# Rootly vs Squadcast: An Incident Management comparison for 2026
Squadcast's cheapest paid plan costs $9 per user per month, and on-call scheduling is part of it. Rootly sells incident response and on-call as separate products at $20 per user each, so an engineer who both carries the pager and runs incidents costs $40, and the AI SRE that Rootly leads its marketing with is a third product priced by quote. For a team of 25 with 10 on rotation, the list prices come to about $225 a month for Squadcast and about $700 for Rootly.
Nearly $6,000 a year is a lot to pay for anything, so the useful question is what it buys. This comparison is organized around that question, and the answer depends on what goes wrong in your incidents today.
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The two products are built for different parts of the problem. **Squadcast is an on-call and alert-noise product**, now sold as SolarWinds Incident Response, that filters alerts before anyone is paged and tracks reliability against SLOs, managed mostly from a web dashboard and mobile app. Rootly concentrates on the people side. **Rootly is a Slack- and Teams-native response platform** with configurable workflows, an AI assistant on its entry plan, and a separate AI SRE that proposes root causes, and it is still an independent company.
The sections below cover where each one runs, alert noise, on-call, automation, reliability tracking, AI, status pages, ownership, and a cost breakdown.
## Quick comparison
The table covers what teams usually ask first. Most of Rootly's extra cost sits in the response and AI rows.
| Category | Rootly | Squadcast |
|---|---|---|
| **Current name** | Rootly | SolarWinds Incident Response, formerly Squadcast |
| **Ownership** | Independent | SolarWinds |
| **Main surface** | Slack or Teams | Web dashboard and mobile app |
| **Strongest at** | Coordinating the response | Reducing alert noise and paging |
| **Alert deduplication** | Alert grouping in On-Call | ✔, Event Intelligence |
| **Self-resolving alert suppression** | ✘ | ✔, Auto Pause Transient Alerts |
| **On-call** | Separate license, $20 per user | Included in every plan |
| **Shadow rotations** | ✔ | ✘ |
| **Workflow automation** | ✔, lifecycle workflows | ✔, Workflows module |
| **Executable remediation runbooks** | ✘ | ✔, Premium and above |
| **SLOs and error budgets** | ✘ | ✔ |
| **AI assistant and summaries** | ✔, Essentials | ✔, alert prioritization and summaries |
| **AI root-cause investigation** | ✔, AI SRE, priced by quote | ✘ |
| **MCP server** | ✔, hosted or self-hosted | No public server |
| **Status pages** | ✔ | ✔ |
| **On-premise option** | ✘ | ✔, Enterprise |
| **Entry paid price** | $20 per user for incident response | $9 per user, on-call included |
| **Logs, metrics, traces** | ✘ | ✘ |
## What the price gap pays for
Before the detail, here is the short version of what Rootly's higher price gets you, and what Squadcast's lower price leaves out.
Rootly's $20 incident response license buys a response that runs in Slack or Teams: automatic channels, role assignment, lifecycle workflows, an AI assistant that summarizes and drafts retrospectives, status pages, and a hosted MCP server. Its $20 on-call license adds schedules, escalations, shadow rotations, coverage-gap detection, and live call routing. The AI SRE is extra.
Squadcast's $9 Pro seat buys on-call, escalations, alert deduplication and suppression, and mobile paging. Premium adds remediation runbooks and SLO tracking, and Enterprise at $21 adds unlimited phone and SMS, unlimited stakeholders, and on-premise deployment. What none of its plans offer is a chat-first incident workflow with an AI that investigates.
So if your pain is alert floods and pager fatigue, Squadcast covers it for less. If your pain is the hour after the page, Rootly is where the extra money goes.
## Where each one runs
The products feel different from the first click, because they live in different places.
Rootly runs the incident inside Slack or Microsoft Teams. Declaring one opens a channel, assigns roles such as incident commander and communications lead, starts the timeline, and prompts the commander with next steps, all without leaving chat.
Squadcast's center is its own dashboard, where responders see incidents, alerts, service health, and on-call status in one place. Slack and Teams integrations let people acknowledge and update incidents from chat, but the incident itself is managed in Squadcast's interface and mobile app.
Teams that already coordinate everything in Slack tend to prefer Rootly's approach. Operations teams that want one console for alerts, services, and on-call often prefer Squadcast's.
| Where work happens | Rootly | Squadcast |
|---|---|---|
| **Incident channel in Slack or Teams** | ✔, core design | Chat integrations for actions |
| **Role assignment** | ✔, automatic | Responders and assignees |
| **Central web console** | Supporting | ✔, primary |
| **Mobile app** | ✔ | ✔ |
[summary]
### Run incidents in Slack with the data inside
Rootly brings the incident into Slack, and Squadcast keeps it in its own console, but both link out to a separate monitoring tool for the evidence. Better Stack opens incident channels in Slack or Teams with the triggering logs and metrics already attached, so responders investigate in the same thread where they coordinate.
