# FireHydrant vs Datadog On-Call: An Incident Management and On-Call comparison for 2026
Datadog's pricing page includes an FAQ that tells you a lot about this decision: should you buy On-Call and Incident Management separately, or as the Incident Response bundle? On-Call costs $20 per seat, Incident Management $30, and the bundle $40, and the right answer depends on how much your on-call rotation overlaps with the people who run incidents. FireHydrant asks no such question. One Pro seat at $25 covers its on-call product, its runbooks, its service catalog, and its status pages.
That FAQ is a good way into the comparison, because it shows what each vendor thinks it is selling. Datadog sells incident response as a set of modules on top of an observability platform you are already paying for. FireHydrant sells one response product that sits on top of whatever monitoring you use.
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They come at the same job from opposite directions. **Datadog On-Call is paging built into an observability platform**, so a Datadog monitor can page an engineer whose phone opens straight onto the graphs, logs, and traces behind the alert, with Incident Management, Status Pages, and the Bits AI SRE alongside it. FireHydrant brings no data of its own. **FireHydrant is a standalone, runbook-driven incident platform** that works with Datadog or any other monitoring tool, and since January 2026 it has belonged to Freshworks.
This comparison covers how each counts seats, paging, running the incident, AI and MCP, status pages and retrospectives, the telemetry question, and costs for a 25-person team.
## Quick comparison
The table covers what teams usually ask first. Like Grafana IRM, Datadog reverses the usual pattern on telemetry.
| Category | FireHydrant | Datadog On-Call |
|---|---|---|
| **What it is** | Standalone incident response platform | On-call module of the Datadog platform |
| **Owner** | Freshworks | Datadog, public |
| **Holds your telemetry** | ✘ | ✔, metrics, logs, traces, and more |
| **Pricing unit** | Per responder | Per seat, by product |
| **On-call price** | Included in $25 Pro seat | $20 per seat |
| **Incident management price** | Included in $25 Pro seat | $30 per seat, or $40 bundled with On-Call |
| **Pages from third-party alerts** | ✔ | ✔ |
| **Declare from telemetry** | ✘ | ✔, from monitors, pages, and dashboards |
| **Automation** | Runbooks | Workflow Automation, billed separately |
| **Service catalog** | ✔, Pro | ✔, Software Catalog |
| **AI investigation** | ✘ | ✔, Bits AI SRE on AI Credits |
| **AI summaries** | Enterprise | ✔ |
| **Status pages** | ✔, unlimited public on Pro | ✔, part of Incident Response |
| **Free plan** | Up to 10 responders | ✘ |
| **Works without Datadog** | ✔ | Can page from other tools, built for Datadog |
## Two ways to count seats
The billing models shape the decision as much as the features do, so they come first.
Datadog bills each Incident Response product by seat. A user claims an On-Call seat when they join a schedule, appear in an escalation policy, or set up notification preferences to receive pages. Viewing pages, schedules, and escalation policies needs no seat. Billing is based on the peak number of seats in use during the month, and any seats beyond your committed number are charged at the on-demand rate, which for the bundle is $58 instead of $40.
That gives you three options. Buy On-Call at $20 for the rotation and Incident Management at $30 for the people who run incidents, if the groups barely overlap. Buy the $40 bundle when most of the same people do both. Or buy only On-Call and run incidents in Slack without Datadog's incident tooling.
FireHydrant bills per responder, at $25 on Pro, and that one seat includes Signals on-call, incident response, the service catalog, and status pages. Signals is metered by the number of alerts sent, and SMS and voice cost extra. A team of up to 10 responders can use the Free plan, which includes response features and a status page but not Signals.
| Seat model | FireHydrant | Datadog |
|---|---|---|
| **What a seat covers** | Everything on the plan | One product, or both with the bundle |
| **Who needs a seat** | Responders | Anyone on a schedule, escalation, or receiving pages |
| **Viewers** | Viewer licenses on Enterprise | Free for viewing |
| **Overage billing** | Alert volume for Signals | Peak seats above commitment at on-demand rate |
| **Free tier** | Up to 10 responders | ✘ |
## Paging from where the alert lives
Datadog's on-call advantage comes from owning the alert.
