Best Incident Management Software Shortlist
I've assessed various tools for this shortlist and decided on these top 12 incident management software with detailed summaries below.
- ClickUp - Best for a high-level overview
- Freshservice - Best for multi-channel support
- ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus - Best for ticket life cycle automation
- incident.io - Best for incident management on Slack
- Mantis Bug Tracker - Best open-source option
- ServiceNow - Best for the use of artificial intelligence
- AlertOps - Best for integrations
- BigPanda - Best incident management with business logic and context
- xMatters - Best for in-depth analytics
- FireHydrant - Best for service catalog
- OpsGenie - Best for customized workflows
- New Relic - Best for enterprises
Security incidents such as data breaches and service outages can disrupt your business operations. Incident management tools help IT teams respond quickly to incidents and facilitate root cause analysis to prevent future incidents.
Here are my top picks for incident management tools, with screenshots and explanations. I’ve also provided pricing information and the criteria I used to narrow down my choices.
What Is Incident Management Software?
Incident management software is a software solution for managing incidents and service requests. It can help organizations streamline and centralize their IT service management and incident handling processes with incident logging and tracking, categorization and prioritization, investigation and diagnosis, and incident resolution and recovery.
Overviews of the 12 Best Incident Management Software
Here’s an overview of each of the top incident management tools I picked. I’ll cover their general features, pricing plans, strengths, and weaknesses.
1. ClickUp - Best for a high-level overview
ClickUp is a project management tool, but teams can use it to manage and respond to incidents. Its flexible incident management features let you create tasks for every step of the incident response process and set priorities and due dates.
Why I picked ClickUp: I included ClickUp in this list because it gives a high-level overview of all incidents and their progress. You can create your own dashboards with various views, like a board view, where you can group incidents by status, assignee, and other attributes. There are also roadmaps that help you prioritize issues and set dependencies to solve those incidents.
ClickUp Standout Features and Integrations:
Features include Gantt charts so you can see your ticket status progress and resolution timelines. I also like that ClickUp lets you create simple statuses for yourself, like “Work in progress” or “In a meeting,” to collaborate better with team members. Email ClickApp lets you receive emails right within ClickUp, so you don’t have to toggle between platforms.
Integrations are built natively. You can connect to 1,000+ tools like Slack, GitHub, WebHooks, Harvest, Google Drive, Outlook, Google Calendar, and Figma. The platform also allows custom integrations with public API.
Pricing: From $5/user/month
Trial: Free forever plan
Pros
- Incident report templates
- Checklists so that you don’t miss any tasks
- Docs functionality to record bugs and their resolution plans
Cons
- Seems complicated at first glance due to the abundance of features
- Sometimes buggy
2. Freshservice - Best for multi-channel support
Freshservice is a cloud-based service desk software designed to help you manage incidents with multi-channel support, a customizable ticketing system, and insightful reporting tools.
Why I picked Freshservice: I picked Freshservice because it allows you to offer support via multiple channels like mobile apps, phone calls, feedback widgets, self-service platforms, email, Freddy chatbot, and even walk-ups. It converts queries from all the channels into tickets which let you eliminate the back and forth in managing incidents across platforms.
Freshservice Standout Features and Integrations:
Features that I feel are useful for multi-channel support are its ability to connect incident management with change, asset, and configuration management so that you have the proper context to all the tickets coming in. It connects with Slack, which enables you to raise tickets in Freshservice from Slack DMs. You can also update the ticket status right from the Freshservice portal to Slack.
Integrations are native options like Google Calendar, TeamViewer, Document360, Azure Active Directory, and Office 365 Calendar.
Pricing: From $19/agent/month (billed annually)
Trial: 21-day free trial + Free demo
Pros
- Customizable service level agreements (SLAs) and escalation rules
- Can refer to historical data with its AI engine called Freddy
- Insightful reports and analytics on incident trends and performance
Cons
- Steep learning curve
- Can get expensive as the number of agents increases
3. ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus - Best for ticket life cycle automation
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus is an IT service management (ITSM) software that helps organizations optimize their support workflows — incident management being one of its powerful features.
Why I picked ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus: The primary reason for my choosing ManageEngine is its ability to automate every step of the ticket life cycle with drag-and-drop elements. It can categorize and assign tickets to the right technicians with business rules, round-robin, or load-balancing techniques. Agents can use custom email templates to save time as they resolve tickets. To complete the ticket’s life cycle, you can define when to close the ticket, and ManageEngine does the rest.
