15 best incident management software in 2025

When an IT incident occurs, every second of disruption typically translates into financial losses and reputational damage for your organization. Manual incident response processes cannot keep pace with the speed and complexity of modern IT environments.

Incident management software such as Freshservice's ITSM provides a centralized command center where technical teams coordinate their response efforts. It leverages proactive monitoring, automated workflows, and AI-driven capabilities to streamline resolution processes.

Attempting to resolve a widespread disruption without an incident management platform is like addressing a complex issue without the necessary tools or resources. You might eventually succeed, but the damage accumulates significantly during the delay.

Let's examine what incident management platforms are, the tangible benefits they deliver, and the top 15 solutions available in 2025.

What is incident management software?

Incident management software is a tool used by organizations to manage and resolve disruptions that affect normal IT service delivery. Incidents refer to technical outages, security breaches, service interruptions, or any event that impacts business operation.

Incident response systems help in logging incidents, prioritizing their severity, assigning them to the appropriate teams, and ensuring that they are resolved efficiently. They offer features like real-time alerts, workflow automation, and collaboration tools. This ensures that support staff are well-equipped to respond swiftly and effectively to disruptions.

Essential features of incident management software

Understanding the capabilities that distinguish effective incident management platforms helps you evaluate which solution aligns with your operational requirements.

The most capable systems support every stage of the incident lifecycle, from initial detection through post-incident analysis. They incorporate tools for intelligent prioritization, workflow automation, real-time tracking, and comprehensive reporting

The following core features enable IT teams to address disruptions efficiently while

minimizing operational impact and maintaining service quality for end-users:

1. Leveraging AI

AI-powered detection systems within incident management platforms continuously analyze system behavior to identify anomalies that signal potential issues. This predictive capability enables your team to address emerging problems before they escalate into full-scale disruptions, significantly reducing operational impact.

Example: When an e-commerce platform experiences unusual database query patterns during peak shopping hours, AI-powered monitoring detects the anomaly and automatically creates a high-priority incident ticket. The system routes this to the database team before customers experience slowdowns, preventing potential revenue loss.

2. Instant alerting

When disruptions like system failures, service interruptions, or security breaches occur, incident reporting software immediately generates alerts to notify relevant teams.

These incident management software reviews reach stakeholders through multiple channels, including email, SMS, push notifications, and integrated messaging platforms. This ensures your team receives critical information regardless of their location or current activity.

Example: When a payment gateway fails during business hours, the system immediately sends SMS alerts to on-call engineers, creates a high-priority ticket, and posts notifications in the dedicated Slack channel. Meanwhile, a minor reporting dashboard issue generates a standard-priority ticket without triggering urgent notifications, allowing teams to address it during regular working hours.

3. Integrates with the current structure

Effective incident management platforms offer extensive integration capabilities across your IT infrastructure to ensure seamless operations. By integrating with monitoring tools like application performance monitors and network monitoring systems, the software can automatically detect issues and create & report incidents without manual intervention. This provides real-time visibility into infrastructure health.

Beyond monitoring solutions, capable platforms integrate with IT service management features and tools, including change management, asset management, and configuration management database (CMDB) systems.

Example: When performance monitoring detects elevated response times on a production server, the incident management system automatically creates a ticket and pulls related information from the CMDB. Your team immediately sees that a configuration change was deployed to that server two hours earlier, directing their investigation toward the most likely root cause and reducing diagnosis time from hours to minutes.

4. Strong workflow automation capabilities

Workflow automation in incident management systems handles routine tasks, including logging, status updates, notifications, and ticket closure. The platform automatically updates incident status as it progresses through investigation, diagnosis, and resolution stages, or closes tickets once resolution is confirmed and validated by end-users.

Advanced platforms support predefined workflows for common incident types, following specific response procedures based on industry best practices and your organizational standards. When the system detects a known incident pattern, it automatically triggers designated actions such as initiating diagnostic tests, sending notifications to relevant stakeholders, or applying documented fixes from the knowledge base.

Example: When users report an inability to access a specific application, the system recognizes this as a recurring incident type and automatically executes a predefined workflow. It runs connectivity diagnostics, checks the application server status, notifies the application team, and simultaneously searches the knowledge base for similar past incidents.

