incident.io vs FireHydrant: Slack-native vs web-first incident management in 2025

Updated December 03, 2025

TL;DR: Both incident.io and FireHydrant modernize incident management, but they differ in one critical way: where the work happens. We built incident.io to run your entire incident lifecycle inside Slack or Microsoft Teams using slash commands and AI automation. FireHydrant centers on a web console with Slack extensions. For teams that live in Slack and want to reduce MTTR from hours to minutes with AI automation, incident.io Slack-native architecture eliminates tool sprawl. The choice hinges on your team's daily habits: do you want incident management that disappears into your existing chat workflow, or a dedicated platform that guides every step?

When production incidents strike, your on-call engineer needs to assemble the team, document the timeline, update the status page, and begin troubleshooting while racing against customer impact. Every tool switch burns critical seconds. Every missed notification extends downtime.

Modern incident management platforms promise to streamline this chaos. Both incident.io and FireHydrant have emerged as leading alternatives to legacy tools like PagerDuty and Opsgenie. They offer AI-powered automation, integrated status pages, and automated post-mortems. But their core philosophies diverge in ways that directly impact your team's MTTR and adoption.

We examine how these platforms handle the complete incident lifecycle, from declaration through post-mortem, to help you choose the right fit for your engineering team.

The core philosophy: Slack-native vs web-first architecture

The most significant difference isn't a feature. It's where your team does the actual work.

What Slack-native actually means

We architected incident.io to run entirely inside Slack or Microsoft Teams from day one. When an alert fires from Datadog or New Relic, we automatically create a dedicated channel like #inc-2847-api-latency. Your on-call engineer types /inc assign @sarah to make someone incident commander. They type /inc escalate @database-team to pull in specialists. They type /inc resolve when fixed. No browser tabs. No separate login. The entire incident lifecycle happens in chat commands that feel like normal Slack messages.

We built this architecture because your team already knows how to use Slack with no training required. One reviewer noted on that incident.io is "fast, collaborative, and intuitive right from Slack" with features like "automated timelines, role assignments" (Source: G2 review) all accessible through chat. Another user emphasized that incident.io was "easy to install and configure" and helped their team "do a better job of responding to minor incidents." (Source: G2 review).

How FireHydrant approaches Slack integration

FireHydrant offers Slack integration with slash commands including /fh, /firehydrant, and /incident for declaring incidents, assigning roles, and managing tasks. The platform is designed to let teams work from either Slack or the web UI based on preference.

The key difference: FireHydrant was built as a web application that added Slack integrations. For complex workflows like customizing runbooks or viewing detailed analytics, you navigate to their web console. This flexibility gives you more customization options but adds minutes of context switching per workflow update during high-pressure incidents.

The adoption impact

When you train a new engineer for on-call rotation, incident.io's Slack-native approach accelerates onboarding. One of our customers reported their small engineering team of around 15 people completed integration with existing tools "in less than 20 days to rollout" with an "outstanding" onboarding experience. The user interface was "polished and intuitive." (Source: G2 review).

FireHydrant users also praise the platform, but the learning curve includes understanding both the Slack commands and the web interface for advanced features. incident.io vs FireHydrant reviews on G2 indicate we score 9.5/10 for ease of use compared to FireHydrant's 8.7/10.

Managing the incident lifecycle: Declaration through resolution

Both platforms automate the incident lifecycle, but their approaches reflect their different architectures.

Declaring and assembling the response team

With incident.io, the flow is:

1. Alert triggers: Datadog alert fires at 2:47 AM
2. Auto-creation: We create #inc-2847-api-latency channel
3. Auto-paging: On-call engineer receives phone/SMS/email/push
4. Service context: Channel populates with alert details, dependencies from our Service Catalog, recent deployments
5. Timeline starts: Automatic capture begins, no manual notes required

Your incident commander types /inc summary to add a human-readable description. Everything captured automatically.

FireHydrant also supports declaring incidents directly from Slack with commands or from their web UI. Their Runbooks can automatically execute steps like creating Slack channels, assigning teams, and kicking off workflows based on incident severity. The platform offers highly customizable templates that ensure consistent process execution.

Speed comparison: Both platforms assemble teams in under three minutes when properly configured. The incident.io advantage is that everything feels like native Slack behavior. FireHydrant's advantage is the structured, checklist-driven approach that ensures no steps are missed.

Running the incident: Timeline capture and roles

During active incidents, we automatically capture every Slack message, role assignment, and command in a structured timeline. Our AI-powered Scribe joins your Zoom or Google Meet calls as a participant to provide real-time transcription and summaries, highlighting key moments and capturing decisions. This eliminates the need for a dedicated note-taker (typically 20-30% of one responder's attention) who can now focus fully on troubleshooting.

