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    Runbook automation that is not a bolt-on, or a per-seat bill.

    Rundeck did runbook automation before most people had a word for it, and PagerDuty's incident integration is genuinely good. The difference is what you pay as the team grows, and whether the product is somebody's main business.

    Rundeck’s commercial edition is PagerDuty Runbook Automation: $125 per user per month plus a platform fee for the hosted product, and a quote for self-hosted. PagerDuty pricing, checked 24 September 2026.

    PagerDuty acquired Rundeck in October 2020. Open-source Rundeck is still released (v6.2.1, September 2026).

    Claims about other products verified . Each one is sourced on this page.

    Flat pricingNo per-seat billAccess grants in the UIStandalone roadmap
    The money

    Per user is the part that compounds.

    10 people, theirs

    ~$15K

    per year, plus platform fee and every notified user

    10 people, ours

    Flat

    per organization, quoted against the team

    Adding a person inside a band

    $0

    bands of up to 10 and up to 50 users

    Per-seat pricing quietly discourages the thing automation is supposed to enable: giving more of the team safe access to the runbooks. PagerDuty counts every person added to the account as a paid user, including people who only receive notifications, with cheaper stakeholder licences for read-only access. Flat pricing does not make you choose between the budget and the access model.

    Day one

    What each one costs before it runs a command.

    Rundeck's own system requirements, against ours. The figures on the left are quoted from their documentation, not estimated by us.

    Rundeck
    1. 1Java 17 or later (supported through Java 25)
    2. 2A production database: MariaDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server or Oracle
    3. 316GB RAM and 4 CPUs minimum per instance (8GB and 2 CPUs absolute minimum), 32GB and 8 CPUs recommended
    4. 4A server to run it on, with ports 4440 and 4443 exposed
    5. 5Patch and upgrade the JVM, the database and Rundeck itself from then on

    Their docs warn against the embedded H2 database in production, so the database is not optional at any real size.

    Rundeck system requirements
    Opafra
    1. 1Sign in
    2. 2Add one line to authorized_keys on a host
    3. 3Run something

    No JVM, no database, no server of ours. Nothing runs on your hosts either.

    Feature by feature
    CapabilityOpafraPD Runbook Automation
    Pricing modelPer organization, by user bandPer user, plus a platform fee
    10-person team, per yearPer organization, by user bandAbout $15,000 plus platform fee
    Cost of adding a personNothing inside a user band (up to 10, then up to 50)Another paid user; read-only stakeholders on a cheaper licence
    AI that drafts the automationA plan that only dry-runs until a person keeps itAdvertises AI-generated runbooks
    Access controlPer-environment grants, in the UIACL policy files
    Time-limited access grantsYesNot documented
    Run-to-run diffYesNot documented
    Environment derived from the targetsYesNot documented
    Hosted optionYesYes
    Self-hosted optionCustomer-hosted execution on EnterpriseYes
    Contractual SLAEnterprise planYes
    Plugin catalogModules, smallerYears of plugins

    Sources: PagerDuty pricing, Rundeck: community versus enterprise, Rundeck documentation. Last verified September 2026

    The acquisition

    Runbook automation is a feature of somebody's incident product now.

    PagerDuty acquired Rundeck in 2020, and the product that came out of it is sold as part of an incident-response platform. That is not a criticism. If your team lives in PagerDuty and the thing you want is to attach a runbook to an incident so a responder can press it at 3am, the integration is the whole point and it works.

    It does change what you should expect from the roadmap. Runbook Automation earns its investment by making incident response better, so the features that get attention are the ones on that path. Scheduled maintenance across a fleet, change approval for planned work, and a record an auditor will accept are adjacent concerns rather than the main one.

    Rundeck Community is still there and still free, and for a team that wants a job runner with a web UI it remains a reasonable answer. What sits in the commercial bundles is the part that matters at scale: high availability, clustering and the advanced ACLs. That is a normal open-core split and worth knowing before you plan around the community edition.

    Community versus enterprise

    Rundeck's own page says what the free edition does not get.

    Rundeck Community is free, maintained, and not going anywhere. That should be said plainly because a page like this one has an incentive to imply otherwise, and it would be false. PagerDuty still ships it, and it works.

    What is worth reading closely is Rundeck’s own community-versus-enterprise page, because the line it draws is not where a free-tier line usually sits. The things held back are not luxuries. Single sign-on is enterprise. Failed job resume and retry on failed nodes are enterprise. Missed job fires, the feature that tells you a scheduled run did not happen, is enterprise. So is the GUI for building access rules.

    Read that list as an operations team rather than as a feature matrix. It says the free edition runs jobs and stops there. The moment you need to know a job did not fire, resume one that died halfway, or let people in through your identity provider rather than a local password, you are on the enterprise track, and that track is priced per user at $125 a month for the hosted product, with the self-hosted one quote-only.

