# FireHydrant vs Squadcast: An Incident Management comparison for 2026
Within ten months of each other, both of these companies stopped being independent. SolarWinds agreed to buy Squadcast in March 2025 and renamed the product SolarWinds Incident Response a year later. Freshworks announced its FireHydrant deal in December 2025 and closed it on January 5, 2026. Two incident startups that spent years pitching themselves as the modern alternative to PagerDuty now sit inside large IT software portfolios, and if you are choosing between them, you are partly choosing which of those portfolios you want your pager to live in.
The products themselves still differ in ways that matter day to day. Both handle on-call, escalation, incident channels in Slack and Microsoft Teams, runbooks, status pages, and retrospectives, and both appear on most [incident management tool shortlists](https://betterstack.com/community/comparisons/incident-management-tools/) for teams leaving PagerDuty or Opsgenie before Opsgenie shuts down in April 2027.
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Where they put their effort is different. **Squadcast is built to shrink the alert stream before anyone is paged**, with deduplication, suppression of alerts that clear on their own, and on-call included in every plan from $9 per user. FireHydrant puts its weight on what happens after the page. **FireHydrant is built to make every incident follow the same process**, using condition-triggered runbooks, a service catalog, and change tracking, priced at $25 per responder.
This comparison covers the two parent companies, alert noise, paging, the two very different meanings of "runbook," reliability tracking, AI, and status pages, then prices both for a 25-person team.
## Quick comparison
The table covers what teams usually ask first. Several rows that look similar behave differently, and the sections below explain those.
| Category | FireHydrant | Squadcast |
|---|---|---|
| **Current name** | FireHydrant | SolarWinds Incident Response, formerly Squadcast |
| **Parent** | Freshworks | SolarWinds |
| **Strongest at** | Consistent response process | Alert noise reduction and on-call |
| **Chat platforms** | Slack, Microsoft Teams | Slack, Microsoft Teams |
| **Main surface** | Slack or Teams channel | Web dashboard and mobile app |
| **Alert deduplication** | Alert grouping on Enterprise | ✔, Event Intelligence |
| **Self-resolving alert suppression** | ✘ | ✔, Auto Pause Transient Alerts |
| **On-call** | Signals, included on Pro and metered by alerts | Included in every plan |
| **Runbooks** | Process automation triggered by conditions | Executable remediation steps |
| **Service catalog** | ✔, Pro | Service data and health view |
| **SLOs and error budgets** | ✘ | ✔ |
| **AI** | Summaries, transcripts, and retros on Enterprise | Alert prioritization and summaries |
| **MCP server** | ✔, open source | No public MCP server |
| **Free plan** | ✔, up to 10 responders | ✘, trial only |
| **Entry paid price** | $25 per responder per month, annual | $9 per user per month |
| **On-premise option** | ✘ | ✔, Enterprise |
| **Logs, metrics, traces** | ✘ | ✘ |
## Two parents, two directions
Before comparing features, it helps to see where each owner is taking its product, because that shapes what you will get in two years.
SolarWinds is an observability and IT management company. It sells infrastructure, network, and database monitoring, SolarWinds Observability as SaaS and self-hosted, and an ITSM product, and it was itself taken private by Turn/River Capital in 2025. SolarWinds' stated reason for buying Squadcast was to join observability with incident response, so the obvious direction is tighter links between SolarWinds monitoring and the pager. For a team already running SolarWinds, that is a real point in Squadcast's favor. For everyone else, the familiar concern with private equity ownership is pricing, since Squadcast's low, published per-user prices are the main reason many teams pick it. If you want to see the rest of the field before committing, our roundup of [Squadcast alternatives](https://betterstack.com/community/comparisons/squadcast-alternatives/) covers it.
Freshworks is a service software company, and FireHydrant now sits inside its Freshservice IT portfolio. FireHydrant told customers accounts, pricing, and support would stay the same, and the first visible result is a two-way integration that syncs FireHydrant incidents with Freshservice tickets. Freshworks describes the goal as one platform for IT service management, infrastructure management, and incident response. That suits companies already on Freshservice and matters less to an engineering team that has never used it.