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus Standout Features and Integrations:
Features I believe support the entire ticket life cycle’s management are that you can communicate with end-users with automated notifications and escalate tickets to prevent SLA violations. You can also define the transitions each incident must pass through to go to the next step. The end user can also see the incident status and progress on a self-service portal.
Integrations include native options for Jira, Office 365 Calendar, Zoho Cliq, and Zoho Flow. Custom APIs are also available.
Pricing: From $10/technician/month
Trial: 30-day free trial + Free demo
Pros
- Custom fields available to add more information to the ticket
- Cloud and on-prem versions available
- HIPAA compliance
Cons
- Customization options are limited in terms of UI and workflow
- Possible performance issues when dealing with large volumes of data
4. incident.io - Best for incident management on Slack
Incident.io offers a centralized platform for managing incidents, and includes features such as automatic incident detection, customizable workflows, and detailed reporting.
Why I picked Incident.io: I picked Incident.io for this list because of its powerful integration with Slack. With simple slash commands (“/”) on Slack, you can respond to incidents and automate actions. For example, the command “/incident” lets you create a dedicated channel on Slack. Incident.io also nudges to inform you about the next steps. You can use the “/escalate” command to automatically escalate a ticket to the right agent and include instructions for them.
Incident.io Standout Features and Integrations:
Features that impressed me in my assessment are that it allows you to categorize incidents with your own custom fields and also allows you to set roles so that a specific category ticket goes to the relevant person. You can also create a live #incident feed on Slack and share updates with other members.
Integrations are available natively, including Asana, Confluence, Datadog, Google Meet, Jira, Notion, PagerDuty, Okta, Opsgenie, and Zoom. Zapier connections are also available.
Pricing: From $16/user/month
Trial: 14-day free trial + Free demo available
Pros
- Generate a post-mortem review automatically
- Pre-built templates for workflows
- Pre-built analytics dashboards that report on data points you want
Cons
- Can’t customize notifications that you want to receive
- No mobile app
5. Mantis Bug Tracker - Best open-source option
Mantis Bug Tracker is a simple, yet powerful open-source issue tracker that allows teams to collaborate on issues and set deadlines for issue resolution.
Why I picked Mantis Bug Tracker: What impressed me about Mantis Bug Tracker, despite being open-source, is that it has all the essential features of a comprehensive incident management solution. You can get email notifications on issue updates, comments, and resolutions. You can set role-based access controls and customize your workflows.
Mantis Bug Tracker Standout Features and Integrations:
Features I think teams will love that it is built on PHP and supports all major operating systems like Windows, Linux, and macOS. It is also compatible with Safari, Opera, Firefox, Chrome, and IE10+. It also provides full-text search, advanced filters, issue change history, built-in reporting, and support for 50 languages.
Integrations are available as plugins, including ViewVC, Google Calendar, Twitter, Scrum Board, Slack, Telegram, Kanban, and Lightbox.
Pricing: From $27.50/month for MantisHub (includes more features)
Trial: 14-day free trial for MantisHub
Pros
- Unlimited users and issues support
- Can track time
- Can perform group actions on multiple incidents
Cons
- UI is outdated
- Need technical knowledge to set it up
6. ServiceNow - Best for the use of artificial intelligence
ServiceNow is software that lets you automate the complete incident management process and helps you reduce the effects of incidents on everyday business operations.
Why I picked ServiceNow: During my evaluation, I really liked ServiceNow’s AI platform called “Now Intelligence.” It analyzes patterns in large data sets with performance analytics, provides intelligent insights, and automates routine tasks. Its natural language processing (NLP) capabilities enable users to interact with the system using conversational language, improving the user experience.
ServiceNow Standout Features and Integrations:
Features that I want to highlight here are its ability to perform predictive analytics, which can detect anomalies and potential issues before they become major problems. It also comes with auto-escalation and routing capabilities, has a mobile app to provide service on the go, and offers multi-language support.
Integrations are available natively for Adobe Workfront, Asana, G Suite, Looker, Jira, monday.com, Slack, Trello, Salesforce CRM, and PagerDuty. Custom APIs are also available.
Pricing: Pricing upon request
Trial: 30-day free trial + Free demo
Pros
- Can design pre-built conversations for virtual agents
- Omnichannel support via phone, email, or chatbot
- Set impact and urgency of incidents for faster resolution
Cons
- Overwhelming amount of features can be difficult to navigate
- May require a dedicated administrative team to manage the platform
7. AlertOps - Best for integrations
AlertOps is a comprehensive incident management platform that helps you to set up escalation policies and consolidate alerts from various sources into a single dashboard.
