Put the two pricing pages side by side and something looks backwards. Zenduty's Growth plan costs $14 per user per month on annual billing and includes an AI SRE agent, AI incident summaries, AI-written post-mortems, and an MCP server. FireHydrant's Pro plan costs $25 per responder and includes no AI at all, because every AI feature FireHydrant sells is listed under Enterprise. On AI, the tool that costs less gives you more.
That is not the whole story, and the rest of this comparison explains why plenty of teams still pay FireHydrant's higher price. But it is the right place to start, because it shows how differently the two vendors decide what belongs in a base plan.
The products themselves start from opposite ends of an incident. Zenduty is a paging and alert-triage product first: it pulls in signals from more than 150 monitoring integrations, folds duplicates together, and decides who to wake. Its parent, the ITSM company Xurrent, has been renaming it Xurrent IMR since November 2025. FireHydrant puts its effort into the response. FireHydrant is a runbook-driven incident platform that opens Slack or Teams channels, pages owners from its service catalog, tracks deploys, and publishes status pages, and since January 2026 it has belonged to Freshworks.
This comparison starts with what each plan buys, then covers alerting, paging, running the incident, AI, status pages, reporting, and costs for a 25-person team.
The table covers what teams usually ask first. Many of the differences are about which plan a feature lands on rather than whether it exists.
| Category | FireHydrant | Zenduty |
|---|---|---|
| Current name | FireHydrant | Xurrent IMR, formerly Zenduty |
| Parent | Freshworks | Xurrent |
| Built around | The response process | Alert routing and on-call |
| Chat platforms | Slack, Microsoft Teams | Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat |
| Integrations | 3 on Free, 5 on Pro, unlimited on Enterprise | 150+, 25 on Growth |
| Alert correlation | Alert grouping on Enterprise | ✔, every plan |
| On-call | Signals, included on Pro and metered by alerts | Included in every seat |
| SMS and voice | Sold separately | Capped on Starter, unlimited on Growth |
| Runbooks and playbooks | ✔, runbooks, 5 on Pro | ✔, playbooks on every plan |
| Service catalog | ✔, Pro | Service dependency mapping |
| AI | Enterprise only | ✔, Sera AI on every plan |
| MCP server | ✔, open source, local | ✔, read-only |
| Status pages | Unlimited public on Pro | $10,000 per year add-on on Growth |
| Analytics | Enterprise | ✔, every plan |
| Free plan | Up to 10 responders | ✘, 14-day trial |
| Entry paid price | $25 per responder per month | $5 per user per month on Starter |
| Logs, metrics, traces | ✘ | ✘ |
Because so much of this comparison depends on plan gating, it helps to see the plans before the features.
Zenduty, now Xurrent IMR, says its plans differ only in scale and support. Every plan includes Sera AI, the MCP server, playbooks, post-mortems, alert correlation, analytics, SSO, and role-based access. Starter costs $5 per user per month annually, or $6 monthly, for up to 5 users, 1 team, and 5 integrations, with capped calls and texts. Growth costs $14 annually, or $16 monthly, for up to 50 users, 5 teams, 25 integrations, and unlimited calls and texts. Enterprise is custom, with unlimited scale and included status pages. There is no free plan, only a 14-day trial.
FireHydrant gates by feature. Its Free plan covers up to 10 responders with 2 runbooks, 1 public status page, and 3 integrations. Pro costs $25 per responder per month annually and adds 5 runbooks, unlimited public status pages, the service catalog, 5 integrations, Signals on-call, and SSO. Enterprise is custom and adds AI, unlimited runbooks and integrations, alert grouping, live call routing, private status pages, analytics, SCIM, and audit logs.
So Zenduty gives you most of its features early and limits how much you can use them. FireHydrant limits which features you get and lets the plans scale differently.
| Plan design | FireHydrant | Zenduty |
|---|---|---|
| Gating approach | By feature | By scale and support |
| Free option | ✔, up to 10 responders | 14-day trial |
| AI on the mid-tier plan | ✘ | ✔ |
| Status pages on the mid-tier plan | ✔ | $10,000 per year add-on |
| Mid-tier scale limits | 5 runbooks, 5 integrations | 50 users, 5 teams, 25 integrations |
Zenduty does more with an alert before anyone is paged.
