# incident.io vs Grafana IRM: An Incident Management comparison for 2026
Here is a quick way to predict which of these tools you will prefer. Think about the last time something broke and ask where you first noticed it. If the answer is "a Grafana dashboard," and the next hour was spent bouncing between that dashboard, Slack, and a pager app, Grafana IRM was built to remove exactly that bounce. If the answer is "a page from one of six different monitoring tools," and the hard part was getting the right people organized in Slack, incident.io was built for you.
That difference comes from what each product is attached to. **Grafana IRM is the incident layer of an observability platform**, so on-call, alert routing, and incident response live next to the metrics, logs, and traces in Grafana Cloud. You can declare an incident straight from a graph that looks wrong. **incident.io is an independent incident platform that lives in Slack and Microsoft Teams**, connects to whatever monitoring you run, and puts its effort into coordination, automation, and an AI that investigates alongside your engineers.
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Most incident tools in this series hold none of your telemetry, so comparisons usually end with "and neither one can see your logs." This one is different. Grafana IRM can see them, which is its biggest advantage. incident.io cannot, but it is deeper and more polished at running the incident itself. The sections below help you decide which matters more for your team.
## The short version
The table covers what buyers usually ask first. The sections after it explain the rows that look close but play out differently.
| Category | incident.io | Grafana IRM |
|---|---|---|
| **What it is** | Standalone incident platform | Incident and on-call layer inside Grafana Cloud |
| **Holds your telemetry** | ✘ | ✔, Loki, Mimir, and Tempo in Grafana Cloud |
| **Primary surface** | Slack or Teams channel | Grafana, plus Slack and Teams |
| **Declare from a dashboard** | ✘ | ✔, from any visualization |
| **On-call** | Add-on, $10 to $20 per user per month | Included |
| **Schedules as code** | Terraform provider | ✔, Terraform and iCal |
| **Incident coordination depth** | ✔, a core strength | Growing, newer product |
| **AI investigation** | ✔, Investigations, through integrations | ✔, Sift and Grafana Assistant, on native data |
| **Call transcription** | ✔, Scribe | ✘ |
| **MCP server** | ✔, hosted | ✔, open-source Grafana MCP server |
| **Status pages** | ✔ | ✘, not part of IRM |
| **Self-hosted option** | ✘ | Enterprise only, OSS OnCall archived in March 2026 |
| **Free plan** | Up to 5 users | Up to 3 active IRM users |
| **Pricing model** | Per user, on-call per rotation member | Per active user, plus a $19 monthly platform fee |
| **Compliance** | SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA on Enterprise | SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, FedRAMP, PCI DSS |
## What each product is attached to
Before comparing features, it helps to see where each product sits in your stack, because that decides almost everything else.
### Grafana IRM: part of the observability platform
Grafana IRM combines what used to be two products, Grafana OnCall and Grafana Incident, into one incident response and management layer inside Grafana Cloud. Alerts from Grafana Alerting and dozens of other sources are routed through escalation chains to on-call responders. Incidents carry timelines, roles, and post-incident reviews. And because Grafana Cloud also holds your metrics in Mimir, logs in Loki, and traces in Tempo, the responder investigates in the same product that raised the alert.
The catch is commitment. You get the integrated experience by standardizing on Grafana Cloud. If your monitoring lives in Datadog or New Relic, IRM can still ingest those alerts, but its biggest advantage mostly disappears.
### incident.io: independent of your monitoring
incident.io does not care where your alerts come from. It connects to Grafana, Datadog, Prometheus, CloudWatch, Sentry, and many others, and it focuses on what happens once an alert turns into an incident. You type `/inc` in Slack, and it creates a channel, assigns an incident lead, announces the incident, and starts recording everything. The Catalog knows who owns each service, workflows fire as the incident changes, Scribe transcribes the call, and Investigations posts findings into the thread.