Why I picked AlertOps: My primary reason for choosing AlertOps for this list is that it integrates with many tools and platforms, including monitoring and alerting tools, communication tools, and ITSM platforms across categories like DevOps, enterprise, MSP, and SecOps. Apart from this, you can have their solution architects create and optimize configurations for you.
AlertOps Standout Features and Integrations:
A feature that I feel is powerful beyond its integration capabilities is dynamic routing so that you can spot and escalate incidents with contextual data to the right team member. You also get playbooks and communication templates for incident types and a detailed timeline to see how the incident was resolved and learn from it.
Integrations are native and include AlertSite, Bugsnag, Catchpoint, Checkly, Confluence, Datadog, Dynatrace, Freshservice, FireHydrant, and HaloITSM. Open APIs are available.
Pricing: From $5/user/month
Trial: 14-day free trial + Free demo
Pros
- iOS and Android mobile app
- On-call scheduling
- Reports and analytics with downloadable reports
Cons
- Setup process and integrations can be complicated
- Advanced features are available on high-pricing tiers
8. BigPanda - Best incident management with business logic and context
BigPanda’s incident management software allows you to detect incidents in real-time and helps triage and investigate them with context-rich data.
Why I picked BigPanda: BigPanda caught my attention because it helps you set rules to create relationships between various incidents and identify patterns that run across them. For example, its alert clustering algorithm groups related alerts together, minimizing noise and improving situational awareness. By correlating related alerts and identifying the root cause of an incident, BigPanda reduces the mean time to resolution (MTTR) and helps you see the impact that incident has caused.
BigPanda Standout Features and Integrations:
Features that I found useful are BigPanda’s dashboard, which provides a high-level view of the organization's IT infrastructure and incident status. Its topology awareness quickly identifies the scope of an incident and prioritizes resolution efforts with auto-routing. It also provides business context, such as severity and affected services, so that teams can work on the incidents sooner.
Integrations include 50+ native options like Solarwinds, AppDynamics, Dataloop, Dynatrace, Jenkins, Vmware, Jira, Asana, and Slack. Fee-based custom integrations are available.
Pricing: $5/monitored node/month
Trial: 90-day free trial
Pros
- Reports on health trends and IT Ops key performance indicators (KPIs)
- Single console for NOC, DevOps, SRE, and IT Ops teams
- Timeline feature for historical incident data
Cons
- Can be pricey for those on a tight budget
- Comprehensive list of features may take time to learn
9. xMatters - Best for in-depth analytics
xMatters is an incident management software with features like workflow management, collaboration, and analytics to help you improve your incident resolution times.
Why I picked xMatters: Though xMatters has most of the features a standard incident management software has, it stands out to me because of its reporting and analytical abilities. You get comprehensive insight into how your team is performing, and you can also track incident severity, validate the source of alerts, and group incidents by their MTTR. xMatters also has an incident timeline to see how an incident was solved and which strategies were successful (and which ones weren’t).
xMatters Standout Features and Integrations:
A feature that makes me recommend this software is real-time event metrics. You can see how many alerts were responded to, how many are pending, and how many were delivered. You can share reports to support post-mortem analysis, automate workflows and even build your own workflows without any coding.
Integrations include native integrations like Slack, Zendesk, Jira Cloud, New Relic, Cherwell, Datadog, Dynatrace, and Freshdesk. It also offers “Integration Builder” services to connect to other tools not on their list.
Pricing: From $9/user/month
Trial: 14-day free trial
Pros
- Mobile Android and iOS apps with on-call management
- Flexible roles and permissions
- Multilingual messaging
Cons
- Needs a user-friendly interface
- Conference calling feature can be complicated to use
10. FireHydrant - Best service catalog
FireHydrant is an incident response platform designed to help businesses recover from and prevent incidents with automated incident response workflows and real-time status updates.
Why I picked FireHydrant: I like how FireHydrant’s service catalog provides a centralized view of the entire infrastructure, making it easier to understand dependencies and quickly identify the affected services during an incident. You can catalog every service that you run and the teams that are responsible for them.
FireHydrant Standout Features and Integrations:
A feature that I appreciate from FireHydrant’s service catalog is that it includes readiness checklists so that every service meets production qualifications. Apart from this, you can also automate workflows with the help of FireHydrant’s Runbooks to reduce manual tasks. In these Runbooks, you can add conditions so that teams are notified about the severity of an incident.
