incident.io vs Blameless

Blameless offers a dedicated incident management tool, but what are the benefits and drawbacks of using Blameless and how does it compare to incident.io? This page is designed to talk you through the pros and cons of each.

What’s the difference between incident.io and Blameless?

Like incident.io, Blameless offers end-to-end incident management. However, there are a few key differences between the two products.

Slack native response vs adopting a new web UI

incident.io lives in Slack, so you can run your incidents end-to-end where you already work following a simple and intuitive flow. This makes incident.io easy to adopt, and accessible to use.

incident.io have unmatched user experience. Their Slack integration is so intuitive that I didn't need to explain anything to my colleagues before they were full converts. I simply told them to use it and they did. We've only been using incident.io for a month and they are already so core to how we manage incidents that we wholly depend on them, and I ain't bothered by that

— G2 Review

Although Blameless offers a Slack integration its primary interface is via a dedicated web UI. This means there are more steps required to configure it.

Accessible to whole organization vs Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) focussed

Blameless is primarily targeted toward SREs. If in your organization incidents are SRE-specific, and other teams don’t need to get involved much this may work well for you.

On the other hand, incident.io is designed to be accessible to your whole organization. This makes it easier for non-technical stakeholders — such as Customer Support, Compliance, and Leadership — to get involved in and have visibility of incidents going on across the organization.

While SREs are a key persona we build for, and we offer valuable SRE tooling like integrations with GitHub to track incident PRs or a first class Catalog to manage your services, we always ensure we can be used by non-technical people too.

In practice, this means you won't find us asking for template strings or code snippets to configure your instance: you'll have a web dashboard that anyone from your organization can use, even if we still have a Terraform provider for those who prefer config-as-code!

Flexible solutions for modeling your entire organization

Catalog is a great example of where incident.io is ahead of Blameless. Catalog is a core component of the incident.io platform that embodies our approach to whole-organization incident response. Bring your teams and users from an IDP, connect your CRM to bring context on customers, and connect with existing tooling like issue trackers and code repositories to level up your incident response processes.

In comparison, Blameless does not have its own catalog and instead integrates with existing ones to tag services against incidents. This approach limits the ability to tag service areas, business concepts, or associate teams with impacted services, restricting the flexibility needed for comprehensive incident management.

Native Status Pages vs integration with third-party providers

incident.io offers Status Pages natively to power incident communications outside of your organization.

We offer public, private and internal Status Pages that are integrated with your incident response workflow, and have automatic and manual update capabilities. You can use sub-pages to allow updating many status pages at once, useful if you have a page per-customer.

Blameless does not offer Status Pages natively, and instead offers integrations with third-parties that you're required to buy separately. This is similar to the incident.io Atlassian Statuspage integration that we've deprecated since building our own Status Pages.