If the knowledge base contains a documented fix that resolved this issue previously, the system suggests this solution to the assigned technician, reducing resolution time.

5. Incident prioritization, assignment, reporting, and tracking

Sophisticated incident management platforms prioritize disruptions based on multiple factors, including business impact, urgency, affected user count, and service criticality. This ensures incidents affecting essential services or high-value customers receive immediate attention, while less critical issues are addressed according to appropriate service level agreements.

Detailed reporting features deliver insights into incident trends, recurring issues, and root causes, supporting continuous improvement initiatives and helping you identify systemic problems requiring preventive action.

Example: When multiple incidents occur simultaneously, the system automatically assigns the responsibility for a database connectivity issue affecting employees to senior database administrators. It also routes a single user's password reset request to tier-one support.

The real-time dashboard shows managers that database incidents have increased this month, prompting an investigation into whether infrastructure upgrades are needed to prevent future disruptions.

Comparison table of top tools

Selecting the right incident management software requires understanding how different solutions align with your specific requirements, budget, and technical environment.

The comparison table below offers an at-a-glance view of the leading platforms, highlighting their core strengths, ideal use cases, and pricing structures to help you efficiently narrow your options.

15 best incident management software for 2025

As organizations continue to rely on technology for critical operations, selecting the right incident management software is essential for ensuring swift response times and minimizing downtime.

Here are the 15 best options for 2025:

1. Freshservice

Freshservice is a unified IT management platform that is purpose-built for enhancing incident resolution processes. With specific modules for both incident management and major incident management, users can designate specific SLAs, custom fields, permissions, and workflows to suit the type of disruption they're trying to resolve.

Freshservice simplifies the entire incident management process with proactive monitoring, automated alerts, and automatic categorization, prioritization, and routing of tickets.

These powerful features work together to ensure incidents are resolved quickly and accurately, prevented when possible, and delivered reliably to end-users.

Key features

• Primary incident ticket type can be leveraged in major incident management to create separate SLAs, custom fields, permissions, and workflows.

• Service health monitoring provides a user-friendly view into the state of your digital operations by tracking the health of your technical services

• AI-driven knowledge base helps agents auto-generate help articles and deflect routine inquiries with short, actionable responses.

Pros

• Keep customers updated on the response process through a public status page.

• Users can easily generate a post-incident report containing all ticket information via placeholders.

• Teams can create multiple SLA policies to suit task deadlines or enforce a different policy for tickets based on business hours, specific departments, or groups.

• Priority matrix allows admins to focus on the right tickets and quickly resolve high-priority incidents based on impact and urgency.

• Alert management tools consolidate notifications from all monitoring tools on a single pane of glass.

2. Instatus

Instatus helps businesses monitor their website's performance and uptime, and create status pages to communicate with customers about issues or downtime. It allows users to send notifications through Slack, Discord, Telegram, Email, SMS, Webhook, or API.

Pros

• Monitors a website's performance and functionality, including loading pages, forms, and API requests.

• Users can set up custom alerts to keep stakeholders informed about incidents and changes in the status of their services.

Cons

• No automatic pings to see if your site is down—you'll need to integrate with an external system for automatic updates.

• User reviews mention an unresponsive and unhelpful customer support team when assistance is required.

• Non-intuitive interface can create challenges in adding users, viewing your account information, and navigating from one feature to the next.

3. HaloITSM

HaloITSM is a software solution that assists technical teams in managing services for both customers and employees. It's an IT service management platform that offers a range of features, including incident management, change management, and asset management.

Pros

• Automatically generates and updates knowledge articles based on resolved incidents and user interactions.

• Predictive analytics uses pattern recognition and trend analysis tools to forecast service disruptions and resource requirements.

Cons

• Customization is complex, requiring time and resources to tailor to unique business needs.

• The knowledge base's capacity is limited, with a lack of version control and access restrictions.

• Rule-based configuration is tedious because users often find themselves manually entering rules that are only slightly different from each other.