For example, Favor's engineering team reduced MTTR by 37% after implementing incident.io. Before using incident.io they were wasting 20-30 minutes just on manual coordination.

FireHydrant logs all incident events to a timeline, and responders can star key items during the incident to highlight them for later retrospectives. This ensures important moments are flagged. The platform's AI Copilot can draft answers to retrospective questions based on gathered context, though the emphasis is more on structured data collection than real-time narrative generation.

"Incident.io is incredibly flexible and integrates smoothly with the tools we rely on. It makes it easy to collaborate at key moments, which helps us maintain SLAs and fix things quickly. Workflows, notifications, and forms are highly customizable, making incident.io a key tool across different areas of our business." - incident.io user on G2

Post-incident learning: Automated post-mortems

This is where automation significantly reduces manual toil for both platforms.

We use captured timeline data, Scribe transcriptions, and AI to auto-generate postmortem drafts from your incident's complete context.

FireHydrant offers flexible retrospective templates with collaborative editing and integrated incident data. Templates can be automatically attached to incidents via Runbooks based on conditions like severity or impacted services. The AI Copilot drafts answers to your template questions, and you can export finished retrospectives to Google Docs, Confluence, or PDF.

Which reduces more manual effort? Both platforms cut post-mortem time by 60-80%. Our strength is rapid narrative generation ready for immediate review. FireHydrant's strength is structured, template-driven retrospectives with deep customization. The choice depends on whether you prefer faster AI-generated summaries or guided, question-based analysis.

Feature comparison: incident.io vs FireHydrant

Three measurable advantages: Tool consolidation, support velocity, and AI automation

Three areas where our approach delivers measurable advantages for most engineering teams:

Eliminating tool sprawl and context switching

Before adopting our platform, teams typically juggle PagerDuty for alerting, Slack for communication, Jira for tracking, Confluence for documentation, and Statuspage for customer updates. That's five tools during a high-pressure incident.

We consolidate on-call scheduling, incident response, status pages, and post-mortems in one platform that lives in your existing chat tool.

One reviewer on G2 noted

it's "a one stop shop for incident management (not just on call rotations like many competitors. Built in and custom automations, great slack integration, automated post mortem generation, jira ticket creation, followup and actions creation." - incident.io user on G2

Eliminating 5-7 tool switches per incident typically reduces MTTR by 10-15 minutes.

FireHydrant also reduces tool sprawl but maintains a web-first architecture. For teams that prefer structured web interfaces, this isn't a disadvantage. For teams allergic to opening yet another browser tab at 3 AM, the native chat approach matters.

Support velocity that fixes bugs in hours, not weeks

Customer support quality separates modern platforms from legacy vendors.

One of our customers reported that when they "reported some type of issue in the process to Incident.io support and in matter of hours the fix was released." (Source: G2 review) This reflects our approach of operating shared Slack channels with customers for real-time bug fixes and feature requests.

The Etsy case study famously noted that we shipped four requested features in the time a competitor took to respond to one support ticket. G2 data shows we score 9.8/10 for Quality of Support compared to FireHydrant's 9.2/10.

AI that automates up to 80% of incident response

Our AI SRE assistant doesn't just correlate logs. It identifies the likely code change behind the incident, suggests fixes, and can even open pull requests directly in Slack. Our Scribe feature transcribes incident calls in real-time, captures key decisions, and updates the timeline automatically. Our automation lets teams resolve incidents while maintaining comprehensive documentation without dedicating an engineer to note-taking.

FireHydrant's AI capabilities focus on retrospective generation and incident summaries. Both platforms leverage AI meaningfully, but our approach of automating investigation and fix generation goes further in reducing manual MTTR.

Pricing and total cost of ownership

Transparent pricing helps teams forecast costs and avoid surprises during renewals.