That independence is the appeal for teams with mixed monitoring. The trade-off is that incident.io never holds the telemetry, so every investigation reaches into another tool through an integration.
| Platform aspect | incident.io | Grafana IRM |
|---|---|---|
| **Where it lives** | Standalone SaaS | Inside Grafana Cloud |
| **Works with any monitoring** | ✔ | ✔, but best with Grafana Cloud |
| **Telemetry in the same product** | ✘ | ✔ |
| **Incident maturity** | Deep and polished | Newer, consolidating two products |
| **Commitment required** | None beyond the tool | Adopting Grafana Cloud |
[summary]
### One warehouse, fast queries, one language
Grafana keeps incidents next to the telemetry, but the telemetry is spread across separate backends with separate query languages: LogQL for logs, PromQL for metrics, and TraceQL for traces. incident.io keeps none of it. Better Stack stores logs, metrics, and traces in one warehouse you query with SQL, and Query Boost keeps those queries fast at volume, so a responder can move from a trace to its logs without switching stores or syntax.
**The incident belongs next to the data, and the data is easier to use when it lives in one place.** [See Query Boost](https://betterstack.com).
[/summary]
## Declaring from a graph versus declaring from Slack
The difference between these two is easiest to see in a single incident. At 3pm, an engineer notices that memory on a Kubernetes service is climbing steadily, and pods have started restarting.
### In Grafana IRM
She sees it on the service dashboard before any alert fires. She clicks the panel and declares an incident directly from the visualization, and the incident opens with that graph attached as context. Grafana IRM pages the service's on-call engineer through its escalation chain and posts to the team's Slack channel.
The on-call engineer opens the incident and stays in Grafana. He runs Sift, which checks the service's metrics, logs, and recent changes and flags a spike in error logs that started after a deploy an hour earlier. He pulls the pod logs from Loki on the same screen, confirms a memory leak in the new version, and rolls back. The timeline records each step and becomes the start of the post-incident review.
### In incident.io
The same climb triggers a Grafana alert, which reaches incident.io through an alert route and pages the on-call engineer through incident.io On-call. He declares an incident, and the channel opens with the Catalog linking the service to its owners.
Investigations gets to work. Through the Grafana and GitHub integrations, it links the memory climb to the deploy from an hour earlier and posts the change in the thread. The engineer still opens Grafana to confirm the leak in the pod logs, then returns to Slack to coordinate the rollback. Scribe captures the decision on the call, and the timeline builds itself.
Both teams fix the leak. Grafana IRM kept the investigation in one tool. incident.io made the coordination smoother and wrote better notes, but the engineer switched tools to see the evidence.
| During the incident | incident.io | Grafana IRM |
|---|---|---|
| **Declaring** | `/inc` in Slack or from an alert | From a dashboard panel, Slack, or an alert |
| **Evidence in the same tool** | ✘, opens Grafana | ✔ |
| **AI help** | Investigations through integrations | Sift on native metrics and logs |
| **Call notes** | ✔, Scribe | ✘ |
| **Timeline** | ✔, automatic | ✔, automatic |
## On-call and escalation
Both tools can replace a standalone pager. Grafana IRM inherited the well-regarded Grafana OnCall project. incident.io built its own on-call product more recently and sells it as an add-on.
### Grafana IRM: on-call with an open-source heritage
Grafana IRM schedules support rotations, planned overrides, automated shift-swap requests, Google Calendar integration, and time zones, and you can define them in Terraform or import them from iCal. Escalation chains run multiple steps, and notifications go out through the iOS and Android apps, Slack, Teams, Telegram, SMS, phone, and email. The mobile app can override do-not-disturb for critical alerts.
One thing changed this year. Grafana OnCall, the open-source and self-hostable version, entered maintenance mode in 2025 and was archived on March 24, 2026. Its repository is read-only, and the cloud connection that handled mobile push, SMS, and phone notifications for self-hosted users was switched off. Development now happens only in Grafana Cloud IRM, with self-managed deployment available on Enterprise. If a free, self-hosted pager was part of Grafana's appeal, that option is gone.
### incident.io On-call: built around the people carrying the pager
incident.io On-call covers rotations, overrides, and escalation paths, with do-not-disturb breakthrough on mobile. It adds shadow rotations for new engineers, holiday calendars that flag conflicts, and on-call pay reporting. Alert routes group and filter incoming alerts, and the Catalog routes pages by service ownership. Live call routing is available on Pro.