The practical difference: Squadcast's parent sells the monitoring that produces alerts, and FireHydrant's parent sells the service desk that tracks the tickets afterward.
| Ownership | FireHydrant | Squadcast |
|---|---|---|
| **Acquirer** | Freshworks, closed January 2026 | SolarWinds, announced March 2025 |
| **Parent's core business** | Service desk and ITSM | Observability and IT management |
| **Most natural pairing** | Freshservice | SolarWinds Observability |
| **Buying channels** | Direct | Direct, AWS Marketplace, Azure Marketplace |
## Before the page: alert noise
This is the clearest dividing line between the two products.
### Squadcast: filtering as the headline feature
Squadcast takes alerts from more than 200 monitoring and DevOps tools and runs them through Event Intelligence, which deduplicates, tags, and routes them using rules and machine learning. Auto Pause Transient Alerts holds back notifications for alerts that usually resolve within a few minutes, so a flapping check that recovers never wakes anyone. SolarWinds' own customer quote from Redis describes going from tens of thousands of incoming alerts to hundreds.
All of this is part of the plans rather than a separate AIOps purchase, which keeps the cost of noise reduction low even for small teams.
### FireHydrant: alert rules first, grouping on Enterprise
FireHydrant's Signals product takes alerts through webhooks and integrations and applies alert rules that decide who gets paged and how. Unlimited webhooks and alert rules come with Pro. Alert grouping, which folds related alerts into one page, is listed only on Enterprise, and FireHydrant does not advertise a feature for suppressing self-resolving alerts.
For a team with tidy monitoring, alert rules are enough. For a team whose monitoring fires hundreds of duplicates during a partial outage, Squadcast does more of that work out of the box and at a lower tier.
| Noise reduction | FireHydrant | Squadcast |
|---|---|---|
| **Alert rules and routing** | ✔, unlimited on Pro | ✔ |
| **Deduplication and grouping** | Enterprise | ✔, every plan |
| **Transient alert suppression** | ✘ | ✔ |
| **Integration count** | 3 on Free, 5 on Pro, unlimited on Enterprise | 200+ |
[summary]
### Fewer false alarms when you own the monitors
Squadcast cleans up alerts after another tool sends them, and FireHydrant routes whatever arrives. Better Stack runs the uptime monitors, heartbeat checks, and log-based alerts itself, with confirmation from multiple regions before an incident opens, so fewer false alarms are created in the first place and the page comes from the same platform that detected the problem.
**Noise is easier to control at the monitor than in the pager.** [See Better Stack uptime monitoring](https://betterstack.com/uptime).
[/summary]
## Paging and on-call
Both tools can replace PagerDuty for on-call. The pricing mechanics are where they differ most.
### Squadcast: on-call in every seat
Squadcast has been building on-call since 2017. Schedules support weekly, follow-the-sun, and custom rotations with overrides, escalation policies run across multiple tiers, and Live Call Routing connects an outside caller to whoever is on duty. Workload analytics show how pages are spread across the team.
The schedule editor keeps rotations and escalation rules side by side, which makes gaps easy to spot.
On-call is part of every plan. The limit to check is notifications: lower tiers cap monthly SMS and voice alerts per user, and unlimited phone and SMS arrives on Enterprise.
### FireHydrant Signals: included, but metered
Signals comes with FireHydrant Pro and covers schedules, unlimited escalation policies, and notifications by push, Slack, Teams, and email. SMS and voice notifications are sold separately, and Signals as a whole is charged by the number of alerts you send. Live call routing and notification policies are Enterprise features.
FireHydrant's Signals Migrator imports PagerDuty and Opsgenie schedules and policies, which shortens a migration considerably. Squadcast offers migration help too, but FireHydrant's tool is the more automated of the two.
| On-call | FireHydrant | Squadcast |
|---|---|---|
| **Schedules and overrides** | ✔ | ✔ |
| **Multi-tier escalation** | ✔, unlimited policies | ✔ |
| **SMS and voice** | Sold separately | Capped on lower tiers, unlimited on Enterprise |
| **Live call routing** | Enterprise | ✔ |
| **Workload analytics** | Enterprise analytics | ✔ |
| **Billing** | Per responder plus alert volume | Per user |
| **Migration tooling** | Signals Migrator | Assisted migration |
[summary]
### On-call without metering or phone packs
FireHydrant bills alerts by volume and phone notifications separately, and Squadcast caps calls and texts below its top tier. Better Stack charges $29 per responder per month with unlimited phone calls and SMS, and runs schedules, escalations, Slack and Teams incident channels, and status pages alongside the monitoring that triggered the page.