Our pricing structure

We publish clear pricing tiers:

• Basic: Free forever with 1 on-call schedule, 1 workflow, 2 integrations
• Team: $15/user/month (annual) or $19/user/month (monthly) for incident response. Add $10/user/month (annual) or $12/user/month (monthly) for on-call capabilities
• Pro: $25/user/month for incident response, add $20/user/month for on-call
• Enterprise: Custom pricing with SAML/SCIM, unlimited everything

Real cost for a 50-person team with on-call:

• Team plan: $25/user/month × 50 = $1,250/month or $15,000/year. This includes unlimited incidents, workflows, and integrations with no per-incident fees.
• Pro plan: $45/user/month × 50 = $2,250/month or $27,000/year

FireHydrant pricing structure

FireHydrant's current pricing includes:

• Platform Pro: $9,600/year flat rate for up to 20 responders
• Enterprise: Custom pricing for larger teams

TCO comparison and ROI framework for mid-sized teams

ROI calculation example for 50-person team:

If your current MTTR is 48 minutes and we reduce it to 31 minutes (35% improvement), you save:

• 17 minutes per incident × 18 incidents/month = 306 minutes (5.1 hours) monthly
• At $150/hour loaded engineer cost = $765/month = $9,180/year in faster incident resolution alone

Add post-mortem time savings:

• 75 minutes saved per post-mortem × 18 incidents/month = 1,350 minutes (22.5 hours) monthly
• At $150/hour = $3,375/month = $40,500/year saved on documentation

Total measurable value: $49,680/year from time savings alone, before counting reduced downtime costs or improved team morale.

At scale, pricing is comparable between platforms. The value difference comes from measurable factors: our typical 3-5 day implementation vs 2-3 weeks for complex platforms, 90%+ team adoption in week one vs gradual ramp-up, and hours-to-fix support velocity vs multi-day ticket responses.

One incident.io user on G2 emphasized that we stand out for "how deliberately thought out their AI features are" and the "stellar customer relationship experience." (Source: G2 review)

Navigating migrations from legacy tools

Teams evaluating modern incident management platforms often seek alternatives to legacy tools that no longer meet their needs. Both incident.io and FireHydrant position themselves as modern platforms designed for engineering teams who want consolidated workflows and AI-powered automation.

The migration decision hinges on team workflow preferences. If your team lives in Slack or Teams and you want to run real incidents within days, our opinionated defaults get you operational fast. If you need to replicate complex workflows with maximum customization, FireHydrant's Runbook flexibility provides more structural control.

Both platforms offer comprehensive integrations with monitoring tools like Datadog, Prometheus, and New Relic, making technical migration straightforward regardless of choice.

Verdict: Which platform fits your team?

The decision comes down to two factors: where your team's daily work happens and how much process customization you need.

Choose incident.io if:

• Your team lives in Slack or Teams and context switching during incidents currently adds 10-15 minutes to your MTTR
• Fast adoption is critical because you're onboarding 5+ engineers to on-call rotation in the next quarter and can't afford 2-3 week ramp times
• You need immediate time-to-value and want to run your first real incident through the platform within 3-5 days, not 3-5 weeks
• AI automation will save measurable hours because your team handles 15+ incidents monthly and currently spends 60-90 minutes per post-mortem on manual reconstruction
• Support responsiveness matters because you've been burned by week-long ticket response times from legacy vendors and need bugs fixed in hours during critical rollout periods

Hypothetical ROI for 50-person team: If your current MTTR is 48 minutes and we reduce it to 31 minutes (35% improvement), you save 17 minutes × 18 incidents/month = 306 minutes (5.1 hours) monthly. At $150/hour loaded cost, that's $765/month = $9,180/year in faster incident resolution alone, before counting post-mortem time savings.

Choose FireHydrant if:

• You require highly structured, checklist-driven processes where every incident must follow predefined templates with explicit quality gates
• Your team prefers web-first interfaces and you're willing to accept context switching in exchange for comprehensive dashboard views and granular configuration options
• You have dedicated setup capacity and can invest 3-4 weeks in configuration and training to achieve your desired workflow precision

We believe both platforms represent significant upgrades over legacy tools. The architectural difference matters most: do you want incident management that disappears into Slack, or a dedicated platform that provides maximum structure?

For most Slack-centric engineering teams managing 15-25 incidents monthly, our native architecture eliminates friction that adds 10-15 minutes per incident. For teams that need elaborate, structured processes with deep customization, FireHydrant's web-first approach delivers powerful workflow automation.

Ready to see the difference? Book a demo to see how our AI SRE automates investigation and resolution in real-time.

Key terminology

Slack-native: An application architected to run entirely within Slack using slash commands and chat interactions, not a web app with Slack notifications.

Runbook: Automated workflows that execute predefined steps during incidents, such as creating channels, assigning roles, or sending notifications.

MTTR (Mean Time To Resolution): The average time from incident detection to full resolution, a key reliability metric for engineering teams.

Scribe: Our AI assistant that transcribes incident calls in real-time and captures key decisions without manual note-taking.

Post-mortem: A structured document analyzing what happened during an incident, why it happened, and how to prevent recurrence.

On-call rotation: A schedule determining which engineer responds to incidents during specific time periods, typically rotating weekly or daily.