On-call costs $10 per user per month on Team and $20 on Pro with annual billing, charged only for people on rotation. If PagerDuty is the other option on your list, our [PagerDuty vs Grafana IRM comparison](https://betterstack.com/community/comparisons/pagerduty-vs-grafana-irm/) covers how Grafana's on-call stacks up against the incumbent.
| On-call feature | incident.io | Grafana IRM |
|---|---|---|
| **Rotations and overrides** | ✔ | ✔, including automated shift swaps |
| **Schedules as code** | Terraform provider | ✔, Terraform and iCal |
| **Shadow rotations** | ✔ | Via schedule layers |
| **On-call pay reporting** | ✔ | ✘ |
| **Notification channels** | App, SMS, phone, Slack, Teams, email | Adds Telegram and Google Calendar |
| **Live call routing** | ✔, Pro and above | ✘ |
| **Self-hosted** | ✘ | Enterprise only |
| **Pricing** | Add-on | Included |
[summary]
### Incidents, on-call, and status pages in one product
incident.io charges extra for on-call and needs a separate monitoring tool, and Grafana IRM needs you to run several Grafana Cloud components and has no status pages. Better Stack combines incident management, on-call, status pages, uptime monitoring, and full observability in one product, with on-call included in the $29 responder price.
**A single product with incidents, on-call, and status pages is simpler to run than several parts wired together.** [See incident management in Better Stack](https://betterstack.com).
[/summary]
## Running the incident
This is incident.io's strongest ground. Grafana IRM covers the essentials, but incident.io has spent years refining how an incident feels to the people inside it.
### incident.io: the channel does the organizing
incident.io declares incidents into a dedicated channel, sets roles, nudges the incident lead when updates are overdue, and records every message, role change, and decision on the timeline. Workflows page the right people as severity changes, create Jira or Linear tickets, and post updates. Scribe joins Zoom or Google Meet and writes down what was decided, so people who join late catch up without interrupting. Pro adds custom incident types, private incidents, and customizable post-incident processes.
### Grafana IRM: one view of the incident, next to the data
Grafana IRM keeps incident details in one view with a full timeline of actions and decisions, and it turns that timeline into a structured post-incident review. It integrates with Slack, Teams, Jira, ServiceNow, and GitHub. It is capable and improving, but it has fewer coordination features than incident.io, with no call transcription, lighter workflow automation, and less guidance for the incident lead. Its advantage is that every graph and log query is one click away.
| Incident coordination | incident.io | Grafana IRM |
|---|---|---|
| **Dedicated incident channel** | ✔ | ✔, via Slack integration |
| **Role assignment and update reminders** | ✔ | ✔, roles, fewer prompts |
| **Workflow automation** | ✔, visual builder | Lighter |
| **Call transcription** | ✔, Scribe | ✘ |
| **Post-incident review** | ✔, AI-drafted | ✔, generated from the timeline |
| **ITSM integrations** | ✔, Jira and Linear | ✔, Jira, ServiceNow, GitHub |
## AI and MCP
Both have real AI investigation. The difference is what the AI can reach.
### incident.io: Investigations through your integrations
incident.io launched Investigations in mid-2025. When an alert fires, it looks at telemetry from connected tools, recent code changes, and similar past incidents, then posts hypotheses and evidence in the channel. In incident.io's own example of a payments outage, it proposes a fix and opens a pull request. It also names and summarizes incidents, suggests next steps, helps triage alerts, and drafts post-mortems. A hosted MCP server lets Claude, Cursor, and other assistants read incidents, alerts, schedules, and catalog data. Everything it knows about your systems comes through integrations.
### Grafana IRM: Sift and Grafana Assistant on the data it holds
Grafana's AI spans the platform. Sift automatically runs checks against your metrics, logs, and traces during an incident and surfaces likely causes, such as error spikes, noisy neighbors, and recent changes. Grafana Assistant handles agentic tasks, builds dashboards, and helps write queries. Because both run on Grafana's own observability data, they can look at the raw telemetry instead of a summary passed across an integration. Grafana also maintains an open-source MCP server that exposes dashboards, queries, alerting, IRM data, and Sift investigations to AI assistants.