Datadog On-Call, generally available since January 2025, pages from any Datadog monitor or third-party alert. Schedules and escalation policies handle rotations, routing rules decide which team gets paged, and when the primary does not acknowledge, the next person is notified automatically. The Datadog mobile app opens a page with the related dashboards and telemetry in reach, and on-call analytics show which services and engineers carry the most load.
FireHydrant's Signals ingests alerts from Datadog and other tools through integrations and webhooks, applies alert rules, and pages through push, Slack, Teams, and email. Pro includes unlimited escalation policies, while alert grouping and live call routing are Enterprise features. When a Signals page opens, the context is the alert payload and FireHydrant's catalog, and the engineer opens Datadog to see the data.
| Paging | FireHydrant | Datadog On-Call |
|---|---|---|
| **Pages from Datadog monitors** | ✔, via integration | ✔, native |
| **Pages from other tools** | ✔ | ✔ |
| **Telemetry on the page** | Link out | ✔, in the mobile app |
| **Routing rules** | Alert rules | ✔ |
| **On-call analytics** | Enterprise | ✔ |
| **SMS and voice** | Sold separately | ✔, push, SMS, and voice |
[summary]
### Escalation flows without a per-product seat
Datadog charges separate seats for paging and for running incidents, and FireHydrant meters alerts and sells phone notifications separately. Better Stack's $29 responder price covers on-call, incident management, and unlimited phone calls and SMS, and its escalation flows branch on time, severity, and alert metadata from the same platform that holds your logs and metrics.
**Paging and incident response are one job, so they should be one price.** [Explore Better Stack escalations](https://betterstack.com/incident-management).
[/summary]
## Running the incident
FireHydrant is a deeper response tool. Datadog keeps the response close to the data.
FireHydrant's runbooks fire when an incident matches conditions such as severity, service, or environment. A single runbook can open a Slack or Teams channel, start a video bridge, page the owning team from the catalog, assign an incident commander, create a ticket, and post a status update. FireHydrant also ingests deploy and infrastructure change events, so responders see what shipped just before the failure.
Datadog Incident Management lets you declare an incident from a page, a monitor, or any piece of telemetry, which carries that data into the incident. The incident timeline records activity automatically, the Slack and Microsoft Teams apps let responders work without leaving chat, AI-generated summaries post into Slack, and the Software Catalog traces upstream and downstream services affected by an outage. Automated runbooks run through Datadog Workflow Automation, which is billed separately by execution.
| Running the incident | FireHydrant | Datadog |
|---|---|---|
| **Declare from telemetry** | ✘ | ✔ |
| **Response automation** | ✔, runbooks included | Workflow Automation, billed separately |
| **Incident channels in Slack or Teams** | ✔ | ✔ |
| **Service catalog** | ✔ | ✔, Software Catalog |
| **Change tracking** | ✔, deploy events | ✔, deployment and change data |
| **Evidence in the same tool** | ✘ | ✔ |
## AI and MCP
Datadog's AI reaches further, because it reads the data itself.
Bits AI SRE became generally available in December 2025. When an alert fires, it investigates across metrics, logs, traces, and recent changes inside Datadog and proposes a root cause. In 2026 Datadog moved Bits onto AI Credits, a shared pool used by Bits investigations, chat, code fixes, and custom agents. Credits cost $500 per 500 per month on an annual commitment, or $1.30 each on demand, and Datadog says an investigation uses about 6.5 credits on average. That is cheaper per investigation than the older pricing, but still usage-based and harder to forecast during a bad month.
Datadog also offers an MCP server that lets assistants such as Claude query telemetry and incident data.
