Incident management software

When your IT team experiences a flood of unexpected requests reporting the same issue, incident management software can enable your agents to respond quickly to minimize the impact. This software helps minimize downtime, streamline resolution processes, and identify recurring issues by centralizing incident tracking, automating workflows, and providing real-time insights.

This guide will help you select the best incident management software for your business by comparing top solutions, pricing, features, and benefits. Keep reading so you react to support tickets faster and create a problem-solving process to minimize repeat issues.

More in this guide:

• What is incident management software?
• Features of incident management tools to look for
• The 15 best incident management software
• How to choose the right incident management solution
• Frequently asked questions
• Try incident management software for free

Incident management software is a critical IT tool designed to help teams efficiently handle and resolve unplanned disruptions in IT services. It automates the logging, tracking, prioritization, and resolution of incidents, enhancing response times and reducing manual efforts. Additionally, it supports collaboration across teams, offers tools for root cause analysis, and provides insights to continuously improve IT service management.

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. For example, AI agents can autonomously handle requests to help IT teams manage larger support volumes. AI agents analyze issues employees or customers report and lead them to a resolution, all without a member of your IT team ever having to get involved.

Additionally, AI empowers agents to respond to issues faster. Zendesk AI, for instance, proactively suggests real-time responses, which agents can approve or modify.

Beyond this, AI-driven tools allow businesses to easily adapt workflows or AI agent responses to specific incidents. For example, suppose a storm disrupts operations at a particular airport. In that case, an airline can swiftly create a new workflow to help customers cancel flights or connect them directly with an incident-response team.

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 can detect potential issues before they escalate and alert product engineering teams to assess them. This includes situations like products responding slower than usual or unexpected increases or decreases in service volume rate.

Integrations

A siloed incident management system can hinder your efficiency. Integrating it with other tools enhances its operability. For example, the incident response software can integrate with your IT inventory to help manage devices. It can also integrate with remote support tools to allow technicians to troubleshoot issues directly within the issue tracking system.

Scheduling

Workforce management tools analyze historical data on staffing levels, call volumes, and other relevant factors to accurately forecast future staffing needs. 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: Effects 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 issue origin, status, and assignment. 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 information pricing options and free trials.

• Zendesk: Best for AI-powered customer experience
• 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
• 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

1. Zendesk

Best for AI-powered customer experience

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 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.

Pricing: Plans start at $19 per agent/month, billed annually. A 14-day free trial is available.

Explore more Zendesk pricing plans.

2. Jira Service Management

Best for integration 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. 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.

Pricing: Paid plans start at $700 per year for up to three agents. A free plan and a seven-day free trial are available.

Learn more: Discover how Jira 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.

Pricing: Paid plans start at $29 per user/month, billed annually. A free plan is available.

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.

Pricing: Contact Splunk for pricing. A 14-day free trial is available.

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).

Pricing: Paid plans start at $21 per user/month, billed annually. A free plan and a 14-day free trial are available.

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.

Pricing: Contact NinjaOne for pricing. A 14-day free trial is available.

7. Opsgenie

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.

Pricing: Plans start at $9.45 per user/month, billed annually. A free plan and a 14-day free trial are available.

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.

New Relic 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.

Pricing: Contact NewRelic for pricing. A free plan is available.

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.

BigPanda 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.

Pricing: Contact BigPanda for pricing.

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.

Pricing: Plans start at $39 per technician/month, billed annually. A 30-day free trial is available.

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.

Pricing: Free

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.

Pricing: Plans start at $19 per agent/month, billed annually. A 14-day free trial is available.

Learn more: Discover how Zendesk vs. Freshservice 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.

Pricing: Contact ServiceNow for pricing.

Learn more: Discover how ServiceNow integrates with Zendesk and 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.

ManageEngine’s 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.

Pricing: Contact ManageEngine for pricing. A 30-day free trial is available.

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.

Pricing: Paid plans start at $9 per user/month. A free plan is available for up to 10 users.

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.