**A pager should not come with a usage meter.** [Explore Better Stack incident management](https://betterstack.com/incident-management).
[/summary]
## Two meanings of "runbook"
Both vendors use the word runbook, and they mean different things by it. This is easy to miss in a demo.
### FireHydrant: runbooks that run the process
A FireHydrant runbook is a set of steps that fires when an incident matches conditions such as severity, service, or environment. It can open a Slack or Teams channel, start a video bridge, create a Jira or Freshservice ticket, page the owning team, assign roles, and post a status update, all in the first minute.
Each step is readable in the configuration screen, so the whole team can see what will happen before an incident starts.
The catch is the cap: 2 runbooks on Free, 5 on Pro, unlimited only on Enterprise.
### Squadcast: runbooks that fix things
A Squadcast runbook is a set of remediation steps that an engineer can execute from the incident, such as a diagnostic check or a failover script. Coordination is handled separately by the Workflows module, which fires on lifecycle events like created, acknowledged, reassigned, and resolved, and runs actions across connected tools, such as creating a ServiceNow record for every P1.
So FireHydrant's runbooks automate the people side of a response, and Squadcast splits that between workflows for coordination and runbooks for the technical fix.
| Automation | FireHydrant | Squadcast |
|---|---|---|
| **Runbook purpose** | Coordinate the response | Execute remediation steps |
| **Process automation** | ✔, runbooks | ✔, Workflows |
| **Executable fix steps** | ✘ | ✔ |
| **Condition-based triggers** | ✔ | ✔ |
| **Limits** | 5 runbooks on Pro | Runbooks from Premium |
| **Ticket sync** | Jira, Freshservice, ServiceNow | Jira, ServiceNow, bidirectional |
## Tracking reliability over time
Squadcast measures reliability against targets. FireHydrant maps the system and records what changed.
### Squadcast: SLOs and service health
Squadcast includes SLO and error budget tracking, defined from metrics in your connected monitoring tools, with breach alerts routed through the normal on-call path. Service Health shows which services have open incidents and how each is tracking against its objectives.
Incident analytics cover MTTA and MTTR trends by team and service, plus alert volume and on-call load.
### FireHydrant: service catalog and change events
FireHydrant's service catalog, included on Pro, records services, environments, owners, and dependencies, and runbooks use it to pull in the right team automatically. FireHydrant also ingests deploy and infrastructure change events, so responders can see whether a release shipped just before the incident.
Incident analytics exist but are an Enterprise feature, and FireHydrant does not track SLOs.
| Reliability tracking | FireHydrant | Squadcast |
|---|---|---|
| **SLOs and error budgets** | ✘ | ✔ |
| **Service catalog** | ✔, Pro | Service data |
| **Change event tracking** | ✔ | Via integrations |
| **Service health view** | Catalog | ✔, dedicated dashboard |
| **MTTA and MTTR analytics** | Enterprise | ✔ |
## AI and MCP
Neither of these tools leads the category on AI, and both point their AI at different jobs.
### FireHydrant: documentation AI on Enterprise
FireHydrant AI writes incident summaries into the timeline, transcribes incident calls, helps triage, drafts retrospectives, and suggests follow-ups. It is useful, especially for the post-incident write-up, but the pricing page lists all of it under Enterprise.
FireHydrant's official MCP server is open source, now published under Freshworks' GitHub organization, and runs locally with an API key, so assistants like Claude can read and act on incidents through FireHydrant's API.
### Squadcast: AI for the alert stream
Squadcast's AI works on alerts. It prioritizes and isolates the alerts most likely to matter, improves deduplication, spots recurring patterns, suggests suppression and routing rules, and generates incident summaries. It does not attempt root-cause analysis, and SolarWinds does not document a public MCP server for it.