FireHydrant AI writes timeline summaries, transcribes calls, helps triage, drafts retrospectives, and suggests follow-ups, all on Enterprise, and it works on the incident record rather than on telemetry. FireHydrant's open-source MCP server runs locally with an API key and can read and act on incidents.
| AI and MCP | FireHydrant | Datadog |
|---|---|---|
| **Root-cause investigation** | ✘ | ✔, Bits AI SRE |
| **Reads raw telemetry** | ✘ | ✔ |
| **Incident summaries** | Enterprise | ✔ |
| **Call transcription** | Enterprise | ✘ |
| **AI pricing** | Enterprise quote | AI Credits, about 6.5 per investigation |
| **MCP server** | ✔, open source, incident data | ✔, telemetry and incidents |
[summary]
### AI SRE without a credit meter
Datadog's Bits AI SRE reads your telemetry but draws down a shared credit pool with every investigation, and FireHydrant's AI sits on Enterprise and reads only the incident record. Better Stack's AI SRE works on the logs, metrics, and traces stored in the same platform, and its MCP server gives Claude or Cursor that same access.
**An AI investigation should be something you run whenever it helps, not something you ration.** [See Better Stack AI SRE](https://betterstack.com/ai-sre).
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## Status pages and retrospectives
Both now include status pages, which is unusual among the tools in this series.
FireHydrant includes 1 public status page on Free and unlimited public pages on Pro, updated by runbooks, with private pages on Enterprise.
Datadog Status Pages is part of the Incident Response suite. You publish components, incidents, and planned maintenance to a shareable page, with email and Slack subscriptions for customers or internal stakeholders. A status page incident is a separate, customer-facing message that can summarize several internal incidents.
For retrospectives, FireHydrant builds from its timeline, with one template on Pro and unlimited templates plus AI drafts on Enterprise. Datadog generates postmortems from the incident timeline, with the related graphs and logs already attached.
| Status and review | FireHydrant | Datadog |
|---|---|---|
| **Public status pages** | 1 on Free, unlimited on Pro | ✔ |
| **Subscriber notifications** | ✔ | ✔, email and Slack |
| **Retrospectives** | ✔, templates | ✔, postmortems from the timeline |
| **Telemetry in the retrospective** | Links | ✔, embedded |
[summary]
### Status pages next to the monitors
FireHydrant's status pages update from runbooks, and Datadog's sit inside an Incident Response suite priced by the seat. Better Stack includes status pages with custom domains, private pages, and subscriber notifications, tied to its own uptime monitors so a component can change state the moment a check fails.
**A status page should know about an outage as soon as the monitor does.** [See Better Stack status pages](https://betterstack.com/status-page).
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## The telemetry question
Datadog wins this section outright, with one large caveat.
Datadog is one of the broadest observability platforms available, covering infrastructure, APM, logs, real user monitoring, synthetics, security, and more. Choosing Datadog On-Call puts paging, incidents, and every signal in one product, which is why Datadog's AI can investigate and FireHydrant's cannot.
FireHydrant holds none of that data. Choosing it means paying for monitoring elsewhere, often Datadog itself, and switching tools during most investigations.
The caveat is cost. Datadog's observability products are priced separately, per host, per GB, per indexed event, and per custom metric, with on-demand rates around 50% above committed rates. For many teams, the observability bill is the reason they are looking at alternatives in the first place, not the incident tooling on top. If that describes you, our [Better Stack vs Datadog comparison](https://betterstack.com/community/comparisons/better-stack-vs-datadog/) covers the full-platform alternative, and our roundup of [Datadog log management alternatives](https://betterstack.com/community/comparisons/datadog-log-management-alternatives/) covers the most common place teams start cutting.
| Observability | FireHydrant | Datadog |
|---|---|---|
| **Metrics, logs, traces** | ✘ | ✔ |
| **RUM, synthetics, security** | ✘ | ✔ |
| **Same product as incidents** | ✘ | ✔ |
| **Pricing** | Not applicable | Per host, per GB, per event, per metric |
| **On-demand premium** | Not applicable | About 50% above committed rates |
[summary]
### High-cardinality metrics without the surprise bill
Datadog keeps the telemetry next to the incident but bills custom metrics, hosts, and logs separately, and FireHydrant keeps none of it. Better Stack stores high-cardinality metrics, logs, and traces in one warehouse without per-series pricing driving the bill, and runs on-call, incidents, and status pages on the same data.