If most of your telemetry lives in Grafana Cloud, Grafana's AI has better material. If your monitoring is spread across several vendors, incident.io's integration-based approach can pull context from all of them, and it adds code changes and past incidents to the picture.
| AI capability | incident.io | Grafana IRM |
|---|---|---|
| **AI investigation** | ✔, Investigations | ✔, Sift |
| **Works on raw telemetry** | Through integrations | ✔, native Grafana data |
| **Code-change analysis** | ✔ | ✔, via change tracking |
| **Suggested fixes and pull requests** | ✔ | ✘ |
| **Incident summaries and post-mortem drafts** | ✔ | ✔, via Grafana Assistant |
| **MCP server** | ✔, hosted | ✔, open source |
## The observability difference
This is the section where Grafana IRM wins outright. Grafana Cloud is a full observability platform with metrics, logs, traces, profiling, synthetic monitoring, real user monitoring, and Kubernetes and application observability, and Grafana Labs was named a Leader in Gartner's 2026 Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms. Choosing IRM means your incidents and your telemetry share one product.
incident.io holds none of that. Choosing it means you also run a separate monitoring platform, and responders switch to it during most incidents. Many teams do exactly that and are happy, often pairing incident.io with Grafana itself. But it is a real cost in money and in context switching.
The one thing to weigh against Grafana here is complexity. Grafana Cloud's power comes from several components, each with its own query language and pricing dimension, and getting value from it takes more setup than a single product would.
| Observability | incident.io | Grafana IRM |
|---|---|---|
| **Metrics** | ✘ | ✔, Mimir |
| **Logs** | ✘ | ✔, Loki |
| **Traces** | ✘ | ✔, Tempo |
| **Profiling, RUM, synthetics** | ✘ | ✔ |
| **Same product as incidents** | ✘ | ✔ |
[summary]
### Keep PromQL, drop the extra components
If your team already thinks in PromQL, you don't have to give that up to simplify your stack. Better Stack lets you build charts with PromQL or SQL on top of one warehouse that holds logs, metrics, and traces together, next to on-call and incidents, without running separate backends for each signal.
**You can keep the query language your team knows and still cut the number of systems you operate.** [Build charts with PromQL](https://betterstack.com).
[/summary]
## Status pages
This is a clean gap in incident.io's favor. incident.io includes status pages, with one public page on Team, an internal page on Pro, and unlimited and per-customer pages on Enterprise, all updated from the incident channel.
Grafana IRM does not include customer-facing status pages, so Grafana teams typically add a separate status page product. If public incident communication matters to you, factor that extra tool into the cost.
| Status pages | incident.io | Grafana IRM |
|---|---|---|
| **Public status pages** | ✔, from Team | ✘ |
| **Per-customer pages** | ✔, Enterprise | ✘ |
| **Updates from the incident** | ✔ | ✘ |
## Pricing
The pricing models reward different team shapes. incident.io charges per user, with on-call billed only for people on rotation. Grafana IRM charges only for users who actually use it in a given month.
### incident.io
incident.io's plans are:
1. **Basic:** free for up to 5 users, with single-team on-call and one status page.
2. **Team:** $15 per user per month billed annually, or $19 monthly, with AI and multi-team on-call. On-call adds $10 per user per month.
3. **Pro:** $25 per user per month, adding advanced insights, custom incident types, and private incidents. On-call adds $20 per user per month.
4. **Enterprise:** custom, adding HIPAA, advanced access control, audit logs, and unlimited status pages.
### Grafana IRM
Grafana IRM's free tier covers up to 3 active IRM users with access to everything. The Pro plan costs $20 per active IRM user per month plus a $19 monthly platform fee, with automatic volume discounts. An active user is someone who uses IRM that month, so occasional responders who never touch it in a given month cost nothing. Enterprise pricing is custom, with a $25,000 annual minimum and options for federal cloud and bring-your-own-cloud deployment. The observability data IRM sits beside is billed separately by usage.
### What a 25-person team pays
Assume 25 engineers, 10 of them on rotation, and that all 25 use the incident tool in a typical month. Monitoring is excluded for both, though with Grafana it is likely the same Grafana Cloud bill you would pay anyway.
| Cost component | incident.io Team | incident.io Pro | Grafana IRM Pro |
|---|---|---|---|
| **Seats** | 25 at $15, so $375 per month | 25 at $25, so $625 per month | 25 active at $20, so $500 per month |
| **On-call** | 10 at $10, so $100 per month | 10 at $20, so $200 per month | Included |
| **Platform fee** | ✘ | ✘ | $19 per month |
| **Status pages** | Included | Included | Separate product |
| **Monthly total** | Around $475 | Around $825 | Around $519 |
In a quiet month when only 12 people touch IRM, the Grafana bill drops to about $259, which incident.io's per-user model does not match. incident.io Team comes out slightly cheaper when everyone is active and includes status pages. The bigger cost question is usually observability. If you are paying for Grafana Cloud anyway, IRM is an inexpensive addition. If you are not, you are comparing IRM's on-call and incident features alone against incident.io's, where incident.io is deeper.
