Yes: Business and up
Signed SLA statements
Each period's attainment, signed and checkable by anyone without an account.
Compareincident.io
Observer vs incident.io
incident.io is an incident management platform with on-call and status pages built in, so the page follows the incident. Observer reads the metric that defines healthy and publishes the verdict from it.Checked against incident.io's own public pages.
Observer ahead on
7of 7
- Signed SLA statementsNo:
- Per-customer statusPartly:
- What drives statusNo:
- Built-in monitoringNo:
- Signal source & data localityPartly:
- Pricing modelPartly:
- Open source & engineer surfaceNo:
incident.io's answers from its own public pages, checked .
Verdict
The short answer.
incident.io is built for
Running incidents end to end with on-call, and updating the status page from the incident, by a responder or a workflow.
Observer instead
Reads the metric that defines healthy and changes the public verdict from it, so the page moves before anyone has declared an incident.
Pick
Choose incident.io if you want incident response, on-call and the status page in one platform, led by your responders. Choose Observer if you want the page to follow measured thresholds, alongside the incident tool you already use.
At a glance
The record first, then the mechanics.
What your customers can check comes first. How the page runs follows.
The record
Signed SLA statements
- Observer
- Yes: Business plan
- incident.io
- No: not listed
Per-customer status
- Observer
- Yes: from Pro
- incident.io
- Partly: Enterprise
The mechanics
What drives status
- Observer
- Yes: metric + threshold
- incident.io
- No: incidents
Built-in monitoring
- Observer
- Yes: telemetry + probes
- incident.io
- No: alert intake
Signal source & data locality
- Observer
- Yes: inside your network
- incident.io
- Partly: your alerting tools
Pricing model
- Observer
- Yes: flat per tier
- incident.io
- Partly: per user
Open source & engineer surface
- Observer
- Yes: agent, Apache 2.0
- incident.io
- No: closed source
Yes: does itPartly: partlyNo: does notMethod: each answer is graded against a status page with a record customers can check, using the vendor's own public pages. Checked .
Side by side
Line by line.
The same 7 dimensions on every comparison, each with the question it answers.
Dimension
Observer
incident.io
The record
Signed SLA statements
Can a customer check the SLA figure without taking your word for it?
Yes: Business plan
Each period's attainment, with the working shown, hashed and signed. Your customer checks it at /reliability/verify without an account.
not listed
SLA statements are not listed. Enterprise lists a 99.99% uptime SLA for incident.io itself.
Per-customer status
Can each customer see their own status?
Yes: from Pro
One probe can publish a different verdict per customer, with its own SLO target, subscribers and access.
Enterprise
Customer pages, behind sign-in for a specific customer, are on Enterprise. Lower plans get one public page; Pro adds one internal page.
The mechanics
What drives status
What flips a component from up to down?
metric + threshold
Reads the metric your engineers already watch, applies your threshold, and publishes the verdict.
incidents
A responder, or a workflow on the incident, publishes a status page incident and sets each affected component's impact.
Built-in monitoring
What does it check on its own?
Yes: telemetry + probes
Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, CloudWatch, Loki, Elasticsearch and SQL/NoSQL, plus HTTP, TCP, DNS, TLS, ICMP, gRPC and WebSocket probes.
alert intake
Takes alerts from the monitoring tools you connect, such as Datadog, Grafana or any webhook, plus heartbeat check-ins.
Signal source & data locality
Where does the signal come from, and where does it go?
inside your network
The agent runs next to your data and sends readings and verdicts outbound. Database and source credentials stay on the host.
your alerting tools
Signals arrive as alerts your tools send in. Component impact is set on the incident, not computed from a metric.
Pricing model
How does the bill grow?
flat per tier
Free, then $19, $79 or $199 a month, then Enterprise. No per-seat or per-subscriber fees.
per user
Free Basic plan with one public page and a custom domain, then plans priced per user. On-call is an add-on.
Open source & engineer surface
What can engineers read, script and extend?
Yes: agent, Apache 2.0
Open-source agent, public API, CLI, MCP server and AI-assistant skills.
No: closed source
Status page API, a read-only widget API and a Terraform provider.
Beyond the page
What Observer adds after the incident.
The reporting customers, procurement and auditors ask for, built on the same measurements as the page.
Yes: Business and up
Reliability Center
Public commitments and attainment, and a private portal per customer.
Yes: Pro and up
Executive dashboard
Attainment, risk and MTTR across every service, for the board.
Yes: Starter and up
SLOs and error budgets
Budgets read from the same metrics, with burn alerts.
Yes: Pro and up
Status per customer
One probe, each customer judged against their own SLO.
Fair to say
When incident.io is the better pick.
One incident platform
You want on-call, incident response and the status page from one vendor.
Responder-led updates
You want every public change tied to a declared incident, set by a responder or a workflow.
Migration
Moving from incident.io.
Run the agent
One container next to the systems you already monitor. It dials out; nothing in your network accepts a connection from Observer.
Map what you watch
Each status page component becomes a metric: the query behind the alert that usually opens the incident, plus two thresholds.
Publish and route
Group metrics into services and publish the page. Send flips to Slack, PagerDuty, Teams or a webhook; recoveries always deliver.
Switch over
Keep incident.io live until the page matches what you would have posted. Then point your status domain at Observer (custom domains are on paid plans).
Questions
Asked before switching.
Is Observer an incident.io alternative?
For the status page, yes. incident.io is an incident management platform whose status page follows declared incidents. Observer is a status page that reads your metrics, and it can send each status change to the incident tool you already run through a webhook.
Can incident.io update its status page automatically?
Yes, through workflows: when an incident is created or changed, a workflow can create or update the status page incident. The incident still drives the page. Observer changes the verdict from the metric itself.
Does Observer replace incident.io?
No. Observer is not an on-call or incident response platform. It proves the impact from your metrics and tells your customers; your incident tool keeps running the response.
Sources
Where the facts come from.
Every statement about incident.io on this page was checked against these public pages, most recently on .
incident.io
docs.incident.io
registry.terraform.io
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