Incident management software

The right incident management software should have features that foster fast and effective responses. Here are a few features you should look for in incident management tools.

AI

AI can make your IT service teams more effective while reducing operational costs. The best incident management platforms leverage AI not just for cost reduction, but for transformative service experiences. Advanced tools, like Zendesk AI, have capabilities that extend far beyond basic ticket routing to include:

• AI agents that can draft and send detailed technical responses pertaining to specific issues, employee sentiments, and interaction histories
• Generative AI that can create new knowledge base articles and expand existing ones quickly
• Copilot that can suggest resolution steps based on historical success patterns
• Natural language understanding (NLU) that interprets complex technical issues from conversational descriptions and tags them appropriately

AI platforms that integrate with your existing tools while allowing customization to your organization's specific needs provide the greatest value for modern IT operations.

Immediate alerting

Your incident software needs the capability to send immediate alerts to the right person or incident response team to manage trouble tickets effectively. Some monitoring tools, like Zendesk, can detect potential issues before they escalate and alert product engineering teams to assess them.

Any platform fit for flexible IT teams should offer:

• Context-rich notifications that include affected systems, business impact assessment, and suggested first steps
• Omnichannel alert delivery that intelligently routes through Slack, Microsoft Teams, SMS, email, or dedicated mobile apps based on severity and responder preferences
• Alert correlation that groups related issues to prevent alert fatigue and highlight systemic problems
• Automated incident declaration with customizable triggers based on your service-level objectives (SLOs), error budgets, and business priorities

The best solutions incorporate adaptive alert thresholds that automatically adjust based on historical patterns and current system load.

Integrations

A siloed incident management system can hinder your efficiency. Integrating it with other tools enhances its operability. It can also integrate with remote support tools to allow technicians to troubleshoot issues directly within the issue tracking system.

The Zendesk Marketplace features over 1,800 apps and integrations. Your IT team can communicate effortlessly with different teams via different channels, all from one unified interface.

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Scheduling

Workforce management tools analyze historical data on staffing levels, call volumes, and other relevant factors to accurately forecast staffing needs. Basic scheduling isn’t enough—complex incident management needs require sophisticated resource optimization, like:

• Skills-based routing that matches ticket intent to the most qualified agent
• Workload balancing that prevents burnout by tracking on-call hours and other incident factors

For instance, an IT team can use automatic scheduling to predict peak demand times for technical support. The tool can automatically generate optimal shift schedules based on these forecasts, ensuring adequate coverage during critical periods.

Incident assignment

The severity of an incident determines who addresses the issue, the approach they take, and how it’s communicated to the affected user. When an incident request is created, it must be assigned a severity level.

For example, you could group incidents into five severity levels based on the characteristics of the incident:

• Level 1: Affects core business functions or critical systems
• Level 2: Significantly impacts business operations or a major system
• Level 3: Disrupts some business functionality or impacts a critical department
• Level 4: Minor inconvenience to a limited number of users or departments
• Level 5: Requires investigation but has minimal or no impact on operations

While each business may have different severity ratings, it’s important to communicate your scoring system clearly throughout the organization.

Incident lifecycle tracking and reporting

Incident management software centralizes issues from both internal and external sources, creating a unified hub for tracking and resolution. It acts as a specialized IT help desk software, allowing stakeholders to monitor insights that far eclipse ordinary reporting capabilities:

• Service reliability, including mean time to repair (MTTR) and mean time to detect (MTTD) across different service categories
• Trend analysis for identifying recurring issues or problematic systems
• Incident retrospective tools that capture learnings and automate follow-up action tracking
• Compliance documentation that automatically generates audit-ready records of incident handling

By consolidating communication channels, the software streamlines agent workflow, eliminating the need for separate email, SMS, social media, live chat, or voice tools.

Let’s take a deeper dive into incident management software options. Below, we provide an overview of each product, plus pricing and free trial availability.