**Keeping the telemetry next to the incident only helps if you can afford to keep it.** [See Better Stack metrics](https://betterstack.com/infrastructure-monitoring).
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## What a 25-person team pays
Assume 25 engineers, 10 of whom carry the pager, billed annually at list price. The observability bill is excluded, though a Datadog On-Call customer is almost always paying one.
| Cost component | FireHydrant Pro | Datadog, separate products | Datadog bundle |
|---|---|---|---|
| **On-call for 10** | Included | 10 at $20, so $200 | Included |
| **Incident response for all 25** | 25 at $25, so $625 | 25 at $30, so $750 | 25 at $40, so $1,000 |
| **Total if all 25 take part** | $625 per month | $950 per month | $1,000 per month |
| **Total if only the 10 take part** | 10 at $25, so $250 per month | 10 at $20 plus 10 at $30, so $500 per month | 10 at $40, so $400 per month |
| **SMS and voice** | Extra | Part of On-Call | Part of On-Call |
| **AI investigation** | Not offered | AI Credits | AI Credits |
| **Free tier** | Up to 10 responders | ✘ | ✘ |
FireHydrant costs less at both team shapes and includes runbooks with no execution meter. Datadog costs more per seat, and Bits AI SRE and Workflow Automation add usage-based charges, but phone alerts are part of On-Call and the response sits next to the data. Teams that only need paging can buy Datadog On-Call alone at $20 per seat and run incidents in Slack.
## Using them together
Plenty of teams keep Datadog for monitoring and use FireHydrant for response. FireHydrant integrates with Datadog, so Datadog monitors can feed Signals, and responders follow links back to the relevant dashboards. You lose declaring incidents from telemetry and Bits AI SRE investigating inside the incident, but you gain FireHydrant's runbooks and catalog, avoid Datadog's per-product seats, and keep your response process independent of your monitoring vendor if you ever leave it.
## Which one fits your team
Choose Datadog On-Call if your monitoring already lives in Datadog and you want the shortest path from alert to evidence. It suits teams that investigate from dashboards, want an AI SRE that reads their telemetry, and value one vendor for monitoring, paging, incidents, and status pages. Watch the seat counts, the on-demand rate, and AI Credit usage.
Choose FireHydrant if you want a response process that does not depend on your monitoring vendor, or if your incidents need more structure than Datadog's incident tooling gives you. Its runbooks, catalog, change tracking, and status pages come in one seat, and it works whether your alerts come from Datadog or anywhere else. Plan for Enterprise if you want its AI, and budget for phone alerts. If FireHydrant is not quite right, our list of FireHydrant alternatives covers the next options.
## Final thoughts
Datadog asks you to commit to a platform, and FireHydrant asks you to commit to a process. **Datadog On-Call is strongest when the data and the pager share a vendor**, and Bits AI SRE shows what that makes possible.
The question is whether you want that vendor to own your incidents too. If Datadog is a long-term choice, its On-Call and Incident Management are the natural extension. **If your Datadog bill is already the thing you are trying to shrink, buying your incident process from Datadog makes leaving harder**, and FireHydrant keeps that door open.
[summary]
### One MCP endpoint for incidents and telemetry
FireHydrant's MCP server exposes incident data but no telemetry, and Datadog's spans telemetry billed across many separate products. Better Stack's MCP server sits over one platform, so Claude or Cursor can query your logs with SQL, check who is on call, acknowledge an incident, and build a dashboard chart in one conversation.
**With incidents and telemetry behind one MCP endpoint, your assistant can investigate and respond without switching tools.** [Try Better Stack](https://betterstack.com).
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