Squadcast alternative and SolarWinds Incident Response alternative with on-call, paging and Slack incidents

IncidentBot is a Squadcast alternative for engineering teams that want on-call scheduling, escalation, SMS and voice paging, Slack incident channels, a status page and postmortems from one independent vendor on one per-seat price. Squadcast now ships as SolarWinds Incident Response: Pro costs 15 USD per user a month billed annually, Premium 24 USD and Enterprise is quoted. IncidentBot starts at 24 USD per user billed annually with a public status page and unlimited read-only stakeholders on every plan.

Run a sample incident

What changed after SolarWinds bought Squadcast

SolarWinds announced the Squadcast acquisition on March 3, 2025, and the product now lives at solarwinds.com as SolarWinds Incident Response. The old squadcast.com pricing page redirects there. SolarWinds itself was taken private by Turn/River Capital in 2025. The product still works as a standalone tool and does not require SolarWinds Observability, and for many teams nothing about the day to day has changed.

The teams that start comparing usually hit one of these at renewal.

If none of these applies, stay on Squadcast. It is a capable on-call product at a fair list price. If two of them do, the rest of this page shows how the costs and the switch compare.

New paper and a new vendor review. Your contract, security questionnaire and invoices now come from SolarWinds. Some security teams still ask extra questions about SolarWinds suppliers after the 2020 Orion supply chain attack, and a renewal becomes a procurement project.
Roadmap tied to a larger suite. The acquisition was announced as a way to unify observability and incident response. Teams that do not run SolarWinds Observability want to know that their incident tool is built for their stack, not steered toward another product.
Status pages start on Premium. Pro at 15 USD has schedules, escalations, postmortems and a mobile app, but status pages, runbooks, incident workflows and stakeholder roles start on Premium at 24 USD.
Stakeholders are capped. Premium includes up to 10 stakeholders at no extra charge. A company where support, sales and leadership all want to follow incidents passes 10 quickly, and unlimited stakeholders sit on the quoted Enterprise plan.

Who switches, and who should stay

Teams that switch are usually 10 to 150 engineers who run incidents in Slack, want a status page and read-only access for the whole company without a stakeholder count, and would rather sign with a vendor whose only product is incident management. Teams that should stay: shops already standardized on SolarWinds Observability, teams that rely on the Squadcast SLO tracker, and small teams on Pro that need paging only and no status page, where Squadcast is cheaper.

Squadcast vs IncidentBot at a glance

Squadcast plan details below come from the SolarWinds Incident Response pricing page, checked in September 2026. Confirm on their site before you sign, since packaging changes.

What you check	Squadcast (SolarWinds Incident Response)	IncidentBot
Entry paid plan	Pro, 15 USD per user per month, billed annually	Starter, 24 USD per user per month annual, 49 USD monthly
Next tier	Premium, 24 USD per user per month, billed annually	Team, 49 USD annual, Business 99 USD annual
On-call scheduling and escalation	Every plan	Every plan
SMS and voice paging	Pro: 100 free SMS and voice notifications per user in the US, extra usage charged. Premium: unlimited worldwide	Starter: 100 SMS and voice notifications per user. Team and Business: unlimited (fair use)
Status pages	Premium and Enterprise	1 public on Starter, 3 public or private on Team, unlimited on Business
Read-only stakeholders	Up to 10 on Premium, unlimited on Enterprise	Unlimited on every plan, never billed
Incident channels in Slack	Chat collaboration and Slack integration	Built in: /incident opens a channel with roles, severity and runbook
Postmortems	Every plan	Timeline-based postmortem draft on Team and above, action items to Jira and Linear
SLO tracking	Premium and Enterprise	Not offered; we report MTTA, MTTR and SLA per service
AI incident summaries	Enterprise	Not offered
Owner	SolarWinds (acquired Squadcast in 2025)	Independent, incident management only
Trial	14 day free trial on every plan	No trial; the incident simulator runs without an account

Where Squadcast wins: a lower list price on Pro and Premium, a built-in SLO tracker, AI summaries and a two-way ServiceNow sync on Enterprise. Where IncidentBot wins: a status page on the entry plan, unlimited free stakeholders on every plan, incident channels in Slack with roles and runbooks built in, and a vendor with one product and a full public price list.

Squadcast alternative pricing for a 10 and a 40 user team

List prices per month, annual billing on both sides. Squadcast prices come from solarwinds.com.