• Zendesk: Best for modern, employee-centric incident handling
• Jira Service Management: Best for integrating with Atlassian products
• Better Stack: Best for infrastructure monitoring
• Splunk On-Call: Best for mobile access
• PagerDuty: Best for alert aggregation
• NinjaOne: Best for patch management
• Opsgenie: Best for on-call scheduling
• New Relic: Best for application management
• BigPanda: Best for timeline visualization
• SolarWinds Service Desk: Best for collaboration
• Spiceworks: Best for free use
• Freshservice: Best for Freshworks integration
• ServiceNow IT Service Management: Best for digital product releases
• ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus: Best for lifecycle tracking
• xMatters: Best for adaptive incident management
• HaloITSM: Best for ITIL compliance
• Incident.io: Best for native Slack integration
• Atera: Best for MSP solutions

1. Zendesk

Best for modern, employee-centric incident handling

With Zendesk incident management software, you can swiftly mitigate the impact of service disruptions. Zendesk is easy to implement and works out of the box, allowing you to deploy workflow automation without requiring skilled developers. The intuitive automated ticketing system empowers agents to quickly start working without extensive training, accelerating time to value.

The software improves how your internal support team operates by enabling collaborative incident resolution, policy-based escalation, root cause analysis, and solution tracking. Generative AI empowers self-service options, allowing users to interact with Zendesk AI agents to diagnose issues and resolve complex requests from start to finish. These AI agents are pre-trained on IT ticket data, ensuring they are ready to assist from day one.

Our incident management software also detects issues across your entire system and automatically sends immediate alerts on convenient channels—like Microsoft Teams and Slack—as well as live chat and email so that you can provide timely support. Users can report issues themselves, but routine monitoring can automatically discover incidents.

Meanwhile, the Zendesk Agent Workspace gives IT support agents a unified view of trouble tickets, along with the details and context of each issue. AI is built into the workspace so agents get real-time assistance with their tasks. With over 1,800 integrations in the Zendesk Marketplace, you can extend functionality and tailor your software to adapt to business needs and growth. This provides a lower total ownership cost than products requiring dedicated technical administrators to make adjustments.

What people are saying:

• “The best incident management system I have used in 20+ years of experience in support.”
• “Zendesk is the best tool ever built for incident management.”
• “Stability and dependability have been fantastic, with industry-leading incident status monitoring and notifications.”

2. Jira Service Management

Best for integrating with Atlassian products

Part of the Atlassian product family, Jira Service Management’s incident management software offers incident swarming and on-call alerting capabilities. That means the software assigns ownership to an agent to handle the escalated incident from end to end instead of placing it into a queue.

Standard packages include self-service, ticket management, configurable workflows, and reporting and analytics—though out-of-the-box reporting with Jira is limited to basic features. Businesses must opt for Jira's Premium or Enterprise plans to access more incident management features, such as advanced alert integrations and incident investigations. Additionally, Jira Service Management integrates with other Atlassian tools like Confluence for knowledge sharing.

What people are saying:

• “It integrates well into the larger Atlassian suite of products and third-party vendors.”
• “When I first started using it, I struggled to optimize it for myself.”
• “The incident management forms require more options to cover all different types of incidents in an organization.”

Learn more: Discover how Jira Service Management integrates with Zendesk and how Zendesk vs. Jira compare.

3. Better Stack

Best for infrastructure monitoring

Better Stack (formerly Better Uptime) is infrastructure monitoring and incident management software. Its features include multichannel alerting, website monitoring, incident timelines, merging, post-mortems, error logs, and historical reporting. Uptime has an interface with customizable features, like notifications and prioritization options.

Its automated multi-location checks vet and confirm an incident before sending alerts to prevent false issues. Once confirmed, the system alerts the right agent via push notifications or channels, including SMS, email, or integrated communication tools.

What people are saying:

• “Setting up uptime monitoring and incident alerts was incredibly simple.”
• “The incident management for Better Stack is a bit confusing and not the best UI to manage.”
• “Better Stack is still incomplete compared to competitors on the logs/metrics side.”

4. Splunk On-Call

Best for mobile access

Splunk On-Call, formerly VictorOps, is a traditional incident management tool for incident responses and management. It integrates with other tools to add to incident management capabilities like log analysis, real-time user monitoring, and infrastructure monitoring. It offers desktop and mobile apps that let users resolve or reroute incident alerts from Android and Apple devices.

The software features automated notifications and alerts that help teams manage time-sensitive or escalated issues. Additional automation tools include on-call scheduling, rule-based routing, and triage, which assigns the issue to the right agent to address it.

What people are saying:

• “Splunk is a great tool for security incident monitoring and investigation.”
• “For large enterprises, it is costly, and [it requires] licenses for all employees to access the application.”
• “The licensing model is not easy to sell or control, and the sale to a manufacturer like Cisco is creating difficulties in the sales process for companies dedicated to marketing cybersecurity solutions.”