Before Zenduty pages anyone, its alert rules can rewrite who owns an alert, which escalation path it follows, how urgent it is, and which SLA applies, using any field in the incoming payload. Duplicate alerts are merged by timing or content, planned work is silenced with maintenance windows, and repeat incidents can be suppressed. All of that is on every plan, limited mainly by the integration count.
FireHydrant's Signals takes alerts through webhooks and integrations, and Pro includes unlimited alert rules and webhooks. Alert grouping is an Enterprise feature, and Pro's 5-integration limit is tighter than Zenduty Growth's 25. Signals is built to hand an alert straight into an incident, where FireHydrant's runbooks take over.
| Alert intake | FireHydrant | Zenduty |
|---|---|---|
| Payload-based routing rules | ✔, alert rules | ✔, alert rules on every plan |
| Alert correlation | Enterprise | ✔, every plan |
| Maintenance windows | Via configuration | ✔ |
| Integrations on the mid-tier plan | 5 | 25 |
| Handoff into an incident | ✔, runbooks | ✔, incident created from the alert |
Zenduty correlates alerts after another tool fires them, and FireHydrant routes them into a response, so both depend on whatever your monitors send. Better Stack runs the uptime checks and log-based alerts itself and confirms failures from multiple regions before opening an incident, so fewer false alarms are created at all.
The cheapest alert to suppress is the one that never fires. See Better Stack uptime monitoring.
Both include on-call. Each has a different catch around phone alerts.
Zenduty's schedules support custom rotations, overrides, and team or service escalation policies, and notify by email, SMS, voice, Slack, Teams, and push. Sera AI can build a rotation from a plain-language description, and if someone is removed from a schedule, Zenduty adjusts the rotation automatically. The Starter plan rations phone alerts: each user gets 100 free calls and texts a month in the US, Canada, and India, and only 25 in other countries. On Growth there is no limit.
FireHydrant's Signals covers schedules and unlimited escalation policies with notifications by push, Slack, Teams, and email. SMS and voice are bought separately at every plan, Signals is charged by the number of alerts sent, and live call routing is an Enterprise feature. Its Signals Migrator imports PagerDuty and Opsgenie schedules.
For a team on Zenduty Growth, phone alerts are effectively unlimited and included. On FireHydrant, they are always an extra line item.
| On-call | FireHydrant | Zenduty |
|---|---|---|
| Rotations and overrides | ✔ | ✔ |
| Escalation policies | ✔, unlimited on Pro | ✔, team or service level |
| SMS and voice | Sold separately | Capped on Starter, unlimited on Growth |
| Natural-language scheduling | ✘ | ✔, Sera AI |
| Billing | Per responder plus alert volume | Per user, included |
Zenduty caps calls and texts on Starter, and FireHydrant sells them separately on every plan. Better Stack includes unlimited phone calls and SMS in its $29 per responder price, with schedules and escalation policies running on the same platform that detects the problem.
Nobody should have to check a usage meter before waking up a colleague. Explore Better Stack on-call.
Once people are awake, FireHydrant pulls ahead.
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 service catalog, assign an incident commander, create a ticket, and post a status update.
The service catalog records owners and dependencies, and FireHydrant ingests deploy and infrastructure change events, so responders see what shipped just before the failure.
Zenduty covers the essentials from chat, including Google Chat, which FireHydrant does not support. Responders can acknowledge, add people, and update incidents from Slack, Teams, or Google Chat. Playbooks walk responders through a checklist for familiar incident types, SLA timers show whether the team is meeting its response goals, and templated stakeholder updates plus bidirectional Jira and ServiceNow sync handle the paperwork. What it lacks is automatic channel creation, catalog-driven ownership, and change tracking. If you want to see how that gap looks against a Slack-native tool, our incident.io vs Zenduty comparison covers it.
| Running the incident | FireHydrant | Zenduty |
|---|---|---|
| Automatic incident channel and bridge | ✔ | ✘ |
| Google Chat | ✘ | ✔ |
| Response automation | ✔, runbooks | Playbooks and AI workflows |
| Service ownership | ✔, catalog | Service dependency mapping |
| Deploy and change tracking | ✔ | ✘ |
| Incident SLAs | ✘ | ✔ |
| Two-way ticket sync | Jira, Freshservice, ServiceNow | Jira, ServiceNow, and others |
This is the section where the price comparison turns upside down.