Plan	10 users, per month	40 users, per month
Squadcast Pro (15 USD, 100 SMS and voice per user in the US, no status page)	150 USD	600 USD
Squadcast Premium (24 USD, unlimited SMS and voice, status pages, 10 stakeholders)	240 USD	960 USD
Squadcast Enterprise (unlimited stakeholders, AI summaries)	Custom quote	Custom quote
IncidentBot Starter (24 USD, 100 SMS and voice per user, 1 public status page, unlimited stakeholders)	240 USD	960 USD
IncidentBot Team (49 USD, unlimited SMS and voice, 3 status pages, postmortem drafts)	490 USD	1,960 USD

Read it honestly. On list price alone, Squadcast Pro is cheaper at both sizes, and Premium costs the same per seat as our Starter plan. A 10 person team that only needs paging should look hard at Pro. IncidentBot makes sense when the stakeholder cap and the vendor matter more than the seat price: a 40 engineer team with 60 people in support, sales and leadership who follow incidents pays for 40 seats here and nothing for the 60 readers, while Premium covers 10 of them and the rest means an Enterprise quote. Put your own numbers into the seat calculator on on call management software pricing. The full plan breakdown, SMS overage and the 5, 15 and 40 user math are in our Squadcast pricing guide.

From alert to status update in one record

Teams leaving Squadcast usually want the same paging reliability and a shorter path from alert to channel to postmortem.

Grouping and noise rules are on incident alerting software, and the incident workflow with roles and severity rules is on incident response tools.

An alert from Datadog, Prometheus Alertmanager, Grafana, CloudWatch, Sentry, email or a webhook lands on a service and pages the on-call engineer through an escalation policy: push, SMS, voice, email and Slack. Paging runs outside Slack, so a chat outage never silences an alert.
/incident opens a dedicated channel, sets severity, assigns commander, comms lead and scribe, and posts the runbook attached to the service.
The comms lead turns the live incident into a status update and publishes it to the status page app with one click. Nothing goes to customers on its own.
When the incident closes, the timeline becomes a blameless incident postmortem draft with impact window, response times and action items synced to Jira or Linear.

Moving off Squadcast in five steps

A paging migration is a translation, not a rebuild. Most teams finish in two to four weeks.

Inventory: export services, squads, schedules, escalation policies, routing rules, deduplication rules and integrations. Note which runbooks and workflows people actually use.
Rebuild rotations: recreate squads and schedules with on call scheduling software, including overrides, shadow shifts and hand-off times. Keep the names so responders recognize them.
Re-point alerts: add IncidentBot as a second destination in each monitoring tool, one service at a time, so both tools receive the same alerts.
Parallel run: keep Squadcast paging for one to two weeks while IncidentBot pages the same people, then compare who was reached and how fast.
Cut over: move paging, publish your status page on your own domain and keep your Squadcast postmortems and SLO history exported where the team can read them.

Other Squadcast alternatives and competitors

The usual Squadcast competitors are PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Splunk On-Call, incident.io, Rootly, FireHydrant, xMatters, Grafana Cloud IRM, Better Stack and Zenduty, which is now sold as Xurrent IMR. PagerDuty is the closest paging-first peer; our PagerDuty alternative page covers that comparison. Opsgenie is no longer sold to new customers and reaches end of support on April 5, 2027, see the Opsgenie alternative. Slack-first teams usually compare incident.io and FireHydrant, and the best incident management software guide lists the criteria that separate them all.

What is the best alternative to Squadcast?

The best Squadcast alternative depends on why you are leaving. Teams that want a larger enterprise vendor usually compare PagerDuty. Engineering teams that run incidents in Slack and want paging, a status page on every plan and unlimited free stakeholders from an independent vendor pick IncidentBot. If you only need paging at the lowest seat price, Squadcast Pro is hard to beat.

Is Squadcast now SolarWinds?

Yes. SolarWinds announced the acquisition of Squadcast on March 3, 2025, and the product is now sold as SolarWinds Incident Response. The squadcast.com pricing page redirects to solarwinds.com. It still runs as a standalone product and does not require SolarWinds Observability.

How much does Squadcast cost?

SolarWinds Incident Response, formerly Squadcast, lists Pro at 15 USD per user per month and Premium at 24 USD per user per month, both billed annually, plus a quoted Enterprise plan. Every plan has a 14 day free trial. Pro includes 100 free SMS and voice notifications per user in the US; Premium includes unlimited. Checked in September 2026.

Does Squadcast have a free plan?

The current SolarWinds pricing page lists no free plan, only a 14 day fully functional trial on Pro, Premium and Enterprise. IncidentBot has no free plan either; the incident simulator lets you run a sample incident before you create an account.

Who are Squadcast's competitors?

Squadcast's main competitors are PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Splunk On-Call, incident.io, Rootly, FireHydrant, xMatters, Grafana Cloud IRM, Better Stack and IncidentBot. They split into paging-first on-call tools and Slack-first incident response tools; IncidentBot covers both in one seat.

Can we try it before we migrate?

Yes. The incident simulator runs a sample incident in your browser: an alert, escalation through a policy you build, a Slack channel, a status page draft and a postmortem skeleton.

Replace Squadcast with paging, incidents and a status page on one price

Create your account, rebuild one squad's rotation and run both tools side by side until the pages match.