Active911 alternative
Thinking about replacing Active911?
Active911 is the app most departments in this country already have, and it is genuinely good at the job it took on. Here is what stationOS Respond does differently, what it costs, and who it is not for yet.
What Active911 is good at
It is the category default for a reason. Over 20,000 agencies and half a million personnel run on it, it has been delivering CAD dispatches with mapping, routing and response buttons for longer than most of the alternatives have existed, and it runs on more platforms than we do.
Two things it has that we do not, stated plainly: if your procurement requires documented SOC 2, HIPAA or FirstNet certification, they hold those and we do not. And ActiveComms puts radio channels on a phone over cellular — we have nothing that does that.
If your members are happy with it and your coverage is good, there is no urgent reason to move. The departments that switch to us usually have a specific complaint — the alert does not wake people, the phone is under a coat when the tone drops, or the bill has quietly grown three add-ons.
Five things Respond does differently
Not a longer feature list — a different idea of what an alerting app is supposed to do when the tone drops at two in the morning.
It says the call out loud
“Structure fire — 123 Main Street,” spoken on arrival, generated for each call, and preceded by a tone that ramps over eight to nineteen seconds rather than starting at full volume. That is station-alerting behavior — the kind a career house has bolted to the apparatus-bay wall for decades — running on the phone in your pocket.
Seven surfaces, because the phone is usually unreachable
Half the time the phone is in a pants pocket under bunker gear. The same live call also reaches the watch, the car’s own screen, the lock screen without unlocking, a rugged Garmin, the tablet mounted in the rig, and the screen on the apparatus floor — and none of them ever disagree about what is happening. The watch, the car screen, the lock screen and the rig tablet are iPhone and iPad. On Android, it’s the phone and a Garmin.
Offline is a normal condition, not an error
The page brings the whole call with it — type, priority, address and coordinates — so it still works with no signal. Hit responding in a dead spot and it goes through when you get a bar back, with the time you actually tapped it. The board says “last seen 07:52” instead of leaving a dead responder’s ETA ticking forever, which matters on a mountain road.
Nobody gets left silent
An on-duty member who is paged and says nothing is paged again at two, five and ten minutes, escalating to a Critical Alert — and it stops the instant they answer, decline, or the call clears. It never widens the net or changes who is eligible to be paged; it only reaches the people already on duty more insistently.
ETAs from routing, not from a text box
A typed-in “five minutes” is a guess. Respond routes from where you actually are, recalculates as you drive, and defaults to your own historical average to that station rather than asking you to invent a number at 3am. You’re marked arrived when you pull up, not by a second tap you were never going to remember.
Notes your own officers wrote
The gate code, the aggressive dog, the driveway that eats ambulances. Members write typed notes against an address with their name on them, and they surface automatically the next time a call drops there.
Scheduling and the wall board are in the price
Duty shifts, the apparatus-floor board, the rig-mounted tablet app and incident command are all part of Respond. Live duty state is what drives the alerting, so the rota and the pager are the same system instead of two.
Is this actually a fit?
We would rather you find out here than twenty minutes into a demo.
Worth a look if
- You are a volunteer or combination department and turnout is the problem you are actually trying to fix.
- Your district has dead zones, and you need the call to keep working when the bars do not.
- You want the rota, the wall board and the rig tablet in the same system as the pager.
- You want a number you can put in a budget request without booking a sales call first.
Not yet, if
- You need SMS or voice-call fallback for members without smartphones. Respond is push-only today, and that is a real gap — IamResponding and eDispatches both do this and we do not.
- Your members are on Wear OS watches. We support Apple Watch and Garmin; there is no Wear OS build.
- Most of your members carry Android and you want the watch, car or rig-tablet pieces. On Android, Respond is the phone and a Garmin today.
- You need a deep hydrant-testing or pre-incident-planning system. Ours are a map layer, not a module.
- You want to be the twentieth department on a product rather than one of the first. We are new, and we would rather you know that now.
There is almost nothing to migrate
This is the easy part, and it is the main reason alerting is a sensible place to start. Active911 holds your dispatches, not your records — there is no NERIS history, no certification file and no years of incident reports sitting inside it that have to come across.
Switching is a CAD feed pointed at us and members installing an app. Most departments run both side by side for a few weeks, which we encourage: it costs you nothing and it is the only honest way to find out whether ours actually wakes people up.
Printed, so it goes in a budget request
Run both for a month
The only test that matters is whether it wakes your members at 2am. That takes a few weeks of real calls, not a demo.
Active911 product details on this page are drawn from their public documentation and were last checked in August 2026 — verify anything decision-critical against their site, since vendors change them. stationOS details reflect the shipped product.