Incident management is a team effort.
While it's true that incident management should be seen as a company-wide effort, and you should empower all teams to declare incidents, this differs from the team effort I'm referring to here.
No, incident management is a team effort in the sense that no one tool can do it all, not even incident.io. We covered as much when we discussed why we integrate with tools that can be seen as our competitors – and that’s OK!
Organizations rely on different tools to form a comprehensive incident management stack.
But with so many options on the market, it can take time to grasp which one might be the most sensible for your specific needs.
To help you find the right tools for your organization, we've compiled this handy guide to today's best incident management solutions. Many of these tools integrate with others on this list, which can help you streamline your stack and make your incident response less cumbersome.
At the end of each section, I've also included some G2 reviews to help give you a sense of how users feel about the tool.
A quick disclaimer: we'll be including incident.io on this list but we're also going to be honest about the benefits of the other tools featured here as well. In the end, our goal is to give every tool on this list a fair shake and let you–not us–decide whether or not to look into it further.
How can incident management solutions improve your organization's workflows?
Incident management solutions help you streamline and bring structure to your incident response processes. Adopting a few of these saves precious time and money.
With these dedicated solutions, organizations can more confidently manage and resolve incidents faster since every step of the process is accounted for somehow.
One tool for paging, another for communication, another for monitoring, and so on. It also helps to bring a repeatable process to your incident response, eliminating the need or reliance on ad hoc processes.
What to look for when choosing incident management solutions
Before you start looking around, having a checklist of the qualities you're looking for in an incident management solution is a good idea.
First is a solid user interface. Remember, in an ideal world, you're empowering your entire organization to declare incidents. But the reality is that different teams will have varying technical competencies, so it's essential to have an incident management tool that everyone feels comfortable using. So find that middle ground first.
Second, get a word-of-mouth review or look at something like G2 for testimonials. When it comes to incident management tools and SaaS, reputation means everything, so be sure to pay attention to solutions that appear to be user favorites.
Next, list features that are nice to have and non-negotiables. You may want a deeply customizable tool, a solution that works well out of the box, and access to deep incident response analytics or integrations. Whatever your asks are, document them during the search process.
Finally, and this is something that many folks will overlook, consider an incident management solution with a strong customer support team.
You may be in a situation where you'll need assistance setting up or navigating the software. And it doesn't matter how good the software is if you don't know how to use its features thoroughly.
With that said, let's move on to the solutions you should consider.
Nine incident management software solutions
incident.io for incident management
incident.io offers a range of incident management features and products designed to make the incident response process more collaborative, transparent, and efficient.
Directly integrated into Slack, incident.io can fit seamlessly into your existing tech stack in just a few clicks. One of our most notable features, Workflows, allows incident response teams to automate many manual processes during incidents. For example, teams can set up a Workflow to automatically add specific engineers to dedicated Slack channels whenever an incident of a particular type is declared.
incident.io also has a simple and intuitive UI designed to make it easy for your organization to declare incidents, from engineers to your data and customer support teams.
To help organizations learn from their incidents, the Insights dashboard features many important response metrics, such as MTTR, average response time, and much more. Insights into these metrics can help organizations make meaningful changes to their response processes and make them more efficient over time.
We recently released a Status Pages product to help organizations improve communications and build customer trust, even during downtime.
And with over a dozen integrations with popular SaaS tools such as Datadog, Google Docs, Pagerduty, Notion, and more, organizations can confidently look to incident.io for end-to-end incident management.
"G2 review": Incident.io stands out as a valuable tool for automating incident management and communication, with its effective Slack bot integration leading the way. The platform's compatibility with multiple external tools, such as Ops Genie, makes it an excellent central hub for managing incidents.
Slack for incident communication
Slack has become synonymous with office communications and for a good reason. With Slack, you can switch seamlessly between private and group channels.
It keeps you updated on the latest updates with push notifications and facilitates simultaneous collaborative efforts. Between its ubiquity and easy functionality, it's no wonder that Slack routinely tops the list of top software integrations for incident management software.
Using a Slack-based system like incident.io will save your team precious time getting up to speed. Your teams already use Slack daily–adopting an accident management system capable of operating from beginning to end on Slack will save you time and enhance workplace efficiency.
"G2 review": Integration with a wide range of tools makes this a versatile tool. Some helpful features are running incident tools, alert notifications, and primary escalation tools.
Zendesk for incident ticket management
While it's not ideal, the reality is that, sometimes, you'll first learn about an incident when a customer raises the alarm. For situations like these, having a dedicated ticketing system can significantly help organizations appear more customer-centric and respond with more speed and efficiency.
