The API and the file format are public. |
| Free plan | Grafana Cloud IRM: up to 3 active IRM users a month. | Free: 10 probes checked every 5 minutes, 10 vitals, 10 channels, one person. |
| Paid plan | Pro: from $20 per active IRM user, plus a $19 a month platform fee. | Team, $79 a month or $790 a year, for up to 10 people. Company, $149 a month or $1,490 a year, for up to 25 people. |
| Three people | $0. | Team, $79 a month. |
| Four people | About $99 a month: four active users and the platform fee. | Team, $79 a month. |
| Ten people | About $219 a month. | Team, $79 a month. |
| Twenty-five people | About $519 a month. | Company, $149 a month. |
| Alerts from Alertmanager | Native. | A webhook receiver pointing at a channel URL. The channel is the integration. |
| Monitoring | Grafana Cloud’s own synthetic monitoring, metered separately. | Probes from eight locations and vitals for cron jobs, in every plan. |
| SMS and voice | Yes, in Cloud IRM. | No. The app rings; an unanswered page moves to the next person. |
Checked 2 October 2026 against Grafana’s pricing page and the archived OnCall repository. Both of us move; if a figure here has gone stale, tell us and we will correct it.
Where Grafana OnCall is the better choice
If you are already paying for Grafana Cloud, IRM is inside the bill you have, next to the dashboards and the alert rules, and three people on it cost nothing. That is a good deal for three people and nothing here beats it.
If your paging is driven by metrics, Grafana is where the metrics are. Tissue Mast watches URLs, ports and cron check-ins; it does not query Prometheus, and the page it sends carries what the probe saw, not your dashboard.
If you need SMS or a voice call, Cloud IRM has them and we do not.
Where Tissue Mast is the better choice
The fourth person. Three people is free on Cloud IRM and the fourth is about $99 a month. Team is $79 for up to ten, and the number does not change when the fifth arrives.
No metric stack required. A probe is a URL and an expected status; a vital is one curl at the end of a cron job. You do not need to run Alertmanager to get paged, though if you already do, a receiver pointing at a channel URL is the whole integration.
The pager is first-party. OnCall OSS reached a phone through a relay that was retired with the project; Mast Pager is our app, holds the Critical Alerts entitlement, and rings through Do Not Disturb until somebody acknowledges it.
What moving looks like
Alertmanager already speaks webhook. One receiver, pointed at a channel URL, and firing alerts ring the phone.
receivers: - name: mast webhook_configs: - url: https://mast.tissue.dev/mk_9f2a41c8b7?priority=page
The priority query parameter is what makes it a page rather than a notification. The manual covers the payload fields Mast reads from an Alertmanager post.
The free account is one person, ten probes and ten vitals, with no credit card. If three of you were on OnCall OSS, Team is $79 a month and the fourth person is included.