Looking for a good Pagerduty alternative? Struggling to decide between Squadcast and Pagerduty for your Incident Management needs? Here’s a quick breakdown of their strengths to help you choose the best fit.
Squadcast: Unified Incident Management Platform
An all-in-one Incident Management Platform designed to streamline On-Call rotations, Incident Response, and Reliability Workflows that are easy to use with a clean UI, transparent pricing, and dedicated support for migration and onboarding.
A leading Incident Alerting and Collaboration Platform offering extensive customization options. Pagerduty empowers teams to tackle critical incidents with its robust alerting engine, granular control over Notification Rules, Escalation Policies, and On-Call Scheduling.
Introduction
Let’s face it, incidents are inevitable. But the search for the right Incident Management Tool for your team shouldn’t be. DevOps, SRE teams, and Developers all share the same goal, i.e., streamlining the Incident Response Process and minimizing downtime. This is where Squadcast and Pagerduty, two powerful tools, offer solutions for managing critical incidents. Both platforms enable On-Call Scheduling, Alerting, Communication, and Post-Incident Analysis, but both have distinct strengths. We’ll breakdown the key differences between the platforms to help you chose the tool for your incident management
How is Squadcast different from Pagerduty
SRE Focus: If you’re an SRE team prioritizing proactive reliability, Squadcast offers clear advantages. The platform offers features like built in Incident Postmortem Templates for quick post incident analysis and SLO (Service Level Objectives) trackers, crucial for reporting and proactive incident prevention. Pagerduty, while offering other incident management features, lacks these Enterprise Incident Management and SRE features.
User Interface: Squadcast boasts a clean, easy-to-use and intuitive UI, which makes it easy for your On-Call Team to navigate and resolve incidents quickly and efficiently. Pagerduty offers a wider range of customizations, making the learning curve quite steeper, especially when dealing with overrides and complex scheduling scenarios. Squadcast offers a more user friendly environment making those late night incidents a bit stressful.
Pricing and Support: Squadcast clearly provides an advantage here for your organization, by offering transparent feature packaging and competitive pricing. Plus, the dedicated support team offers a complete setup of the platform, including onboarding and training your team. Squadcast also offers a proprietary Pagerduty migrator, that enables you to migrate all your environment settings from Pagerduty to Squadcast. P.S: To calculate how much you can save by opting for Squadcast, over Pagerduty, check out this calculator.
Integrated Stack: Squadcast is a unified incident management platform, aiming to streamline workflows by integrating core functionalities like On-Call Scheduling, Alerting, Runbooks, Collaboration tools with Enterprise features like Live Call Routing, Intelligent Noise Reduction into a single platform within a single plan. Pagerduty excels in alert routing and escalation, but requires add-ons for additional intelligent Enterprise features, for a comprehensive Incident Management experience.
Feature Comparison
*This feature comparison reflects functionalities available in the highest pricing tiers of both Squadcast and Pagerduty.
On-Call Management
Feature
Squadcast
Pagerduty
Stakeholder accounts with view-only access
Unlimited
Add-on: License at $150/10 stakeholders
Live Call Routing
Add-on
Webforms Alternative to Live Call Routing
Escalation Policies
Services
Phone and Email Notifications
Schedules
Schedule Overrides
Escalation Policies
Both Squadcast and Pagerduty offer similar essential features for On-Call Management, like Escalation Policies, Services, Email and Phone notifications, and Scheduling with overrides. However, Squadcast provides some key advantages by including inbuilt features like webforms for incident submission, unlimited stakeholder accounts with view-only access and Live Call Routing. These features are available as add-ons for Pagerduty and can add additional cost to the Pagerduty license. This streamlined approach by Squadcast can significantly reduce your overall incident management costs.
Incident Response
Feature
Squadcast
PagerDuty
Incident Watchers
Unlimited
Runbooks Automation
Add-on: License at $59 per user per month
Incident Notes
Notes cannot be edited or deleted
ChatOps Integration
Incident Workflows
Slack Integration
Squadcast offers a prominent advantage in Incident Response functionalities. Squadcast offers unlimited Incident Watchers, a feature not available in Pagerduty. Additionally, Squadcast provides Runbooks automation as a core feature, whereas Pagerduty requires an additional, user-based monthly fee. Both platforms offer Incident Notes, but editing or deleting these notes is not possible in Pagerduty.
SRE & Status Page
Feature
Squadcast
PagerDuty
Incident postmortem templates
Unlimited
SLO Tracker
# of Status Pages
Unlimited
Add-on: License at $89 per Status Page per month
Status Page Subscribers
10,000 Subscribers per Status Page
1000 Subscribers per Status Page
Status page
Squadcast focuses more specifically on the SRE teams with features like built-in Incident Postmortem Templates and an SLO tracker, which are absent in Pagerduty. In addition to that, Squadcast offers unlimited status pages with 10,000 subscribers per page. Pagerduty charges an additional $89 per month for each status page with just 1000 subscribers per page.
Noise reduction, Event Aggregation & Routing
Feature
Squadcast
PagerDuty
Past Incidents
Add-on: AIOps License at $399 per month
Rule Based Alert Suppression
Add-on: AIOps License at $399 per month
Key Based Alert Deduplication
Intelligent Alert Grouping
Add-on: AIOps License at $399 per month
Manually Merge Incidents
Service Maintenance Windows
Global Event Rules
Add-on: AIOps License at $399 per month
Auto Pause Transient Alerts
Add-on: AIOps License at $399 per month
Event Severity Levels
Past Incidents
Squadcast and Pagerduty both provide functionalities for Noise Reduction and Event Aggregation. These include features such as Past Incidents, rule based and key based suppression and intelligent alert grouping. Squadcast offers these features as a part of the license cost whereas these functionalities require an additional, expensive AIOps license in Pagerduty. Squadcast can provide greater control over alert noise while potentially saving costs and streamlining workflows.
Pricing
How much does Squadcast cost?
Squadcast provides a clear feature lineup alongside a transparent pricing model with no hidden costs and an option for a free plan for teams of up to 5 users. Paid subscriptions begin at $9 per user per month, offering fundamental Incident Management and On-Call Scheduling functionalities. For access to advanced Digital Operations and AIOps features for noise reduction and event aggregation, teams can choose the Enterprise plan, priced at $21 per user per month.
How much does Pagerduty cost?
Pagerduty offers a paid plan offering core On-Call and Incident Response features, starting at $21 per user per month. To get access to some of the advanced features, like workflows and advanced integrations, one would have to go for the ‘Business Plan’, which starts at a hefty amount of $45 per user per month. This would still be a considerable price if one would get access to all the advanced automation and noise reduction features along with status pages, but that is not the case. Most of these features are available as paid add-ons, making them even more expensive for the users.
Choosing the right platform
Both Squadcast and Pagerduty offer strong solutions for Incident Management and On-Call Response. Squadcast is ideal for teams looking for a reliable, unified, all-in-one platform with a strong focus on SRE, proactive reliability and user friendly, easy to set up and use platform. Pagerduty still remains a solid choice for those prioritizing extensive alerting and automation features along with customizations.
You can start with your free Squadcast 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.
