Squadcast is an on-call and incident response platform acquired by SolarWinds in March 2025; its pricing page now redirects to SolarWinds Incident Response. It is built for SRE, DevOps and IT operations teams. Pagerless is on-call for people who build apps, often with AI: it decides whether a problem should wake you, explains what broke in plain words, and gets the fix ready for one tap.
Status: Acquired by SolarWinds (announced March 3, 2025).
Side by side
| Feature | Pagerless | Squadcast |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | You + 1 backup, 3 apps, no card | No free plan on the current SolarWinds page; a 14-day trial |
| Paid | Team planned: per alert sent, no per-seat price (not open yet) | Pro: from $15 per user per month billed annually |
| Phone and SMS | Phone calls through your own Twilio at Twilio's price; no SMS | Pro: 100 SMS and voice per user in the US, India and Brazil, 25 elsewhere |
| Schedules and rotations | No: an escalation order (you, then your backup) | Yes |
What Pagerless does differently
- Decides how loud to be. Wake, tell or log for every problem; four floors (app silent, crash loop, 5xx burst, payments failing) always wake someone, and an unsure decision is never quieter than tell.
- Explains what broke. Every problem gets a plain-words diagnosis from the scrubbed samples and recent deploys.
- Gets the fix ready. Undo the update, restart or add capacity on 20+ hosts with one tap and Face ID.
- Sets up in one command.
npx pagerless connectfinds services, jobs and AWS alarms in your repo.
Choose Squadcast if
- You use SolarWinds observability and want incident response in the same suite.
Choose Pagerless if
- You used Squadcast's free plan and need a free replacement.
- You want AI diagnosis and one-tap undo for an app you built.
Moving from Squadcast to Pagerless
Step 1
Run
npx pagerless connect.Step 2
Move each alert source that pages you.
Step 3
Set the escalation order.
Questions
Is Pagerless a good Squadcast alternative?
For one person or a small team that wants to be woken only when it matters, yes: it is free for you and a backup, calls through your own Twilio and offers one-tap undo. For large teams that need rotations and schedules, Squadcast fits better today.
Does Pagerless have on-call schedules?
Not yet. Each app has an escalation order: you first, then your backup after 5 minutes without an answer.
How current is this comparison?
Every Squadcast fact on this page comes from the sources below, checked on October 22, 2026. Prices change; check their page before deciding.