RedAlert vs ImageTrend: Fire First, and Built for NERIS as It Was Designed

Where RedAlert Stands Out

Fire First, Not EMS First

Alpine Software has built software for the fire service since 1994, four years before ImageTrend was founded. Not EMS with a fire suite alongside, not a hospital data company with a fire product line. Fire departments, for three decades.

It shows in the parts of the product nobody demos: how a LOSAP program is configured, how a hydrant flow test prints for ISO, what happens to a truck check when it fails. Those details exist because fire departments asked for them over thirty years, not because they were adapted from a patient care workflow.

NERIS the Way It Was Designed

Under NFIRS, incident reports went from the department to the state, and the state sent them on to the federal system. NERIS changed that. NERIS documentation describes incident data flowing directly from the agency to NERIS, with states receiving their data from NERIS.

In September 2025, ImageTrend issued a policy statement recommending a different model: agency to state, then to NERIS. Its stated reasons were preserving state-mandated custom fields and the state's oversight role.

RedAlert submits the way NERIS was built. And the concern about state-specific fields has a simpler answer than rerouting the national submission: the fields your state requires are built into your incident report as custom fields, so they are completed during normal reporting and available for every report you need to produce. The same approach works for anything else your department wants to track. If you want your own data points captured on every call, build them into your call report as your standard.

Built Around Your Department

RedAlert was built to be changed. Your department adds dropdowns, checkboxes, and free text fields to any record in the system: incidents, personnel, apparatus, properties, training, and attendance. Build the forms your members fill out and the workflows your department actually follows, and adjust them as your needs change. When something is more involved, Alpine's team in Rochester builds it with you, during implementation and after.

Every one of those fields flows straight into reporting. That is how departments get payroll reports built around their own time codes, ISO documentation formatted the way their reviewer wants it, point calculations for a LOSAP plan nobody else runs, and their own data points captured on every call report.

Your occupancy types. Your permit workflows. Your violation codes. Your point program rules. Your payroll time codes. Departments differ more than software vendors like to admit, and a system that bends to you is worth more than one you work around.

The Whole Call, in RedAlert

With the Responder App, the whole call stays in RedAlert: get alerted, respond, and report on the call, without switching systems or vendors. Dispatch drops the call and every member's phone lights up with the address, call type, and details. Members tap responding, command sees who is coming and from where, and turn-by-turn routing puts them on scene.

Retone lets the first member on scene change the call for everyone else. An automatic alarm that turns out to be a working fire gets upgraded to an all-hands alert. A false alarm stands the department down so nobody else drives to a call that does not exist.

The Building on the Tablet Before Arrival

RedAlert MDT puts the live CAD feed on every apparatus tablet, not just the command vehicle, alongside your own mapping layers and full preplan data: hazards, utility shut-offs, site plans, and occupancy information.

The seconds between dispatch and arrival are when most of the decisions get made. A crew that has seen the building on a mounted screen during the drive steps off the truck already knowing where the water is and what is inside.

Your Map, in Your Hand

The full RedAlert map runs in the Responder App on members' phones and tablets, with day, night, and satellite views and the custom layers each member chooses. Crews plot properties, hydrants, and points of interest from the field, update preplans, hazmat, and site plans while standing in the building, and run a full hydrant flow test at the hydrant, with available flow calculated in one tap.

On scene, members draw what everyone else needs to see: a fire perimeter, a road closure, a staging radius. Shapes can be tied to the NERIS incident and set to expire on their own, and an out-of-service hydrant shows dark so nobody hooks up to it.

Attendance You Can Defend

The RedAlert Kiosk is a station-mounted touchscreen where members check in by fingerprint, key fob, or building ID card. It opens on a CAD trigger when the call comes in, locks automatically after a window your department sets, and photographs every check-in.

If your department distributes LOSAP points, stipends, or per-call pay, that attendance record is an accounting document. The difference between attendance that is reported and attendance that is proven is the difference between a number your board accepts and a number your board can defend.

Buy the Modules You Need

RedAlert is priced per module. A volunteer department running 200 calls a year can buy incident reporting, alerting, and attendance, and skip the rest.

A platform spanning EMS, hospitals, and state reporting is efficient for an agency that uses all of it. For a fire department that does not, it often means paying for a platform designed around someone else's priorities.

White-Glove Onboarding, From Rochester

Every RedAlert implementation gets a dedicated project lead based in Rochester, New York. They manage the rollout, migrate your data from your prior system with nothing lost, configure RedAlert to how your department operates, and run weekly meetings with your team until you are live, typically in 90 to 120 days.

Switching records systems is the part departments dread most. Having one person who knows your department, your data, and your timeline, sitting down the hall from the engineers who build RedAlert, turns a migration from a project you manage into one that is managed for you.

Onshore Support in Rochester, New York

When you call Alpine, you reach Rochester. Real people, in the United States, in the same building as the engineers who build RedAlert.

The distance between the person answering your call and the person who can fix your problem is what determines whether it gets fixed. At Alpine, that distance is a hallway.

When ImageTrend May Be the Right Choice

No single platform is right for every department. ImageTrend has built a large platform that serves a real segment of the emergency services. Here are scenarios where it may be the stronger fit:

• You need NEMSIS-compliant ePCR alongside your fire records.

  ImageTrend publicly markets ePCR and fire-based EMS incident reporting. RedAlert is a fire records system and does not provide NEMSIS-compliant patient care reporting. Departments that document basic patient information as part of a BLS response can capture it through custom fields on the incident record.

• Your state runs its EMS or fire reporting on ImageTrend.

  ImageTrend publicly serves government agencies on state and federal reporting. If your state has standardized on ImageTrend and you want your department on the same platform as your state system, that alignment may outweigh fire-specific depth.

• You are a federal or military fire department that requires a FedRAMP-listed vendor.

  ImageTrend displays a FedRAMP Marketplace listing and markets solutions for military fire and EMS. If FedRAMP authorization is a procurement requirement, confirm it with every vendor you evaluate.

If these scenarios describe your department, evaluate both platforms on their merits. If they do not, RedAlert is likely the more practical choice.