If AI investigation is a requirement, neither tool is a strong answer, and you should look at the AI SRE products covered in our alternatives roundups.
| AI and MCP | FireHydrant | Squadcast |
|---|---|---|
| **Incident summaries** | Enterprise | ✔ |
| **Call transcription** | Enterprise | ✘ |
| **AI retrospective drafts** | Enterprise | ✘ |
| **Alert prioritization** | ✘ | ✔ |
| **Root-cause investigation** | ✘ | ✘ |
| **MCP server** | ✔, open source, local | No public server |
[summary]
### AI that starts with the evidence
FireHydrant's AI documents incidents and Squadcast's AI sorts alerts, but neither investigates why something broke. Better Stack's AI SRE runs on the platform that stores your logs, metrics, and traces, so when an incident opens it queries that data directly and returns a likely cause with the supporting evidence, and its MCP server exposes the same data to Claude and Cursor.
**The AI that finds the root cause has to be able to read the telemetry.** [See Better Stack AI SRE](https://betterstack.com/ai-sre).
[/summary]
## Status pages, stakeholders, and retrospectives
Both include status pages, with different gating.
FireHydrant's Free plan includes 1 public status page, Pro includes unlimited public pages, and private status pages are Enterprise-only. Viewer licenses for stakeholders who only need to follow along also sit on Enterprise.
Squadcast includes public and internal status pages with component tracking, scheduled maintenance, and updates from incident actions. Free stakeholder seats start on Premium, capped at 10, and are unlimited on Enterprise.
For the written review, FireHydrant is the stronger tool. Its retrospectives are built from a detailed timeline, and Enterprise adds AI drafts with suggested contributing factors. Pro includes a single retrospective template.
Squadcast offers post-incident reviews with templates, and its timeline fills automatically from incident actions rather than from the chat conversation.
| Communication and review | FireHydrant | Squadcast |
|---|---|---|
| **Public status pages** | 1 on Free, unlimited on Pro | ✔ |
| **Private or internal pages** | Enterprise | ✔ |
| **Free stakeholder access** | Viewer licenses on Enterprise | Up to 10 on Premium, unlimited on Enterprise |
| **Retrospective templates** | 1 on Pro, unlimited on Enterprise | ✔ |
| **AI retrospective drafts** | Enterprise | ✘ |
## The telemetry neither tool holds
Both products start working only after a monitoring tool decides something is wrong. Neither FireHydrant nor Squadcast collects logs, stores metrics, records traces, or runs uptime checks. Squadcast's SLOs are built on metrics pulled from your monitoring stack, and FireHydrant's change tracking shows what shipped but not how the system behaved afterward.
There is one nuance. SolarWinds sells observability products, so a Squadcast customer can buy monitoring from the same parent company. That is still a second product, a second contract, and an integration between them. Either way, your responders will spend part of every serious incident in another tab.
| Observability | FireHydrant | Squadcast |
|---|---|---|
| **Log management** | ✘ | ✘ |
| **Metrics** | ✘ | ✘, pulled for SLOs only |
| **Distributed tracing** | ✘ | ✘ |
| **Uptime monitoring** | ✘ | ✘ |
| **Monitoring from the same parent** | ✘ | SolarWinds Observability, sold separately |
[summary]
### One collector for the data your pager needs
With either tool, the evidence behind an incident lives in a different product. Better Stack's eBPF-based collector discovers your services and captures logs, metrics, and traces without code changes, and stores them in the same platform that runs on-call, incidents, and status pages, so the responder opens the incident and the data together.
**When the pager and the telemetry share a platform, the investigation starts where the alert lands.** [See Better Stack tracing](https://betterstack.com/tracing).
[/summary]
## Pricing
The two vendors count different people, so the cheaper option depends on your team's shape.
### FireHydrant
1. **Free:** up to 10 responders, 2 runbooks, the Slack and Teams chatbot, 1 public status page, and 3 integrations.
2. **Pro:** $25 per responder per month, billed annually, with 5 runbooks, unlimited public status pages, the service catalog, 5 integrations, Signals on-call, and SSO. Signals is charged by alert volume, and SMS and voice cost extra.
3. **Enterprise:** custom, adding FireHydrant AI, unlimited runbooks and integrations, alert grouping, live call routing, private incidents and status pages, analytics, SCIM, audit logs, and viewer licenses.