**Coordination and investigation work best in the same place.** [Explore Slack-based incident management](https://betterstack.com/incident-management).
[/summary]
## Alert noise
Squadcast does more to cut noise, and does it on cheaper plans.
Alerts from Squadcast's 200-plus integrations pass through Event Intelligence, where rules and a learning model merge duplicates, label them, and send them to the right team. A feature called Auto Pause Transient Alerts waits before notifying on alerts with a history of resolving themselves within minutes, so a check that flaps and recovers never pages anyone. Its AI also ranks which alerts most likely matter and suggests new suppression and routing rules over time.
Rootly On-Call groups and routes alerts too, and its AI SRE uses related alerts as evidence once an incident opens. But alert reduction is a supporting feature for Rootly rather than the reason people buy it. If a noisy monitoring stack is your main complaint, Squadcast addresses it more directly, and our [incident.io vs Squadcast comparison](https://betterstack.com/community/comparisons/incident-io-vs-squadcast/) shows how that strength holds up against another response-focused tool.
| Noise reduction | Rootly | Squadcast |
|---|---|---|
| **Deduplication and grouping** | ✔, On-Call | ✔, every plan |
| **Transient alert suppression** | ✘ | ✔ |
| **AI alert prioritization** | Via AI SRE during incidents | ✔ |
| **Suggested routing and suppression rules** | ✘ | ✔ |
| **Integrations** | Broad catalog | 200+ |
## On-call
Both cover rotations, overrides, and escalations. The packaging differs more than the features.
Squadcast has offered on-call since 2017. It supports weekly, follow-the-sun, and custom rotations, overrides, multi-tier escalation, Live Call Routing for incoming phone calls, and workload analytics. Phone calls and texts come with a monthly allowance per user below Enterprise, which lifts the limit.
Rootly On-Call is sold separately at $20 per user and can run without Rootly's incident response product. It adds features aimed at the people on the rotation, including shadow rotations for engineers learning the ropes, detection of gaps in coverage, and inbound call routing that forwards a phone call to whoever is on duty.
If you are also weighing PagerDuty, our [PagerDuty vs Rootly comparison](https://betterstack.com/community/comparisons/pagerduty-vs-rootly/) covers how Rootly On-Call compares with the incumbent.
| On-call | Rootly | Squadcast |
|---|---|---|
| **Rotations and overrides** | ✔ | ✔ |
| **Multi-tier escalation** | ✔ | ✔ |
| **Shadow rotations** | ✔ | ✘ |
| **Coverage gap detection** | ✔ | ✘ |
| **Live call routing** | ✔ | ✔ |
| **Workload analytics** | ✔ | ✔ |
| **SMS and voice** | Included | Capped below Enterprise |
| **Pricing** | $20 per user, separate license | Included in the seat |
[summary]
### Branching escalations at one responder price
Rootly charges for on-call as a second license, and Squadcast caps calls and texts below its top tier. Better Stack's $29 responder price covers on-call and incident management with unlimited phone calls and SMS, and its escalation flows branch on time, severity, and alert metadata.
**One price for paging and response means nobody has to decide which license a responder needs.** [Explore Better Stack escalations](https://betterstack.com/incident-management).
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## Automation
Both automate a lot. They split the work differently.
In Rootly, a workflow can start from almost any change in an incident's life, from the moment it is declared to the moment it closes. Conditions can check services, teams, severity, labels, or custom fields, and actions can page people, create tickets, post updates, run webhooks, and update status pages. Essentials has no published cap on workflows, so you can model a detailed process. The trade-off is that someone has to own and maintain it.
Squadcast divides automation into two tools. The Workflows module reacts to incident state changes and carries out actions in other systems, for example filing a ServiceNow ticket whenever a P1 opens. Runbooks, which start on Premium, hold the technical fix: a diagnostic command or failover procedure an engineer triggers from inside the incident.
| Automation | Rootly | Squadcast |
|---|---|---|
| **Lifecycle workflows** | ✔, highly configurable | ✔ |
| **Executable remediation steps** | Via webhooks | ✔, runbooks |
| **Limits on entry plan** | None published | Runbooks from Premium |
| **Admin effort** | Higher for deep setups | Moderate |
## Reliability tracking
Squadcast tracks reliability against targets. Rootly does not try to.