5. PagerDuty

Best for alert aggregation

PagerDuty is an incident management platform combining features, machine learning, and data science techniques. Activity tracking and reporting allow PagerDuty users to resolve issues before a customer can generate a ticket. The software can use machine learning to group related incidents to prevent duplicate alerts.

Some of its incident management features include process automation, unlimited notifications, and escalation policies. PagerDuty also features native apps and can integrate with many third-party apps and application programming interfaces (APIs).

What people are saying:

• “[The] alert incident management is one of the best.”
• “PagerDuty's customization could be more intuitive.”
• “It's slow both in the UI and in the server, and overall frustratingly buggy.”

Learn more: Discover how PagerDuty integrates with Zendesk.

6. NinjaOne

Best for patch management

NinjaOne is incident management software for IT, network security teams, and managed service providers (MSPs). With NinjaOne, users can monitor their IT infrastructure and create custom alerts for cloud infrastructures, network devices, Windows servers, and Mac and Windows laptops.

Within those applications, you can monitor information, including user logs, running processes, disk usage, encryption status, and memory. Additionally, NinjaOne allows IT teams to access end-user devices remotely. Users can also automatically deploy patches across their network to reduce potential vulnerabilities.

What people are saying:

• “Powerful and easy to use.”
• “The incident and reporting tool could be improved.”
• “Lack of features makes this a basic platform.”

Learn more: Discover how NinjaOne integrates with Zendesk.

7. Opsgenie

Best for on-call scheduling

Opsgenie is another incident management software from Atlassian. While Jira is a full-service IT management platform, Opsgenie specializes in alerts and scheduling. The platform offers a centralized view of all incidents, enabling teams to prioritize and respond to incidents.

Managers can schedule employees to cover on-call hours, after-hours, and teams across different locations. Opsgenie's integration capabilities also allow users to connect it with existing tools, such as monitoring systems, ticketing systems, and collaboration platforms.

What people are saying:

• “Best on-call rotation and alerts for incidents.”
• “There are a couple of pain points that have been communicated for several years that they have chosen not to fix.”
• “The platform can be very confusing.”

Learn more: Discover how Opsgenie integrates with Zendesk.

8. New Relic

Best for application management

New Relic offers incident management software with tools that help businesses handle issues that affect the performance of systems and applications. Its system features a live feed that displays an overview of ticket status, event log, activity, and related issues.

The tool provides contextual alerts so teams know the issue and take the appropriate action. Its system filters low-priority issues that don’t affect customers or business operations to reduce alert fatigue. Businesses can also configure alerts on the interface with a badge to help agents prioritize escalated incidents.

What people are saying:

• “Reliable, insightful, and easy to use.”
• “[The] product is OK. [It’s] too pricey, and customer service is the worst.”
• “Costs rise exponentially with large-scale applications.”

9. BigPanda

Best for timeline visualization

BigPanda’s incident management platform helps IT teams detect, respond to, and resolve problems as they occur. Its Incident 360 Console provides a real-time view of all issues in a single view. IT agents can manage, analyze, and collaborate with other departments to find root causes and take necessary actions.

The tool is customizable, allowing businesses to create filtered views. The live feed provides an overview of the active incidents, showing when the last update occurred and each incident’s priority level. It also has a historical alert feed that displays a full timeline view of an incident so IT reps can identify the root cause.

What people are saying:

• “Our environment has gotten quite better because of BigPanda.”
• “The control we have over the ML model is significantly less [than advertised].”
• “I am a little let down by the machine learning aspect of BigPanda…the system just appears to be taking the most common entities and listing them; I'm not seeing where the learning is coming in.”

10. SolarWinds Service Desk

Best for collaboration

SolarWinds Service Desk features incident management software that helps internal IT teams manage day-to-day problems and resolve incidents. The solution allows teams from every department to track tickets submitted from channels like email, phone, customer self-service portals, live chat, or mobile apps. Users can keep their teammates informed and collaborate by posting real-time comments and status updates.

Its software features self-service articles, incident lifecycle visualization, and issue escalation. In addition to managing incidents, IT teams can use SolarWinds to monitor compliance risks, control inventory, and manage digital assets.

What people are saying:

• “It provides our end users with a simplistic way of entering help desk tickets.”
• “It can be quite expensive compared to alternatives. For a basic helpdesk system, it might be overcomplicated.”
• “I dislike the glaring lack of customizability.”

Learn more: Discover how SolarWinds Service Desk integrates with Zendesk.

