Dust vs Rootly
Side-by-side trajectory, velocity, and editorial themes.
Dust is widening the agent-platform surface: multimodal tools, enterprise audit, model breadth.
Dust is shipping at a fast clip on three fronts that together define a serious agent platform: model breadth (Gemini 3.5 Flash, Grok 4.3, refreshed Anthropic lineup), agent capability (MCP tools can now return images the agent can actually see, plus context compaction for long runs), and enterprise readiness (workspace audit logs streamable to Datadog, Splunk, or any HTTPS sink). Integrations are getting versioned upgrades on the side (Asana MCP v2, Gmail labels and archive). The product is moving from 'chat with an agent' toward 'run agents in production with observability and multimodal I/O.'
Two clear directions: deeper enterprise GTM via SIEM-grade audit, and a more capable agent runtime that can see, remember, and act inside third-party SaaS. The MCP-image release in particular treats Model Context Protocol as a real I/O surface rather than a text-only RPC, which is where the broader MCP ecosystem is heading. Frequent model rotations suggest Dust is positioning as model-agnostic infrastructure rather than locking into one provider.
Next moves likely lean into the same arc: more MCP integrations with action verbs (write/delete/transition states), expanded multimodal returns (audio, structured documents), and finer-grained admin controls layered on top of the audit foundation - tool-usage policies, per-agent egress rules, or approval workflows.
Rootly is moving the incident workflow out of the dashboard and into the IDE.
Rootly is shipping steadily across three lanes: on-call ergonomics (SLA follow-ups, deferred paging, team heartbeats), AI surfaces (Claude Code and Cursor plugins), and enterprise plumbing (Google Workspace directory sync, deeper RBAC). The cadence is roughly one release per week and the changes are coherent rather than scattershot — each lane is building toward a recognizable end-state.
The on-call work is a maturation arc: features that used to be coarse (paging, heartbeats, follow-ups) are gaining ownership, scheduling, and SLA awareness. The AI work is the more interesting axis — pulling on-call context, retros, and incident state into Claude Code and Cursor signals that Rootly wants engineers to interact with the platform inside their editor, not by tabbing away to a separate UI.
Expect the IDE plugins to gain write-side actions next (acking pages, drafting retros, triggering runbooks from the editor), and on-call configuration to keep moving toward team-scoped, RBAC-aware defaults rather than global ones.
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