4. ServiceNow

ServiceNow acts as a comprehensive ITSM platform, offering various ITSM and ITOM solutions. It helps businesses streamline multiple internal processes, such as IT support, onboarding, and customer service.

Pros

• Serves as a unified system of record for assessing incidents, problems, change requests, and their impact.

• Visual, Kanban-like task boards assist in team collaboration.

• Integration capabilities with AIOps help streamline operations, minimize incidents, and shorten mean time to resolution.

Cons

• Search features are complex and challenging to navigate.

• Customization for change approval could be improved.

• Users have reported service disruptions and slowness when searching through lists of tickets.

5. BigPanda

BigPanda is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that assists companies in preventing and resolving technical outages. It leverages AI to correlate IT alerts and changes to

identify root causes and automate incident management.

Pros

• The alert correlation feature helps place similar alerts together for easier management.

• API connectors are easy to integrate with monitoring tools.

• Machine learning and AI help DevOps teams to work efficiently and handle large volumes of data.

Cons

• Support is slow and can take a long time to respond to requests.

• The mobile app needs improvement to function at the same level as the desktop version.

6. Zendesk

Zendesk is a highly scalable customer service software that empowers organizations to improve customer experiences and provide support to both employees and customers. It provides various team collaboration tools that help teams efficiently initiate the incident investigation and remediation process.

Pros

• The system automatically assigns incidents to the right team members with skill-based routing.

• Empowers users to escalate issues based on predefined policies.

Cons

• Fairly expensive compared to other similar providers with comparable features.

• Difficult to customize processes to fit specific organizational requirements.

7. SolarWinds

SolarWinds offers a suite of IT management software and services. Its Orion Platform serves as a monitoring and management system for on-premises, hybrid, and SaaS environments, providing network management tools that can help with configuration, performance monitoring, and topology mapping.

Pros

• Leverages AI and machine learning (ML) to unite granular, accurate, and trusted data so that teams can act on and stay ahead of issues.

• Offers better insight into IT infrastructure and asset dependencies with CMDB software.

Cons

• Difficult to navigate while logging filters to designate severity and urgency.

• Limited proactive monitoring restricts the ability to identify anomalies before they grow into larger issues.

8. Spiceworks

Spiceworks is a free, cloud-based software suite that provides a variety of tools for IT professionals, including a service desk software, network monitoring, and community support.

Pros

• Automatically assign and route tickets based on priorities and categories.

• Easily organize your tasks with custom ticket queues.

Cons

• Not an ideal solution for businesses with advanced incident response needs.

• Limited scalability can lead to slower response times and inadequate resources as your organization grows.

• Lack of useful automation features can lead to heavier manual workloads, slowing down incident response times.

9. Rundeck

Rundeck is an open-source platform that automates operational tasks, such as managing workflows and infrastructure. It provides a centralized interface for managing and executing tasks across multiple systems.

Pros

• Easily automate routine processes like provisioning, security, software updates & deployment, and change configurations.

• ROI metrics data empowers users to track time and money saved, and gather insights into the effectiveness of teams and projects.

Cons

• May not be ideal for enterprise-level organizations.

• Remote command function can cause unpredictable situations if arbitrary commands are used.

• Open-source nature may present some security concerns.

10. ManageEngine

ManageEngine's ITSM software assists organizations in managing their technical operations and delivering IT services efficiently. Its core functions include consolidating all IT-related information into a single dashboard and helping technical teams identify technical issues before they impact business continuity.

Pros

• Availability of on-premises and cloud models, along with the flexibility of migration between them.

• Flexibility to leverage various AI technologies and large language models (LLMs) contextually across workflows and employee touchpoints.

Cons

• A weak spam filter can make it hard to sort through the noise to find the important requests.

• Convoluted and non-intuitive UI make the platform difficult to navigate.

11. NinjaOne

NinjaOne is a remote monitoring and management (RMM) platform that allows IT departments and MSPs to manage their IT assets. Its monitoring and alerting capabilities can detect changes in performance and notify technicians when something requires attention.

Pros

• Automate all your endpoint management tasks—from patching to configuration management—so your team can scale efficiently.

• Real-time monitoring, alerting, and actions enable remote, hands-on management.