Squadcast includes SLO and error budget tracking based on metrics from your monitoring tools, with breach alerts routed through on-call. Service Health shows open incidents and SLO status per service, and incident analytics cover MTTA and MTTR by team and service.
Rootly has a service catalog that feeds its workflows and AI, plus incident metrics and retrospective tracking, but no SLO feature. If your SRE team manages error budgets, Squadcast covers that and Rootly will need another tool.
| Reliability | Rootly | Squadcast |
|---|---|---|
| **SLOs and error budgets** | ✘ | ✔ |
| **Service health view** | Catalog | ✔, dedicated dashboard |
| **MTTA and MTTR analytics** | ✔ | ✔ |
| **Service catalog** | ✔ | Service data |
## AI and MCP
This is where Rootly's price gap is easiest to justify, if you buy the AI SRE.
Even at the Essentials tier, Rootly puts an AI helper in the Slack channel that can catch latecomers up, answer questions about the incident so far, and start the retrospective draft. The separately licensed AI SRE goes further: while people work the problem, it checks recent deploys, connected alerts, and earlier incidents that looked similar, then posts its best guess at the cause with a confidence score and the evidence behind it.
Since March 2026, Rootly has offered a generally available MCP server, either hosted by Rootly or run on your own infrastructure. Through it, tools like Claude and Cursor can look up and change incidents, read alerts, and adjust schedules and workflows.
Squadcast applies AI to the alert stream: prioritizing alerts, improving deduplication, spotting patterns, suggesting rules, and summarizing incidents. Diagnosing the cause is outside its scope, and no public MCP server is listed in SolarWinds' documentation.
| AI and MCP | Rootly | Squadcast |
|---|---|---|
| **Incident summaries** | ✔, Essentials | ✔ |
| **AI retrospective drafts** | ✔ | ✘ |
| **Root-cause investigation** | ✔, AI SRE, priced separately | ✘ |
| **Alert prioritization** | During investigations | ✔ |
| **MCP server** | ✔, GA since March 2026 | No public server |
## Status pages and retrospectives
Both include status pages. Rootly's come with Essentials, and because workflows drive them, raising an incident's severity can publish a customer-facing notice with no extra step.
Squadcast offers both customer-facing and internal pages, with per-component status and maintenance announcements, plus free stakeholder seats from Premium, capped at 10, and unlimited on Enterprise.
For retrospectives, Rootly drafts from its Slack timeline with AI help and syncs follow-ups to Jira, Linear, and other trackers. Squadcast offers post-incident review templates built on a timeline filled from incident actions.
| Status and review | Rootly | Squadcast |
|---|---|---|
| **Public status pages** | ✔ | ✔ |
| **Internal status pages** | Check your plan | ✔ |
| **Free stakeholder seats** | Per plan | Up to 10 on Premium, unlimited on Enterprise |
| **AI retrospective drafts** | ✔ | ✘ |
| **Follow-up sync to trackers** | ✔ | Via integrations |
[summary]
### Status pages that change when the monitor does
Rootly and Squadcast both update status pages from incidents, which means someone has to declare one first. Better Stack's status pages sit on top of its own uptime monitors, so a component can turn red the moment a check fails, with custom domains, private pages, and subscriber notifications included.
**Customers notice an outage at the same moment your monitors do, and your status page should too.** [See Better Stack status pages](https://betterstack.com/status-page).
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## Independent or acquired
Ownership is a smaller factor than features here, but it is worth a paragraph. Rootly is an independent, venture-backed company that sells only incident tooling, and its roadmap is aimed squarely at replacing PagerDuty, Opsgenie, incident.io, and FireHydrant. Our [FireHydrant vs Rootly comparison](https://betterstack.com/community/comparisons/firehydrant-vs-rootly/) covers how it competes with another standalone vendor. Squadcast belongs to SolarWinds, which sells observability, IT operations, and service management, and and which a private equity firm, Turn/River Capital, acquired in 2025. That gives Squadcast a path into SolarWinds monitoring and cloud marketplace purchasing, and raises the usual question about how long its low prices will hold. If that worries you, our roundup of [Squadcast alternatives](https://betterstack.com/community/comparisons/squadcast-alternatives/) covers the field.