11. Spiceworks

Best for free use

Spiceworks offers free incident management software with its cloud-based help desk system. It uses an ad-based revenue model so users can access the software for free rather than paying licensing fees. That means Spiceworks users must contend with banner ads native to the Spiceworks interface.

Users may configure their cloud-based software with custom alerts and automated escalation processes. It also includes reporting, a mobile app, remote support session capabilities, and access to the Spiceworks IT community forum.

What people are saying:

• “[The] Spiceworks community is always helpful about issues.”
• “Functional, but clunky.”
• “It seems to lack sufficient testing before being launched.”

Learn more: Discover how Zendesk vs. Spiceworks compare.

12. Freshservice

Best for Freshworks integration

Freshservice is an IT service management solution from Freshworks that helps teams track, prioritize, and resolve trouble tickets. The incident management tools include incident logging, analysis, custom alerts, and a multichannel support interface. These channels include email, a self-service portal, voice, and chatbots.

As a Freshworks product, Freshservice can connect with its other tools, like its CRM, to share data. However, Freshservice lacks native intelligent workforce management, so users must adopt additional services to cover scheduling and related actions.

What people are saying:

• “A robust and flexible tool with room for improvement in support.”
• “Reporting seems a little clunky, but [it] gives us what we need right now.”
• “[It] doesn't handle large businesses, [and it’s] missing lots of simple features and efficiencies.”

Learn more: Discover how Zendesk vs. Freshdesk compare.

13. ServiceNow IT Service Management

Best for digital product releases

The ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) system is a cloud-based platform that helps teams manage incidents, tasks, and processes. Its incident management platform for IT service teams includes incident logging, notification and escalation, incident classification, root cause analysis, and incident resolution.

ServiceNow features a single-pane agent view so agents can manage issues from one place. The software enables major incident management through embedded workflows to handle high-impact issues. In addition to incident management, ServiceNow can help teams manage and automate digital product releases, including readiness checks, risk scores, and reusable templates.

What people are saying:

• “The platform boasts an intuitive interface, which reduces the learning curve for new users.”
• “[We have a] limited ability to associate problems with incidents.”
• “They claim it is ‘no-code,’ but get ready for big mental gymnastics to get everything wired up correctly.”

Learn more: Discover how Zendesk vs. ServiceNow compare.

14. ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus

Best for lifecycle tracking

ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus software provides an incident management system featuring IT incident tracking tools that help teams resolve outages and incidents. It supports reporting and analytics, workflow customizations, native integrations, and ITSM workflow tools.

Its starting plan includes multichannel support, incident life cycle tracking, and defined escalation paths. These paths include automated technician assignment, which routes incidents to the right agent to handle the request. Businesses can automate rules for lower-priority tickets based on their selected criteria.

What people are saying:

• “Service Desk is convenient and easy for end users.”
• “It has some customization limitations…Also, there is customization complexity.”
• “The request tab interface is so overwhelming.”

Learn more: Discover how ManageEngine Log360 Cloud integrates with Zendesk.

15. xMatters

Best for adaptive incident management

To assist IT operations responses, xMatters is an adaptive incident management software that automates routine tasks and adjusts response strategies based on the severity and impact of the task at hand. Intelligent flood control helps manage alert storms by filtering and deduplicating alerts, ensuring users don’t miss incidents.

Also, xMatters offers on-call scheduling options, enabling teams to create rotation schedules and send employee reminders. Finally, xMatters provides detailed reporting and analytics to help identify trends, improve response times, and optimize incident management processes.

What people are saying:

• “Efficient and reliable incident management solution.”
• “The user interface isn’t the best, but I think it could be improved.”
• “The app is slow to acknowledge that you have responded to a call. This can be misleading when multiple calls enter at the same time.”

16. HaloITSM

Best for ITIL compliance

HaloITSM delivers incident management capabilities through its ITIL-compliant framework. The platform streamlines incident categorization, prioritization, and escalation while maintaining compliance with ITIL standards.

Its reporting tools allow teams to measure performance against established service level agreements. HaloITSM's configuration management database facilitates documentation of IT assets and their relationships, supporting incident root cause analysis and resolution within compliant workflows.

What people are saying:

• “Great product and seamless migration to the cloud.”
• “Sometimes it can be hard to work out where a feature sits, and you end up having to contact support.”
• “Some users might crave more granular control over the interface itself.”

17. Incident.io

Best for native Slack integration

Incident.io provides modern incident management built specifically for engineering teams using Slack as their primary communication platform. The solution creates dedicated Slack channels for each incident, automatically inviting relevant team members based on severity levels and on-call schedules.