Cons

• Initial implementation and onboarding training can be both time- and resource-intensive.

• Mobile applications and offline equipment can be challenging to set up and hard to use.

• Lacks workflow automation that similar providers offer, creating heavier workloads and extended resolution times.

12. PagerDuty

PagerDuty is a cloud computing company and ITOM platform that enables organizations to detect and respond to infrastructure issues. The platform leverages AI and machine learning to reduce false positives and highlight the most important issues.

Pros

• Easily define incident roles, and assign tasks and guided actions for streamlined management.

• Integrations with Slack and Microsoft Teams allow for quick and easy collaboration in a distributed environment.

• A highly functional mobile app is available on both Android and iOS.

Cons

• Lack of audit logs limits accountability and makes it challenging to review activity.

• A limited integration capacity compared to similar platforms, making it difficult to connect to existing infrastructure.

13. Atera

Atera is a cloud-based IT management software that combines remote monitoring and management (RMM) with other tools to help technical professionals and managed service providers (MSPs) oversee technical systems and networks. It excels with tasks like patch management, time recording, expense tracking, and ticket management.

Pros

• Automate repetitive tasks by setting IT automation profiles and assigning them to different devices or end-users.

• Manages all OS patches for Windows and Mac, and also integrates with Chocolatey and Homebrew to automate software installation, patching, and updates for a wide range of software.

Cons

• Can be prohibitively expensive, particularly for smaller businesses operating on strict budgets.

• File size limitation when moving files can negatively impact the user experience.

• Weak reporting and analytics make it difficult to gather useful insights and improve strategies over time.

14. Splunk

Splunk is a software platform that helps organizations manage and analyze large amounts of data, also known as big data. It's often used to enhance security, observability, compliance, and reporting.

Pros

• Automatically correlate petabyte-scale log analytics with real-time metrics.

• Integrate business context workflows and tags with telemetry data to prioritize troubleshooting efforts.

Cons

• Tends to lag when managing large datasets or high volumes of requests.

• Overwhelming complexity can make the platform difficult to set up.

15. Opsgenie

Opsgenie serves as a dedicated incident management platform that helps IT operations teams manage alerts and minimize the impact of service disruptions. It offers an abundance of intelligent tools that help streamline every stage of the incident management process.

Pros

• Stakeholders can stay informed about incident resolution progress through automatic notifications, visiting a status page, or subscribing to status page updates.

• Automatically group related alerts originating from across various systems into a single incident based on pre-specified conditions.

Cons

• Overactive alerts can annoy users and make it challenging to hone in on significant issues.

• Lack of onboarding documentation and support can make initial implementation more difficult than it needs to be.

Why you need incident management tools: Key benefits

Having examined the leading platforms available, understanding the tangible business value these tools deliver helps justify the investment and sets appropriate expectations for outcomes. Organizations implementing incident management software consistently report measurable improvements across multiple operational dimensions.

• Minimized downtime and financial impact: Automated detection and intelligent routing reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR), which directly translates to reduced revenue loss during service disruptions. Organizations report significant improvements in uptime and service availability after implementing dedicated incident management platforms.

• Accelerated response times: Instant alerting through multiple channels ensures your team receives critical notifications immediately, regardless of location or time of day. Automated prioritization directs attention to the most impactful incidents first, preventing minor issues from consuming resources needed for critical disruptions.

• Enhanced customer satisfaction and trust: Proactive communication through status pages and automated updates keeps customers informed during incidents, reducing support ticket volume and maintaining confidence in your services. Faster resolution times minimize customer-facing impact, preserving satisfaction scores and reducing churn risk.

• Improved regulatory compliance: Comprehensive audit trails, automated documentation, and detailed incident reports help you meet compliance requirements in regulated industries. The platform maintains records of all incident-related activities, supporting audit processes and demonstrating adherence to incident response protocols required by frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA.

• Data-driven continuous improvement: Detailed analytics reveal patterns in incident frequency, root causes, and resolution effectiveness. These insights enable you to identify systemic issues, allocate resources more effectively, and implement preventive measures that reduce future incident occurrence.