    That is a legitimate way to run an open-core product and we are not criticising it. We are pointing at which side of the line the things you will need in month three sit on, because the community edition is genuinely good at exactly the demo that gets it adopted, and the bill arrives with the second requirement.

    Our plans include roles and time-limited grants on every tier, single sign-on from Business up, and a run record that says what did and did not happen, priced per organization rather than per person. The features Rundeck gates behind enterprise are the features an ops team asks for first, and pricing them by the seat is what makes the eleventh engineer a budget conversation.

    Enterprise-only, per their comparison: single sign-on, high availability clusters, failed job resume, retry failed nodes, missed job fires, job queuing, the GUI ACL builder, and the certified PagerDuty, ServiceNow, Datadog and GitHub plugins.
    Rundeck: community versus enterpriseChecked September 2026
    Per user, at that price

    What $125 per user per month implies about who it is for.

    Hosted Runbook Automation lists at $125 per user per month plus a platform fee. Self-hosted is quote-only. Those are their published numbers and they tell you who the product is designed for: a small group of specialists operating runbooks on behalf of everyone else.

    That model works until the people who should be running the change are not the people holding seats. Then you get the pattern every operations team recognises: a queue in front of the two engineers with access, and a set of changes that go around the tool entirely because waiting was worse.

    We price per organization by user band rather than per seat, which is a deliberate bet that more of your team should be able to run a governed change, not fewer. An approval gate is a better control than a licence you cannot afford to hand out. If your team is genuinely five specialists and will stay that way, the per-seat price may work out fine and the arithmetic is worth doing honestly.

    The other side

    When PagerDuty Runbook Automation is the right choice

    • You live in PagerDuty incidents end to end. Triggering automation directly from an incident, with the same on-call graph, is real gravity and we do not match it.
    • You depend on specific long-standing plugins. Their catalog has years on ours.
    • You require a self-hosted control plane as a standard option. Customer-hosted execution is on Enterprise, and a self-hosted install of the whole product is not offered.
    Facts
    • PagerDuty Runbook Automation lists at $125 per user per month plus a platform fee for the hosted product; the self-hosted variant, Runbook Automation Self-Hosted, is quote-only. PagerDuty automation pricing
    • Every person added to a PagerDuty account is a paid user, including those who only receive notifications; read-only stakeholder licences are sold separately at a lower price (checked 24 September 2026). PagerDuty automation pricing
    • PagerDuty advertises AI-generated runbooks for Runbook Automation (checked 24 September 2026). Rundeck: community versus enterprise
    • Rundeck's own comparison lists single sign-on, high availability, failed job resume, missed job fires, job queuing and the GUI ACL builder as enterprise-only; the community edition covers workflow execution, basic scheduling and job logs. Rundeck: community versus enterprise

    Last verified September 2026

    Questions

    What people ask before switching

    Is Rundeck still Rundeck, or is it PagerDuty now?
    Both, and the naming is genuinely confusing. Rundeck Community is the open-source product. The commercial hosted product is PagerDuty Runbook Automation, and the self-hosted commercial variant is Runbook Automation Self-Hosted, formerly Process Software. "Process Automation" was the older umbrella name and you will still find it in older write-ups, including, until recently, this page.
    Rundeck Community is free. Why would I pay for anything?
    If it fits, do not. Community covers job definitions, scheduling and node execution, and plenty of teams never outgrow it. What it does not cover, per Rundeck’s own comparison page, is single sign-on, failed-job resume, missed job fires, high availability and the GUI for access rules. The honest comparison is not free against paid, it is free plus the JVM, the database and the person maintaining them, against a flat bill that includes the things on that list.
    Does Rundeck not already do approvals?
    Rundeck has ACLs and job-level controls, and you can build an approval step into a job. As with AWX, that means coverage is whatever each job author remembered. Opafra attaches the gate to the environment instead, so a plan written next month is gated without anyone adding anything to it.
    What about the plugin catalog?
    Rundeck wins this one and it is not close. Years of node sources, notification plugins and step plugins, including cloud inventory sources we do not have. If your workflow depends on a specific plugin, check that first, because our module library is much younger.
    Can I run Opafra self-hosted like Rundeck?
    Not as an off-the-shelf install. On Enterprise, customer-hosted execution runs the execution layer in your own network. If a fully self-hosted control plane is a hard procurement requirement then Rundeck Community or Runbook Automation Self-Hosted is the straightforward answer. The trade-off runs the other way too: with the hosted product there is no control plane for you to operate, patch or keep highly available.

    Give the whole team the plans, not the seats.

    Priced per organization by user band, so adding a person inside a band changes nothing, and the runbook stops living in one person’s terminal.

    Get a demoSee pricing