War room functionality centralizes incident coordination with real-time status updates and action item assignments. Timeline reconstruction captures all incident activities across multiple channels and tools for comprehensive postmortem analysis. Severity-based routing ensures appropriate escalation paths while customizable fields adapt to different incident types. The platform generates analytics dashboards to track resolution times, team performance, and incident trends for continuous improvement.

What people are saying:

• “So much time saved on incident timelines and write-ups.”
• “Some of the best features are in the pro plan, and the price discrepancy between the basic and the pro can be daunting.”
• “The difference in data between what is exposed in the UI and what is available in the API makes customizing and measuring different aspects of the IM lifecycle quite tedious.”

18. Atera

Best for MSP solutions

Atera combines incident management with MSP functionality, making it ideal for managed service providers handling multiple client environments. The platform integrates help desk ticketing with remote monitoring and management for incident detection and resolution across diverse client infrastructures.

MSPs can use Atera for an approach to client management, billing, and support operations. Atera's pricing model is based on technicians rather than endpoints for service providers managing growing client portfolios.

What people are saying:

• “Atera RMM is an exceptional tool for MSPs and IT professionals.”
• “Atera Agent seems to just randomly die on devices every now and then, and requires a script to clean up and reinstall it.”
• “There is a lack of communication about future features (the AI is paid, for example).”

19. EHS Insight

Best for compliance management

EHS Insight approaches incident management with a focus on regulatory compliance and safety standards. The platform allows organizations to document, investigate, and report incidents while adhering to industry regulations and corporate policies.

Its tools support compliance with OSHA, EPA, and other regulatory frameworks through structured incident documentation and reporting. Risk assessment features let teams identify potential compliance issues, while the investigation tools facilitate documentation for audit purposes.

What people are saying:

• “It's really easy for our techs to use.”
• “Sometimes, the completion of workflow steps within some modules (i.e., Incident Event, CAPA) will overlap, which could be a bit confusing to a new user.”
• “There were some pretty critical settings at the beginning of the setup which were easy to get wrong (and we did). Now those setup flaws are permanent features in the system.”

20. Ivanti Neurons

Best for IT asset integration

Ivanti Neurons delivers comprehensive incident management through Ivanti’s unified IT service management platform that integrates with asset management tools. Automated workflow processes connect incident resolution to configuration items within the CMDB.

The platform has a service catalog to facilitate issue resolution. It also has intelligent ticket routing and proactive problem detection as a part of its automation features. 

Voice-enabled self-service options present an alternate method for employees to report and resolve incidents. Ivanti’s enterprise-grade security features control user access throughout the incident management lifecycle while maintaining compliance records.

What people are saying:

• “The platform is very basically laid out and fairly simple to understand.”
• “The solution still feels a bit dated in the admin and analyst part.”
• “[There is a] steep learning curve to maximize the potential return on investment.”

Ideally, you won’t use your incident response software to solve major issues too often. But even when carrying out everyday tasks, it has to function as expected—otherwise, you risk extended outages that can erode business operations. Here are a few things to consider when choosing incident management software:

• Make sure it’s easy to use: An intuitive interface makes it easy for agents to learn and use to carry out their daily tasks. When support teams use complicated tools, it reduces employee satisfaction and productivity. It can also potentially increase costs because it requires more resources to manage.
• Test its reliability: Conducting real-world testing during a free trial allows you to identify and address potential issues, such as alert fatigue, slow response times, and ineffective escalation procedures. Reliable software empowers teams to respond quickly and efficiently to incidents to reduce their impact on operations and the customer experience.
• Ensure it integrates with your tech stack: Seamlessly integrating your existing tech stack with your problem management software streamlines data sharing and operational processes. A fully integrated system allows agents to address issues with full context since alerts can include crucial details, along with a history of previous actions taken on them.
• Consider the time to value: Many IT tools and applications take a lot of time and effort to implement, resulting in a slow time to value. With software like Zendesk, you will get up and running in minutes, not months. We offer many out-of-the-box capabilities so you can start generating a return on your investment from day one.
• Look for a low total cost of ownership: In addition to licensing costs, other fees, like implementation and ongoing administrative and maintenance costs, can add up. Because of this, businesses that opt for free incident management software can quickly outgrow the limited features and capabilities.

The best incident management software will create operational efficiencies and cut costs that other solutions may not.