Integrations include native options like Slack, PagerDuty, Jira Cloud, Checkly, GitHub, Kubernetes, Okta, Statuspage, and Terraform. Users can request custom integrations.
Pricing: Pricing upon request
Trial: Free plan available
Pros
- Incident retrospectives to check timelines
- Analytics dashboards to check what can be improved
- Active community to connect and learn
Cons
- Learning the platform can take time
- Pricing plans are not mentioned
11. OpsGenie - Best for customized workflows
Opsgenie is Atlassian’s incident management tool that lets you handle incidents better with powerful alert management, on-call scheduling, and routing rules.
Why I picked Opsgenie: I chose Opsgenie because it lets you map your incident responses with different workflows. For example, you can pre-fill the incident priority, relevant response team, stakeholders, and communication channels for every incident to quickly collaborate and resolve the issues. Plus, its robust alert management process ensures that no problem gets lost in the cracks.
Opsgenie Standout Features and Integrations:
A feature that I want to spotlight for its workflows is that you can put up status updates so that you know how the incident resolution is progressing. Opsgenie also has a robust alerting feature. You can receive alerts via multiple channels like email and SMS to be notified about every incident.
Integrations are available natively, including Slack, Datadog, Jira, Zendesk, BMC Remedy, SignalFX, SolarWings, Cherwell, and Big Panda. Zapier integrations are available.
Pricing: From $9/user/month
Trial: 14-day free trial
Pros
- Classify alerts to add additional information
- Incoming phone call routing
- Post-incident analysis to see what steps each team took to resolve an incident
Cons
- Access management features available only on premium plans
- Amount of features can be overwhelming
12. New Relic - Best for enterprises
New Relic is a performance monitoring tool. It provides visibility into the performance of web and mobile applications with application and infrastructure monitoring.
Why I picked New Relic: I’ve selected New Relic for my list because it lets you monitor your full stack, so enterprises don’t need to use different tools. Incident management is one of its offerings. You can use its collaboration tools for cross-functional teams and perform root cause analysis to quickly resolve issues.
New Relic Standout Features and Integrations:
A feature that I want to highlight is its AI assistant called Grok. You can ask Grok any question you want, like “How can I fix this error?” or “Can you resolve cart issues?” and it will answer you using telemetry data. Another feature that I appreciate is that New Relic can automatically detect anomalies and alert you and offer remediation steps to troubleshoot issues.
Integrations include 500+ connections to native options like Tomcat, Cassandra, HAProxy, Oracle Database, OpenAI Observability, Cloudflare Network Logs, and Azure Anomaly Detector.
Pricing: Pay as you go
Trial: 14-day free trial available
Pros
- Central dashboard to track applications, networks, and infrastructure
- Monitors mobile apps and servers
- Can set up alerts and receive notifications when metrics exceed a certain threshold
Cons
- Slow data processing at times
- User interface can be overwhelming for beginners
Other Incident Management Software Options
Here are some additional options that weren’t included in the best list but are worth mentioning because of their specific use cases:
- Splunk On-Call - Best for incident management on mobile
- BetterStack - Best for automatic incident reporting
- OnPage - Best for alert management
- Zero Incident Framework - Best for predictive analytics
- Squadcast - Best for Runbooks to track progress for incident resolutions
- LogicGate - Best for managing governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) processes related to incidents
- 4me - Best for creating custom fields
- Moogsoft - Best for managing incidents on both on-prem and cloud environments
Selection Criteria For Incident Management Software
Here’s a summary of the selection criteria I used to evaluate and choose my list of the best incident management software for this post:
Core Functionality
I examined the selected tools for the following core functionalities:
- Automation capabilities like auto-routing of incidents and alert notifications
- Central dashboard that gives real-time visibility of incidents and their statuses
- Customizable workflows to adapt the tool to your requirements
Key Features
Key features that I evaluated are:
- Integrations to popular collaboration, operations, and IT tools
- Analytics and post-mortem reports to improve on mistakes
- Prioritize incidents automatically and escalate when needed
Usability
I checked whether or not the software has a simple interface so that team members can adopt it easily without hurting productivity. For more complicated tools, I made sure they came with adequate documentation with explanations fit for non-technical users.
People Also Ask
Here are some FAQs if you’re still curious to know more about incident management tools:
What is incident management?
What is an example of a software incident?
Is incident management software customizable to the specific needs of my organization?
Conclusion
When choosing incident management software, consider factors such as the size of your organization, the complexity of your IT environment, and the specific needs of your IT team. Look for software that offers the features and integrations you need to effectively manage incidents in your organization.
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