Zenduty includes Xurrent's Sera AI on every plan. The bundle includes alert grouping, an AI SRE that proposes a probable cause, generated summaries and post-mortems, schedules built from a plain-English request, and AI-driven workflows that pick responders and keep tickets updated. Xurrent's marketing says the AI SRE is trained on each customer's past incidents, drawing on old post-mortems and Slack discussions.
Zenduty's MCP server is read-only for IMR: assistants can list and search incidents and read who is on call, but cannot acknowledge or change anything.
FireHydrant AI writes timeline summaries, transcribes calls, helps triage, drafts retrospectives, and suggests follow-ups, all on Enterprise. It does not offer a root-cause agent. Its open-source MCP server runs locally with an API key and can act on incidents through FireHydrant's API.
| AI and MCP | FireHydrant | Zenduty |
|---|---|---|
| AI on the mid-tier plan | ✘ | ✔ |
| Root-cause agent | ✘ | ✔, AI SRE |
| Incident summaries | Enterprise | ✔ |
| AI post-mortems | Enterprise | ✔ |
| Call transcription | Enterprise | ✘ |
| MCP server | ✔, open source, can act | ✔, read-only |
Zenduty's AI SRE learns from incident history and alert payloads, and FireHydrant's Enterprise AI works on the incident record, so neither can read the logs and traces behind a failure. Better Stack's AI SRE runs on the platform that stores that telemetry, and its MCP server lets Claude or Cursor query the same data and act on incidents.
Incident history tells an AI what usually breaks, and telemetry tells it what broke this time. See Better Stack AI SRE.
Here the advantage swings hard the other way.
FireHydrant includes 1 public status page on Free and unlimited public pages on Pro, updated by runbooks, with private pages on Enterprise.
Zenduty can publish public and private status pages that follow incident state automatically. Starter customers cannot get them at all, Growth customers pay a $10,000 annual add-on, and only Enterprise includes them. For a 25-person team, that add-on costs more than the Growth seats themselves.
| Status pages | FireHydrant | Zenduty |
|---|---|---|
| Entry plan | 1 public page on Free | ✘ on Starter |
| Mid-tier plan | Unlimited public pages on Pro | $10,000 per year add-on |
| Private pages | Enterprise | Add-on or Enterprise |
| Updates from incidents | ✔ | ✔ |
Every Zenduty plan ships with reporting. Dashboards chart acknowledgment and resolution times, break incidents down by team, service, and person, flag the services that fail most, and track SLA results, with exports to CSV or PDF. Starter holds a year of history, and Growth keeps it indefinitely.
FireHydrant's retrospectives are built from its incident timeline, with one template on Pro and unlimited templates plus AI drafts on Enterprise. Incident analytics are Enterprise-only.
For leaders who review response metrics and SLA compliance on a schedule, Zenduty delivers more of that on a cheaper plan. If the priority is a detailed written review built from what actually happened in the channel, FireHydrant's timeline gives better material.
| Reporting | FireHydrant | Zenduty |
|---|---|---|
| MTTA and MTTR analytics | Enterprise | ✔, every plan |
| SLA reporting | ✘ | ✔ |
| Retrospective templates | 1 on Pro, unlimited on Enterprise | ✔, custom templates |
| AI retrospective drafts | Enterprise | ✔ |
| Data retention | Plan dependent | 12 months on Starter, unlimited on Growth |
Both tools now belong to IT service management companies, and those companies compete with each other. Xurrent sells ITSM, a service desk, and workflow automation, and Gartner listed it as a Niche Player in its 2026 ITSM Magic Quadrant. Freshworks sells Freshservice and has already built two-way sync between FireHydrant incidents and Freshservice tickets. If your company has picked either service desk, that choice may tilt this decision. If it has picked neither, both roadmaps now share attention with IT features an engineering team may never use.