Zendesk has established itself as one of the most popular service desk software solutions due to its user-friendly features, robust analytics, and reporting functions.
Its responsive user experience (UX) design features and comprehensive ticket response system that lets you chat with customers over the phone, via text, chat channels, and popular social media channels makes it a clear standout.
"G2 review": ZenDesk is the best tool ever built for incident management. We can customize the views to match our team needs, automatically set time frames to close a ticket, auto-replies, and have a fantastic User Interface with outstanding performance in place.
NinjaOne for ITOps
NinjaOne is a popular all-in-one remote IT management solution. It lets you manage all of your endpoints from a single, convenient location. The NinjaOne platform also makes it easy to support end-users across various platforms.
Its UI-friendly dashboard centralizes all the essential features you need in one easy-to-manage location. Everything from patches to documentation is right there at your fingertips.
NinjaOne offers top speeds and reliability. It boasts automatic alerts and reporting functions, and you'll also have top-notch AI availability, built-in report features, and other helpful tools.
"G2 review": NinjaRMM has allowed us to quickly and painlessly onboard new customers and efficiently assess and address any incidents and issues on their systems.
Jira for service management
Jira is another solid choice for your help desk needs. It's a low-code platform that allows for the creation of custom forms. Although it doesn't offer built-in social media integrations, you can bypass this obstacle with third-party applications. Its solid self-service portal lets customers resolve simple questions through an AI chatbot.
Its simple-to-navigate ticket system offers a solid UI, and you should have little trouble manipulating its analytics and reporting features. Overall, it's a well-designed and user-friendly service desk solution suitable for the needs of many medium-to-large businesses.
"G2 review": Modern, affordable, easy and flexible in technical terms--a good platform to manage incidents.
ServiceNow for PaaS
Create a consolidated one-stop shop for all of your business's needs. You can automate low-value, repeatable processes and free up valuable time and energy for the things that matter. This includes the use of AI chatbots to assist customers with routine operations. ServiceNow offers a full range of customizable workflow options.
It also prioritizes and assigns work automatically and oversees your customer service management software.
Some users have noted a less-than-friendly UX design. Still, it makes up for that deficiency with a comprehensive array of features that make it a must-have for any business serious about efficiency.
"G2 review": Tracking incidents as they happen and tracking all the activities across different teams involved in resolving that incident without creating inconsistencies and miscommunication so that we fix it more efficiently.
ServiceDesk Plus for an all-in-one solution
This all-in-one IT service management (ITSM) tool brings a full suite of tools and features. ServiceDesk Plus offers the following:
- Incident management
- Problem management
- Change management
- Configuration management database
- IT project management
- Reports
- Integrations
- Asset management
You'll gain access to help desk features, project management tools, and information technology infrastructure library (ITIL) compliance features. Users like its intuitive UI and customizability.
"G2 review": Easy setup means that it can be up and running within days. Completely flexible within the ITIL framework. Multiple teams and sites supported. Custom templated workflows, services and incidents allow a lot of time savings.
OpsGenie for incident alerting
This incident management tool provides users with a wide range of tools and a sweeping array of third-party integration options, including Jira Service Management. It offers solid reporting, analytics, and helpful warning systems that will alert you to unplanned interruptions. You'll also be able to contact a helpful team of customer support staff.
"G2 review": Opsgenie is a good platform when it comes to raising, managing and monitoring incidents with capability to send alerts and schedule escalations across the development and operations teams.
SolarWinds Service Desk for an alternate full-suite solution
This AI-powered, cloud-based help desk solution helps users enhance productivity through automation, fast workflows, and customizable report features.
Its ITIL-capable features include several management modules and a configuration management database that will sync with your business's unique goals and needs. You can also receive automatic notifications about essential business operations.
SolarWinds helps you ensure business continuity and customer satisfaction by using incident management technology to touch on every stage of the incident life cycle, from ticket creation to closure.
"G2 review": It's a classic incident management tool, intuitive and easy to adopt both for the IT staff and end users. It does everything we need to do, and it doesn't have a million bells and whistles which distract us and we'll never use.
Make incident.io the heart of your incident response stack
Hopefully this list has given you the information you need to make informed decisions about what tooling to include in your incident management stack. There's really no right or wrong here, as it ultimately comes down to what's best for your organization.
But when it comes to incident.io, we've been intentional about designing our tool to be easy to use, intuitive, and scalable.
Between our auto-generated postmortems, Status Pages, Workflows, integrations, and so much more, we've made it sensible to make incident.io the core of your incident management tech stack.
Ready to learn more? Sign up for a custom demo.