## The telemetry neither tool holds
Neither of these products is an observability platform, so you get no log storage, metrics, traces, or uptime checks from either. Squadcast's SLOs read metrics from your monitoring stack, and Rootly's AI SRE works from alerts, changes, and past incidents passed in through integrations. In both cases, responders switch to a separate observability platform to see what actually failed.
| Observability | Rootly | Squadcast |
|---|---|---|
| **Log management** | ✘ | ✘ |
| **Metrics** | ✘ | ✘, pulled for SLOs |
| **Distributed tracing** | ✘ | ✘ |
| **Uptime monitoring** | ✘ | ✘ |
[summary]
### See the failing request, not just the alert
Rootly's AI SRE reasons from alerts and changes, and Squadcast's SLOs read metrics pulled from another product, but neither can open the trace of a request that failed. Better Stack records traces alongside logs and metrics in the platform that pages you, so a responder can go from the alert to the slow span in a few clicks.
**Root causes live in traces and log lines, so the incident tool should be able to reach them.** [Explore Better Stack tracing](https://betterstack.com/tracing).
[/summary]
## Pricing
### Rootly
Rootly sells three products, separately or bundled at a discount:
1. **Incident Response Essentials:** $20 a user each month for chat-based response in Slack or Teams, including workflows, the AI assistant, status pages, retrospectives, and single sign-on.
2. **On-Call Essentials:** another $20 a user each month for rotations, escalation, and paging.
3. **AI SRE:** a sales quote.
Moving up to Enterprise brings private incidents, SCIM provisioning, audit logs, and custom forms. There is no free plan, only a trial, and negotiated discounts are common.
### Squadcast
According to the figures Squadcast has given G2, seats cost between $9 and $21 a month:
1. **Pro:** $9 a user each month for paging, escalation, alert noise reduction, and the mobile app.
2. **Premium:** a middle tier that brings remediation runbooks, SLOs, richer escalation options, and 10 free stakeholder seats.
3. **Enterprise:** $21 a user each month, removing phone and SMS limits and stakeholder caps and allowing on-premise installation.
Some buyers are now routed to sales after the SolarWinds rebrand, so confirm current pricing.
### What a 25-person team pays
Picture 25 engineers who all join incidents, with 10 of them on the rotation, paying list prices.
| Cost component | Rootly Essentials | Squadcast Pro | Squadcast Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|
| **Seats for 25 engineers** | 25 at $20 for incident response, so $500 | 25 at $9, so $225 | 25 at $21, so $525 |
| **On-call for the 10 on rotation** | 10 at $20, so $200 | Included | Included |
| **Monthly total** | About $700 | About $225 | About $525 |
| **AI root-cause investigation** | AI SRE quote on top | ✘ | ✘ |
| **SLOs** | ✘ | ✘, from Premium | ✔ |
| **SMS and voice** | Part of On-Call | Capped | Unlimited |
Squadcast Pro is the cheapest by a wide margin. Even Squadcast Enterprise, with unlimited phone alerts and on-premise deployment, costs less than Rootly Essentials before the AI SRE. Rootly's extra spend buys the Slack-native response, the AI assistant on the base plan, and access to the AI SRE.
## Deployment
Two deployment details can settle the choice for some buyers. Squadcast Enterprise can be installed on your own infrastructure, which few incident tools allow, and you can buy Squadcast through AWS or Azure Marketplace to draw down committed cloud spend. Rootly is SaaS, with a self-hosted option for its MCP server but not for the platform itself.
## Which one fits your team
Pick Squadcast if alert noise and pager fatigue are the main problems and budget matters. It suits teams with many monitoring sources, SRE teams that manage SLOs and error budgets, organizations that need on-premise deployment or marketplace billing, and teams already using SolarWinds. Get pricing commitments in writing on longer contracts.
Choose Rootly if your alerts are under control and your incidents still feel disorganized. It suits teams that run everything in Slack or Teams, want an AI assistant on the base plan, and see value in paying extra for an AI that suggests where the fault lies. Plan for someone to own the workflow configuration, and budget for both licenses if your responders also carry the pager. Our [incident.io vs Rootly comparison](https://betterstack.com/community/comparisons/incident-io-vs-rootly/) covers how Rootly compares with its closest Slack-native rival.
## Final thoughts
The $6,000 a year between these tools buys a specific thing. **Rootly charges for a better-run response and an AI that looks for the cause**, while Squadcast charges less for quieter pagers and reliability targets.
So look at where your on-call engineers lose sleep. If they are woken by alerts that turn out to be nothing, the cheaper tool is also the better one. **If the alerts are real and the hour after them is chaos, Squadcast's savings will not buy that hour back.**
[summary]
### One MCP endpoint for incidents and telemetry
Rootly'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).
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