FireHydrant and Zenduty both stop short of observability, with no log storage, metrics, tracing, or uptime checks of their own. Zenduty's AI SRE reasons over incident history and alert payloads, and FireHydrant's AI works on the incident record, so in both cases the evidence lives in a separate monitoring platform that responders switch to during most incidents. For a comparison against a platform that stores the telemetry as well as paging people, see our Better Stack vs Xurrent IMR comparison.
| Observability | FireHydrant | Zenduty |
|---|---|---|
| Log management | ✘ | ✘ |
| Metrics | ✘ | ✘ |
| Distributed tracing | ✘ | ✘ |
| Uptime monitoring | ✘ | ✘ |
| Where investigation data lives | Connected integrations | Connected integrations |
Both tools leave your metrics, logs, and traces in another vendor's product, and that monitoring bill is usually larger than either incident tool. Better Stack handles high-cardinality metrics without the series count driving surprise costs, and it stores logs and traces alongside them in the same platform that runs on-call and incidents.
The incident tool is rarely the expensive part, so the monitoring bill is where to look for savings. See Better Stack metrics.
Assume 25 engineers, 10 of whom carry the pager, billed annually at list price. Zenduty bills every user who needs an account, while FireHydrant bills responders, so the table shows both team shapes. Monitoring is excluded.
| Cost component | FireHydrant Pro | Zenduty Growth |
|---|---|---|
| If all 25 need seats | 25 at $25, so $625 per month | 25 at $14, so $350 per month |
| If only the 10 on call need seats | 10 at $25, so $250 per month | 10 at $14, so $140 per month |
| SMS and voice | Extra | Unlimited, included |
| AI | Requires Enterprise | Included |
| Status page | Included | About $833 per month add-on |
| All 25 seats with a status page | About $625 per month, plus phone alerts | About $1,183 per month |
Without a public status page, Zenduty costs roughly half as much and includes AI and phone alerts. Add a status page and FireHydrant becomes the cheaper option by a wide margin. Many Zenduty customers solve that by buying a separate status page tool, which brings the cost back down but adds one more product to run.
Both vendors offer migration help, aimed mostly at PagerDuty and Opsgenie users. Xurrent offers up to 12 months of free parallel use for teams leaving PagerDuty, Opsgenie, or incident.io, with scripts that import schedules, escalation policies, services, and integrations. FireHydrant's Signals Migrator imports PagerDuty and Opsgenie configurations. Neither advertises a direct importer from the other, so moving between them means rebuilding schedules and routing by hand or through their APIs. Run both in parallel for at least one full rotation before you switch.
Choose Zenduty if noisy alerts and a tight budget top your list and a public status page is either unnecessary or already handled elsewhere. Organizations feeding alerts from many tools, managers who live in response-time reports, Google Workspace companies that chat in Google Chat, and teams that want AI without an Enterprise contract will get the most from it. Check the 5-team and 25-integration limits on Growth before you commit.
Choose FireHydrant if your incidents involve several teams and the problem is consistency: who joins, what happens first, and how it gets written up. Its runbooks, service catalog, change tracking, and status pages cover that work, and its free plan supports teams of up to 10 responders. Budget for phone alerts, and for Enterprise if you want any AI. If neither is quite right, our list of FireHydrant alternatives covers the next options.
On paper, Zenduty gives you more for less, and on alerting, on-call, AI, and analytics, that holds up. FireHydrant charges more for a better-run incident, with runbooks, ownership, change tracking, and status pages that Zenduty either lacks or prices as an add-on.
So the deciding line is not in either vendor's headline price. Price a status page into Zenduty, price phone alerts and Enterprise AI into FireHydrant, and then compare. If you need a public status page and no AI, FireHydrant is the cheaper tool, and the $14 seat was never the real price.
Zenduty's MCP server can read incidents and schedules, and FireHydrant's can act on incidents, 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.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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