Trying to find the right Incident Management Platform to streamline your team’s incident response to critical issues? Well, if you are trying to decide between Squadcast and Incident.io, here’s a breakdown of their strengths to help you choose the best platform.
Squadcast offers a unified platform for managing incidents, scheduling on-call rotations, automating tasks with workflows, and facilitating communications between stakeholders.
Incident.io provides a comprehensive incident response suite focused on Slack, that integrates on-call scheduling, incident communication, and status pages.
Introduction
Facing critical incidents is inevitable, but choosing the right Incident Management Platform empowers your team to respond swiftly and effectively to these critical issues. Squadcast and Incident.io are both popular options, but cater to slightly different needs. Both Squadcast and Incident.io offer features to manage alerts, collaborate during incidents, and track resolution times. So, what sets them apart? This blog will help you to find what sets them apart and helps you pick the perfect incident management platform for your DevOps, SRE, or Engineering team.
How is Squadcast different from Incident.io?
Holistic Incident Management: Both Squadcast and Incident.io offer core features like Alert Management, Incident Collaboration, and Resolution Tracking. However, Squadcast takes a unified approach. It combines On-Call Management, Incident Response, communication with stakeholders, and smart automation capabilities into a single platform. This reduces tool sprawl, eliminates context switching, streamlines workflows and assists in quicker resolution. On the other hand, Incident.io offers a more modular solution focusing on incident management primarily within Slack and offering integrations for separate on-call scheduling and communication tools. This can require additional integrations with tools like PagerDuty or Opsgenie for alerting on-call teams.
Rich and Mature AI / ML Ops: Squadcast leverages advanced AI/ML techniques to offer features like Past Incidents, Auto Pause Transient Alerts(APTA) and Intelligent Alert Grouping (IAG). Past Incidents surface similar historical issues, accelerating resolution by providing context, past activity, timing patterns and past solutions. Auto Pause Transient Alerts intelligently detect and suppress notifications for short-lived alerts that are likely to resolve on their own, reducing alert fatigue. Intelligent Alert Grouping reduces alert fatigue by consolidating similar open incidents, saving your team from distracting information and alert noise. While incident.io offers some basic intelligent features like Pattern Recognition, Incident Summaries using Natural Language Processing, accessing historical incident data and basic On-Call Alerting and Incident Response, Squadcast's features are significantly more mature and actionable.
SRE-Focused Incident Response with SLOs & Error Budgets: Squadcast aligns with key SRE principles and offers features like adding Additional Responders to an incident, automatically attaching runbooks to incidents and adding stakeholders as incident watchers to keep them updated on any progress on critical incidents. SLO monitoring & management of error budgets cater to the specific needs of large enterprises& MSPs, providing insights for monthly reporting and continuous improvement. Incident.io offers basic incident response and on-call capabilities, lacking the depth of Squadcast's SRE-centric functionalities.
Feature Comparison
On-Call Management
Feature
Squadcast
Incident.io
Stakeholders Stakeholders can subscribe to incidents and stay updated on progress
Stakeholder Groups
Live Call Routing
Available in Enterprise Plan
Webforms Alternative to Live Call Routing
Available from Premium Plan
Squads Sub Teams in Squadcast
Schedules
Schedule Overrides
Escalation Policies
Service Graph
Custom user Roles
Teams
Service Graph
Squadcast and incident.io both offer core on-call functionalities like On-Call Scheduling, schedule overrides, and escalation policies, ensuring smooth team handoffs during incidents. Squadcast has an advantage in on-call management with advanced features like stakeholder groups for organized communication and service graph for visualizing service dependencies. Live call routing, available in Squadcast's Enterprise plan, can be an alternative to web forms (available in the Premium plan) for immediate contact, a desired feature not available with incident.io.
Incident Response with SRE
Feature
Squadcast
Incident.io
Additional Responders
Runbooks
Incident Postmortems with Templates
Incident Watchers
Incident Notes
Attach and Review Runbooks
Squadcast Runbooks
Squadcast and Incident.io both provide core incident response functionalities but Squadcast offers a more comprehensive SRE approach with features like attaching and reviewing runbooks to incidents for faster resolution, assigning additional responders to incidents, including stakeholders for incident progress updates. This facilitates a more collaborative and efficient resolution process.
Event Aggregation and Correlation
Feature
Squadcast
Incident.io
Key Based Alert Deduplication
Rule Based Alert Deduplication
Rule Based Alert Suppression
Global Event Rules
Snooze Notifications
Delayed Notifications
Intelligent Alert Routing and Tagging
Merge Incidents
ML Based Intelligent Alert Grouping
Auto Pause Transient Alerts (APTA)
Event Priority and Severity Levels
Global Event Ruleset
Squadcast shines completely in event aggregation and correlation as compared to Incident.io. Squadcast offers a comprehensive suite of features to reduce alert fatigue and streamline response. It boasts features such as Key based and Alert based deduplication, Suppression Rules, Intelligent Alert Grouping, Automatic Pausing of Transient Alerts, and functionalities like snoozing, delaying, routing, tagging, and merging incidents focused on reducing alert fatigue, all of which are missing in Incident.io. While Incident.io allows prioritizing alerts with severity levels, Squadcast's feature set empowers engineering and DevOps teams to minimize distractions and expedite resolution significantly.
Insights and Analytics
Feature
Squadcast
Incident.io
Past Incidents For Continuous Learning
Display of Deduplicated & Suppressed Alerts By Services & Alert Source
MTTA & MTTR Report
User & Incident Based Analytics
Team Based Analytics
Exportable Incident Timelines
Organization Based Analytics
Squadcast Analytics Dashboard
Both Squadcast and Incident.io offer core analytics and insights features like reporting MTTA (Mean Time To Acknowledge) and MTTR (Mean Time To Resolve), user & incident analysis, exportable timelines of incidents and organization level insights. However, Squadcast provides additional features for advanced learning and streamlined workflows. Past Incidents feature allows you to learn from historical incidents and resolve incidents more efficiently. Deduplicated & Suppressed Alert Display enables us to gain a clearer picture of ongoing issues without information overload. These features empower teams to proactively address issues and optimize their incident response processes.
Pricing
How much does Squadcast Cost?
Squadcast offers a transparent feature package with a simple pricing model, including a free plan for 5 users. Paid plans start at $9 per month per user, offering essential incident management and on-call scheduling features. For all the advanced Noise Reduction, Digital Operations and AIops capabilities, teams can opt for the Enterprise plan, priced at $21 per month per user.
How much does Incident.io cost?
Incident.io also offers a 14-day free trial. Paid plans for Incident Response features start at $15 per user per month. A Pro-plan including some advanced functionalities, including Post Mortems and in-depth insights start at $25 per user per month. It's important to consider that incident.io charges additional fees for the On-Call layer which are $10 per user, per month for the Team Plan and $20 per user, per month for the Pro Plan, which could potentially lead to higher overall costs.
The Final Verdict
Both Squadcast and Incident.io are powerful incident management tools. The choice between the two platforms comes down to your team’s specific needs. Squadcast shines with its SRE-focused features, intelligent alerting, and streamlined collaboration. If rapid incident resolution and a unified incident management platform with automation capabilities are priorities, Squadcast is a compelling option. However, if you value a modular incident response system with strong Slack communication integration, incident.io could be the answer. Consider your team's size, budget, and desired workflow when making your decision.
For a seamless, automated incident management experience, explore Squadcast's free trial and see the difference!