### Squadcast
Squadcast's three plans run from $9 to $21 per user per month, based on pricing supplied to G2:
1. **Pro:** $9 per user per month, with on-call scheduling, escalations, event intelligence, and mobile alerts.
2. **Premium:** priced between Pro and Enterprise, adding runbooks, SLO tracking, advanced escalations, and up to 10 free stakeholders.
3. **Enterprise:** $21 per user per month, adding unlimited stakeholders, unlimited phone and SMS, and on-premise deployment.
There is no permanent free plan. Since the SolarWinds rebrand, some buyers are routed to sales and at least one third-party site lists higher figures, so confirm current pricing before you budget.
### What a 25-person team pays
Assume 25 engineers, 10 of whom carry the pager, at list price. Because FireHydrant bills per responder, the table shows both ends of the range. Monitoring is excluded for both.
| Cost component | FireHydrant Pro | Squadcast Pro | Squadcast Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|
| **If all 25 respond** | 25 at $25, so $625 per month | 25 at $9, so $225 per month | 25 at $21, so $525 per month |
| **If only the 10 on call respond** | 10 at $25, so $250 per month | 10 at $9, so $90 per month | 10 at $21, so $210 per month |
| **On-call** | Included, metered by alerts | Included | Included |
| **Phone and SMS** | Extra | Capped | Unlimited |
| **Runbooks and SLOs** | 5 runbooks, no SLOs | ✘ | ✔ |
| **Free tier** | Up to 10 responders | ✘ | ✘ |
At list price, Squadcast is cheaper at every tier and team shape, except in one case: a team of up to 10 responders that can live on FireHydrant's free plan pays nothing. FireHydrant's higher price buys its runbook-driven process, service catalog, and change tracking. The question is whether those are worth more to you than Squadcast's noise reduction and SLOs.
## Deployment and compliance
Both cover SSO, role-based access, and the usual security reviews, and both offer SCIM and audit logs at the top tier. Squadcast has two deployment advantages: an on-premise option on Enterprise, which is rare in this category, and availability through the AWS and Azure marketplaces, so you can buy it against existing cloud commitments. FireHydrant is SaaS only, hosted on AWS, with Slack Enterprise Grid and multiple organizations on Enterprise.
| Deployment | FireHydrant | Squadcast |
|---|---|---|
| **SaaS** | ✔ | ✔ |
| **On-premise** | ✘ | ✔, Enterprise |
| **Cloud marketplaces** | ✘ | ✔, AWS and Azure |
| **SSO** | ✔, Pro | ✔ |
| **SCIM and audit logs** | Enterprise | Enterprise |
## Which one fits your team
Choose Squadcast if alert volume is what hurts and the budget is tight. It is the better fit for teams drowning in duplicate or self-resolving alerts, teams that report on SLOs and error budgets, teams that need on-premise deployment or marketplace purchasing, and teams already running SolarWinds monitoring. Get price protection in writing on a multi-year deal.
Choose FireHydrant if your alerts are manageable and your incidents are inconsistent, with different people running them in different ways. Its runbooks, service catalog, and change tracking make each response look like the last one, and its free tier covers teams of up to 10 responders. It suits companies already on Freshservice. Plan for Enterprise if you want the AI, analytics, or alert grouping.
If neither fits, our roundup of [FireHydrant alternatives](https://betterstack.com/community/comparisons/firehydrant-alternative/) covers the other tools teams usually consider next.
## Final thoughts
These two were independent a year and a half ago, and that history still shows in the products. **Squadcast does more to filter alerts before anyone is paged**, while FireHydrant does more to make the response that follows consistent. Each now carries the priorities of a parent company whose main business is something other than incident response.
So decide which half of your last bad night you would rather fix: the flood of pages or the confused hour after them. Then look at the parent. **If your company already pays SolarWinds or Freshworks, that relationship may decide this faster than any feature table.**
[summary]
### One MCP endpoint for incidents and telemetry
FireHydrant's MCP server exposes incident data, and Squadcast has no public MCP server, but neither can give an AI assistant your logs or traces, because neither stores them. Better Stack's MCP server covers the whole 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).
[/summary]