Looking to compare Squadcast Vs FireHydrant for opting a strong incident management tool? Here is a quick breakdown of the two tools that you can easily remember:
Squadcast is a comprehensive Incident Management tool that goes beyond alerting and on-call scheduling. Squadcast provides a one-stop shop that empowers SRE and DevOps teams with incident alerting, on-call management, facilitating communication through integrated chatops and automating tasks through workflows.
2. FireHydrant: Streamlining Incident Response
FireHydrant is a dedicated incident response platform focusing on streamlining incident resolution with communication and collaboration through Slack and post-incident analysis to help teams learn and resolve incidents faster.
Introduction
Are you overwhelmed by incident chaos? Want an Incident Management Tool but Struggling to choose between a Unified Incident Management platform and a dedicated response tool? You're not alone. Developers, DevOps, SRE teams, and Engineers across the globe grapple with this decision. Both Squadcast and FireHydrant offer robust solutions, but they cater to different needs. This blog will equip you to make an informed decision by dissecting their functionalities and highlighting key differentiators. Whether you prioritize proactive prevention or focused reactive response, discover which platform best suits your incident management team the best.
How is Squadcast different from FireHydrant
1. Noise Reduction and Event Intelligence with AI/ML Capabilities: Squadcast enables the teams to tackle alert overload with AI/ML powered Noise Reduction and Event Intelligence features. These include features like deduplication, suppression, intelligent alert grouping, flapping alert detection and auto-pausing them. Additionally, Squadcast provides unparalleled incident context through service graph visualization and past incident data. FireHydrant has its primary focus on incident response, and might overwhelm users with unnecessary alerts for minor incidents or false alarms, hindering productivity.
2. Platform Extensibility: Squadcast offers wide platform extensibility. It provides comprehensive Terraform integration for enhanced automation, unlimited developer friendly API access for custom application development, and more than 175 native integrations with a vast array of tools, enabling a diverse incident management ecosystem. FireHydrant has limited native integrations, and its chatops functionality is confined only to Slack. Additionally, API access for crucial incident response isn’t available due to the platform's extensive dependence on Slack.
3. SRE Focus with SLOs and Error Budgets: Squadcast empowers the SRE teams with features like SLO (Service Level Objective) monitoring and Error budget management. These features cater to the specific needs of large enterprises and MSPs, providing valuable insights for monthly reporting and continuous improvement. FireHydrant currently lacks these proactive SRE functionalities.
Feature Comparison
On-Call Management
Feature
Squadcast
FireHydrant
Stakeholder Subscription
Stakeholder Groups
Webforms Modern Alternate to Live Call Routing
Squads Sub Teams in Squadcast
Number of Alerts routed to Platform
Unlimited
50 only Additional alerts are chargeable
Schedules
Escalation Policies
Round Robin Escalations
Service Graph
SLO Tracker with error budgets
Role Based Access Control
Service Graph
Squadcast offers more robust On-Call Management features compared to FireHydrant. It provides features for improved communication such as stakeholder subscriptions, stakeholder groups, flexible team structures with squads, unlimited alert routing as compared to only 50 for FireHydrant, and in-depth visibility with service graphs and SLO tracker. While both offer core functionalities like schedules and escalations, Squadcast adds round-robin escalations for efficient handoffs. FireHydrant's free plan limits alerts to 50 per month, potentially incurring extra charges.
Incident Response with SRE
Feature
Squadcast
FireHydrant
Runbooks
Incident Watchers
Additional Responders
Incident notes
Both Squadcast and FireHydrant offer core Incident Response features, such as runbooks and adding incident notes. However, Squadcast goes beyond basic incident management by offering features like Incident Watchers. This keeps stakeholders informed about the resolution process without cluttering the response effort. Additionally, Squadcast allows you to assign Additional Responders, bringing in an extra set of hands for complex incidents.
Event Aggregation & Correlation
Feature
Squadcast
FireHydrant
Key Based Alert Deduplication
Rule Based Alert Deduplication
Rule Based Alert Suppression
Global Event Rules
Snooze Notifications
Delayed Notifications
Intelligent Alert Routing & Tagging
ML Based Intelligent Alert Grouping
Auto Pause Transient Alerts (APTA)
Custom Content Templates
Event Priority & Severity Levels
Auto Pause Transient Alerts
Squadcast boasts a robust suite of event aggregation and correlation features, while FireHydrant offers basic prioritization through Event Priority & indicates Severity Levels of Incidents. Squadcast empowers you with AI/ML-powered functionalities to significantly reduce alert fatigue and streamline the Incident Response process. Features like Automated Alert Routing & Tagging speeds up incident response by automatically categorizing and routing alerts based on predefined rules, ML-Based Intelligent Alert Grouping reduces alert fatigue by grouping similar alerts for faster analysis and Auto Pause Transient Alerts (APTA) prevents overwhelming teams during temporary disruptions by pausing notifications for brief bursts of alerts that may resolve themselves. These advanced features in Squadcast can significantly enhance the efficiency and accuracy of your incident response process.
Insights & Analytics
Feature
Squadcast
FireHydrant
Past Incidents For Continuous Learning
Display of Deduplicated & Suppressed Incidents By service and Alert Source
Exportable Incident Timelines
MTTA & MTTR Report
User and Incident Based Analytics
Team Based Analytics
Organization Based Analytics
Squadcast and FireHydrant both offer core incident response analytics like exportable incident timelines, MTTA (Mean Time to Acknowledge) and MTTR (Mean Time to Resolve) along with user and incident breakdowns including the number of incidents. However, Squadcast dives deeper with functionalities like Past Incidents which facilitates continuous learning, analyzing past incidents to identify patterns, visualizing deduplicated and suppressed incidents and providing team-based and organization-based analytics for comprehensive performance evaluation.
Pricing
How much does Squadcast cost?
Squadcast offers a transparent feature packaging accompanied with a straightforward pricing structure, along with a free plan for up to 5 users. Paid plans start at $9 per month per user offering essential incident management and on-call scheduling features. For all the advanced Digital Operations and AIops capabilities inclusive of On-Call, Incident Response, Event Aggregation & Correlation and SRE Capabilities, teams can opt for the Enterprise plan, priced at $21 per month per user.
How much does FireHydrant cost?
FireHydrant is primarily Incident Response focused, it prices On-Call and Incident Management Features separately. The complete capabilities of the FireHydrant platform are included in the Platform Pro plan which is priced at $9,600 per year for 20 responders and 50 monthly alerts. Pricing for the Enterprise plan is available upon request.
Choosing the Right Platform
Squadcast and FireHydrant are powerful tools for incident management, but they cater to different needs. FireHydrant, with its strong Slack Integration excels in streamlining the reactive incident workflows, particularly within Slack-centric environments. It has more focus on core communication functionalities like war rooms, collaborative response and basic incident analytics and reporting, making it a strong contender for teams that prioritize a user-friendly platform for handling immediate firefights.
However, if you seek a comprehensive solution for proactive and reactive incident management including SRE focus, Squadcast surely stands out. Its emphasis on AI-powered alert noise reduction, intelligent automation and in-depth analytics empowers SRE teams to prevent incidents before they occur and optimize response efficiency. Moreover, Squadcast boasts a wider range of integrations, superior platform extensibility and support for proactive SRE practices like SLO and error budget monitoring.
Ultimately, the choice between Squadcast and FireHydrant depends on your specific requirements. If your team prioritizes intelligent incident prevention, extensive customization ability and a platform that empowers your team to proactively build reliability, we highly recommend trying Squadcast's 14-day free trial.
Experience the power of a Unified Reliability Automation platform and see how Squadcast can transform your incident management game.
