Struggling to decide between Squadcast and Opsgenie for your Incident Management Needs? Here’s a quick breakdown of their strengths to help you choose the best fit.
Squadcast goes beyond just alerts and On-Call Scheduling. It's a one-stop shop for managing incidents, including scheduling who's on-call, facilitating communication, and automating tasks through workflows.
2. Opsgenie: Alerting and On-Call Management
Opsgenie excels at managing alerts and ensuring that the right people are notified during incidents.
Introduction
Effective incident management involves navigating complexities such as handling alerts, coordinating on-call rotations, and ensuring clear communication, all pivotal for a seamless response. A robust incident management platform is indispensable for developers, DevOps, SRE teams, and engineers alike. This article delves into a comparison between two widely used options:
Squadcast, the Unified Incident Management champion, and Opsgenie, the veteran Alerting and On-Call Management solution. These platforms aim to enhance team collaboration, improve incident response times, and minimize downtime. We'll explore their strengths to help you pick the perfect tool for your team.
How is Squadcast different from Opsgenie?
Unified Incident Management Powerhouse: Squadcast goes beyond the basic Incident Alerting. It brings Incident Response, On-Call Management, Incident Communication, Status Pages and Task Automations under one umbrella, streamlining workflows and boosting your team efficiency. Opsgenie focuses primarily on Alerting and On-Call Response, requiring additional tools for other aspects of Incident Management.
Automation Advantage with Workflows: With Squadcast workflows, you can automate manual incident lifecycle tasks such as adding incident notes, attaching a communication channel, sending Slack messages, making an HTTP call, or even creating Jira tickets. This saves precious time during critical incidents and allows the team to focus on resolving the incidents. Opsgenie offers some automation, but it’s very limited. Squadcast’s automation is powerful and easy to use, giving your team an edge.
Simple to use with Inclusive Features: Squadcast offers simplicity, while focusing on reducing alert fatigue and providing actionable insights to resolve incidents faster. It includes essential features like scheduled templates, round-robin escalations, stakeholders, SSO, and RBAC, which are ideal for large organizations. Opsgenie, while feature-rich, can be more complex to navigate, and reserves some advanced features for its higher-price tiers, limiting functionality for teams on a budget and potentially slowing down incident response times.
Feature Comparison
On-Call Management
Feature
Squadcast
Opsgenie
Webforms (Alternative on Live Call Routing)
Has Live Call Routing
Scheduled Templates
Round Robin Escalations
Routing Rules
Unlimited
Max 100 Rules
Stakeholders
Available in Enterprise Plan
Role Based Access Control (RBAC)
Available from Standard Plan
Phone and SMS Notifications
Schedules
Schedule Overrides
Escalation Policies
Services
Services
While both Squadcast and Opsgenie offer the essentials for On-Call Management, Squadcast pulls ahead with extra features. It provides features like unlimited routing rules for complex workflows, webforms, and free stakeholder access for better communication and visibility. Additionally, Squadcast offers role-based access control from its standard plan, whereas Opsgenie might require a higher-tier subscription. This extra control and flexibility make Squadcast the better choice for teams with intricate on-call needs.
Incident Response
Feature
Squadcast
Opsgenie
Runbooks
Runbooks Created in Confluence
Incident Notes
Incident Watchers
Create Confluence Bridge
ChatOps (Slack, MS Teams)
Response Actions
Incident Operations via API
Squadcast Runbooks
Squadcast offers dedicated runbooks for faster resolution, Incident Watchers for improved collaboration, and a built-in Confluence bridge for knowledge base integration. While Opsgenie relies on few Atlassian tools for some features, Squadcast provides a more unified and streamlined experience by either having an in-built feature or integrating natively with the external tools.
Status Page
Feature
Squadcast
Opsgenie
# of Status Page
5 (Public and Private)
Add-On Atlassian Status Page
Public Status Page
Add-On Atlassian Status Page
Private Status Page
Add-On Atlassian Status Page
Subscribers
5000 subscribers/status page
Add-On Atlassian Status Page
Squadcast offers both public and private status pages directly within the platform, allowing the maximum of 10,000 subscribers each. Opsgenie, however, lacks built-in status pages. To access this functionality with Opsgenie, you'd need to purchase a separate Atlassian Status Page Add-on
Noise Reduction and Contextual Awareness with Workflow Automation
Feature
Squadcast
Opsgenie
Past Incidents
Available in Enterprise Plan
Manually Merge Incidents
Rule Based Alert Suppression
Auto Pause Transient Alerts
Key Based Alert Deduplication
Global Event Rules
Available in Enterprise Plan
Available in Enterprise Plan
Runbooks Execution
Workflows
Auto Pause Transient Alerts
Squadcast and Opsgenie offer similar tools for reducing alert noise and streamlining workflows with features like Rule-based Suppression and Automated Actions. However, Squadcast provides a key advantage for Incident Management by allowing manual merging of incidents, advanced AI/ML features like Auto Pause Transient Alerts and Past Incidents, which Opsgenie currently lacks.
Insights and Analytics
Feature
Squadcast
Opsgenie
Service & Infrastructure Health Analysis
Exportable Incident Timelines
Plugin to export timeline to Confluence
Display of Deduplicated and Suppressed Incidents
Shows only a count of incidents
User and Incident Based Analytics
Monthly Overview Analytics
MTTA and MTTR Report
While both Squadcast and Opsgenie offer service health analysis, exportable timelines, user reports, and monthly overviews, Squadcast provides a clearer view of alert volume by displaying deduplicated and suppressed incidents directly within timelines. Additionally, Squadcast offers these features natively, eliminating the need for external plugins like Opsgenie might require. This simplifies setup and streamlines the user experience.
Pricing
How much does Squadcast cost?
Squadcast offers 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, teams can opt for the Enterprise plan, priced at $21 per month per user.
How much does Opsgenie cost?
Opsgenie offers a free plan for up to 5 users. Paid plans begin at $9 per user per month, providing essential on-call scheduling features. For advanced incident management and collaboration functionalities, their Enterprise plan goes up to $29 per user per month.
Choosing the Right Platform
Ultimately, the choice between Squadcast and Opsgenie depends on your team's priorities. For teams already using Atlassian tools extensively, Opsgenie integrates seamlessly, offering a familiar interface and streamlining data flow across your existing ecosystem. This can be a major advantage for incident response and on-call scheduling.
However, Squadcast stands out for its unified incident management approach, combining on-call, incident response, communication, and automation into a user-friendly platform. This streamlined workflow can significantly reduce complexity and alert fatigue, making Squadcast a compelling choice for teams seeking to optimize their incident management processes. You can start with your Squadcast free 14-day trial and test the features for yourself. Consider your team size, budget, and specific pain points to make the best decision. Whichever platform you choose, a strong incident management foundation is key to a smooth workflow.