[summary]
### Predictable metrics costs at high cardinality
With Grafana IRM, the incident tool is cheap, but the observability bill behind it depends on active series and ingest across several components. With incident.io, the monitoring bill comes from a separate vendor entirely. Better Stack is built to handle high-cardinality metrics without the series count driving surprise costs, and it charges by data volume plus $29 per responder, with incidents, on-call, and status pages on the same invoice.
**The incident tool is rarely the expensive part, and the observability bill is where predictability matters.** [See how Better Stack handles cardinality](https://betterstack.com).
[/summary]
## Security and compliance
Both cover the enterprise basics. incident.io carries SOC 2 Type II and GDPR, and its Enterprise plan adds HIPAA, advanced access control, audit logs, multiple environments, and Slack Enterprise Grid. Grafana Cloud carries SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, FedRAMP, and PCI DSS, with federal cloud and bring-your-own-cloud options on Enterprise. Grafana's public-sector and payments coverage is broader, and incident.io's HIPAA support is clearer for healthcare, though you should confirm current scope with both vendors.
| Security and compliance | incident.io | Grafana IRM |
|---|---|---|
| **SOC 2 Type II** | ✔ | ✔ |
| **GDPR** | ✔ | ✔ |
| **HIPAA** | ✔, Enterprise | Confirm with Grafana |
| **FedRAMP** | ✘ | ✔ |
| **PCI DSS** | ✘ | ✔ |
| **Self-managed deployment** | ✘ | Enterprise, bring your own cloud |
## Using them together
It is worth saying plainly that many teams run both. Grafana handles observability and alerting, and incident.io handles on-call and incident response, with Grafana alerts flowing into incident.io alert routes. That combination gives you Grafana's telemetry and incident.io's coordination and AI, at the cost of two products, a context switch during investigations, and paying for on-call in incident.io instead of getting it bundled with Grafana.
If you already run Grafana Cloud and your incident process is simple, IRM is the cheaper, more integrated choice. If your incident process is complex, or your monitoring spans several vendors, the combination is often worth the extra tool.
## Which one fits your team
Choose Grafana IRM if your telemetry already lives in Grafana Cloud or you plan to move it there. It fits teams that want to investigate in the same tool that pages them, teams with many occasional responders who benefit from active-user pricing, and public-sector or payments teams that need FedRAMP or PCI DSS. Accept a younger incident layer with no status pages, and note that the self-hosted open-source pager is gone.
Choose incident.io if your monitoring spans several tools, or if coordination is where your incidents fall apart. It fits Slack-centric teams, teams that want call transcription, automatic timelines, and polished post-mortems, teams that need status pages built in, and healthcare teams that need HIPAA on the incident tool.
If neither feels right, our roundup of [incident.io alternatives](https://betterstack.com/community/comparisons/incident-io-alternative/) covers the other tools teams usually evaluate.
## Final thoughts
The deciding question is where your team works when something breaks. **Grafana IRM wins when your graphs are the center of your world**, because it puts the page, the incident, and the evidence in one place and charges little for the incident layer once you are on Grafana Cloud. incident.io wins when people are the hard part, with better coordination, better notes, status pages, and an AI that can pull context from every tool you use.
So look at where your last incident was actually solved. If it was solved in a Grafana dashboard, and Slack was just where people waited for updates, move your on-call into Grafana IRM. **If it was solved in the Slack channel, and Grafana was one of several tabs people kept switching to, choose incident.io**, and then think seriously about whether all those tabs need to exist.
[summary]
### One assistant for the incident and the evidence
incident.io's MCP server exposes incidents but no telemetry, and Grafana's open-source MCP server spans a stack of separate components. 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 the same conversation.
**With the incident and the telemetry behind one MCP endpoint, your assistant can investigate and respond without switching tools.** [Try Better Stack](https://betterstack.com).
[/summary]