• Reduced operational costs: Automation eliminates manual tasks that previously consumed significant staff time, allowing your team to focus on strategic initiatives rather than routine incident response frameworks. Organizations report substantial labor cost savings after implementing workflow automation for common type of incidents.

How HelloFresh Streamlined Its Incident Management

HelloFresh, a leading global meal-kit delivery company, struggled with slow, manual incident tracking through spreadsheets and forms, resulting in bottlenecks and unreliable data for reporting. As global operations expanded, the team needed a centralized, automated solution to manage and resolve incidents efficiently.

HelloFresh implemented Freshservice to standardize incident management, automate workflows, and unify cross-departmental collaboration. It was able to:

• Boost operational efficiency by auto-categorizing incidents, improving data visibility, and getting faster response times.

• Increase accountability across departments with automated task assignments and clear traceability.

• Enhance collaboration and context through instant tagging and team huddles, eliminating email back-and-forth.

• Improve compliance and revenue tracking by bringing Finance and Procurement into a unified platform.

How to choose the best incident management tool?

Here are some factors to consider when choosing your incident management solution:

• Reporting: You'll want your tool to assist with answering key questions about incident response times and other key metrics that are important to your IT team.

• Scalability: Consider how the software will help manage the size and complexity of your business needs.

• Security and compliance: Consider how your incident management platform will operate in heavily regulated industries such as banking and healthcare.

• Mobile accessibility: Incidents need to be acted upon as quickly as possible. Mobile functionality ensures that relevant teams are notified even when they're not at their desk.

As incident management becomes increasingly more complex, identifying the appropriate features in your response tools is becoming even more essential. While these are just a few factors to consider, thoroughly assessing providers before committing can help you ensure you choose a comprehensive solution that best suits your unique business requirements.

Implementation best practices for IT incident management software

Selecting the right platform represents only the first step toward effective incident management. Successful implementation requires deliberate planning and structured rollout to ensure your team adopts the new system effectively and realizes the full value of your investment.

• Start with a pilot rollout in a controlled environment: Deploy the platform to a single team or department first, allowing you to identify configuration issues and refine workflows before organization-wide implementation. This approach minimizes disruption while providing valuable insights into how the system performs in your specific environment.

• Define clear SLAs and escalation policies from the outset: Establish specific response and resolution time targets for different incident severity levels before going live. Document escalation procedures that specify when and how incidents should be elevated to senior staff or management, ensuring accountability and preventing incidents from languishing unresolved.

• Invest in comprehensive team training: Provide role-specific training that covers not just how to use the platform, but why specific workflows exist and how they contribute to faster resolution. Include hands-on practice with common scenarios so your team feels confident when real incidents occur.

• Ensure seamless integrations with existing tools: Connect the incident management platform with your monitoring systems, communication tools, and ITSM infrastructure before launch. Test these integrations thoroughly to verify that alerts flow correctly and data synchronizes as expected, preventing gaps in incident detection or response.

• Establish documentation standards and knowledge base processes: Create templates for incident documentation and post-incident reviews to ensure consistency. Implement processes for capturing resolution steps in your knowledge base, building an organizational memory that accelerates future incident response.

• Build feedback loops for continuous optimization: Schedule regular reviews of incident metrics, team feedback, and workflow effectiveness. Use these insights to refine automation rules, adjust prioritization criteria, and optimize workflows based on real-world performance rather than theoretical assumptions.

Optimize your incident management approach with Freshservice

Freshservice acts as a unified ITSM solution from which technical teams can coordinate all of their incident management efforts—no matter how big or small the disruption may be.

A vast array of powerful automated workflows and AI-powered tools serves as the backbone of Freshservice's incident management capabilities, expediting various internal processes to ensure regular service is restored as quickly as possible.

The moment a disruption is detected, tickets are auto-assigned to the right agents, while AI assists in summarizing requests and identifying similar incidents to speed up the resolution process.

For critical disruptions, Freshservice's major incident management helps pool all available resources into rectifying the issue. Teams need to select the 'Major Incident' ticket type to create separate SLAs, custom fields, permissions, and workflows. This helps establish transparent processes and set expectations for multiple teams from the onset, enabling them to work together to mitigate any crisis promptly.