Top 5 Incident Management Tools for 2025

Incident management is one of the most challenging aspects of IT service delivery. However, it’s also critical, as incidents can come with huge costs, including financial, security, compliance, reputational, or service continuity issues.

Of course, prevention is always better than cure. However, the reality is that we can’t prevent every possible incident from occurring.

So, where problem management and risk management might stop incidents from occurring, incident management is concerned with minimizing the impact of those that still do. This includes all aspects of identifying, analyzing, and responding to incidents.

Today, we’re checking out the market for solutions to help us achieve this. Specifically, we’ll be covering:

• What is an incident management tool?
• What to look for in incident management software
• 5 incident management tools for 2025

Let’s jump right in.

What is an incident management tool?

Incident management solutions can come in a few different forms. That is, under the umbrella of identifying, analyzing, and responding to incidents, there are several sets of capabilities that we might need, based on our service portfolio, and specific types of threats.

Many incident management workflows rely on manual identification. This enables users across the organization to report incidents when they occur, with solutions resembling other types of ticketing or request forms.

For more specific types of incidents around our IT infrastructure and environment, many teams also rely on automated monitoring and detection. For instance, for events on the ground that users would be unlikely to spot in time, like security breaches or system interruptions.

In both cases, the goal is to ensure that we gather the right data about incidents in a consistent format, as quickly as possible.

This is then used for analysis and responses.

Here, incident management software assists us in streamlining associated workflows. For example, enforcing logic around how different kinds of incidents are routed, categorized, and escalated or facilitating automation around key tasks.

Most tools also provide a basis for managing on-call agents.

In turn, this means that we can action a response as quickly as possible, helping to minimize the associated costs, risks, and service disruptions.

What to look for in incident management software

With a good grasp of what incident management tools can do, it’s important to consider that there are a range of decision points that go into determining which solution is right for your specific situation.

First, there’s the complexity of our IT environment. So, in large enterprise settings with huge asset estates, automated discovery and monitoring will likely be more of a priority than it is for the majority of SMEs.

We can also consider the maturity of our existing service management solutions. This can inform several requirements, including the amount of flexibility and customization we need in our incident management workflows and the specific integration options we’ll need.

User volumes have a key role to play too, including the structure and size of our IT team as well as colleagues across the organization. In particular, this can determine our automation needs, licensing requirements, and the user management and admin tools we prioritize.

Lastly, a top decision point is how and where our data is stored. On the one hand, this means having the flexibility to define a data schema that’s suitable for our existing workflows.

On the other, it could mean taking account of relevant security needs, including connecting to existing database tools or self-hosting an incident management solution.

5 incident management tools for 2025

Now that we’ve seen the core decisions we’ll have to make around selecting a solution for our needs, we can begin to check out our options for specific tools.

We’ve chosen a diverse range of tools from across the market for incident management tools. This includes simple ticketing tools, wide-reading ITSM platforms, and solutions that are more granularly focused on specific aspects of incident management, such as monitoring.

Our picks are:

1. Budibase
2. Jira Service Management
3. ManageEngine
4. Zabbix
5. Zammad

Let’s check out what makes each one tick.

1. Budibase

First up, we have Budibase, the open-source, low-code platform that empowers IT teams to turn data into action. Large enterprises in all industries choose Budibase to power a range of ITSM workflows, including handling service requests, ticketing, incident reports, and more.

Features

Budibase offers exceptional support for external data. Connect to all kinds of RDBMSs, NoSQL tools, APIs, or spreadsheets as the data layer for your internal tools. Or, you can use our low-code internal database to start from scratch in minutes.

Once you’ve connected your data, you can define user roles and permissions before autogenerating highly customizable UIs. With fully optional custom code, Budibase is the perfect solution for all kinds of IT colleagues to ship professional, secure tools.

We also offer powerful, low-code automations using an intuitive flowchart interface. Build complex logic for incident management using our library of automation actions, including looping and branching logic.

Use cases

Budibase is fully optimized for all kinds of ITSM use cases. With our intuitive design tools and flexible data modeling, you can easily craft all kinds of custom forms, ticketing solutions, and admin panels to closely match existing workflows and business rules.

Our platform is also ideally suited to custom request management tools, approval apps, help desks, self-service portals, and dashboards.

For security-first teams, we offer optional self-hosting, air-gapped deployments, free SSO, and more.

Pricing

Budibase offers scalable pricing to suit the needs of a wide range of organizations. With our free tier, you can build as many apps as you like for up to five users in the cloud or twenty users if you self-host.

Paid licenses start from $5 per month for end users and $50 per month for creators. This also introduces Budibase AI, reusable code snippets, custom branding, and synchronous automations.

We offer creator-only pricing for enterprises, along with air-gapped deployments, custom LLM configs, audit logs, and enforceable SSO, making this the perfect solution for large organizations with advanced security requirements.

2. Jira Service Management

Part of the wider Atlassian ecosystem, Jira Service Management is one of the best-known ITSM platforms on the market today. It’s a highly advanced solution for a huge range of use cases under this umbrella, including incident management.

Pros

A huge part of JSM’s popularity stems from the fact that it offers a highly configurable, intuitive, and ready-to-use solution for core service management use cases across request management, service desk management, ticketing, and more.

More specifically to incident management, Jira Service Management is a strong offering for both automated and manual identification. It ships with ITIL-compliant workflow, which we can customize using our own statuses, transitions, automations, integrations, and more.

Jira is also an attractive option for teams that need their incident management practice to integrate seamlessly with other aspects of their service management. For instance, we can automatically create Problems if multiple similar incidents occur in a defined time span.

Cons

As we’ll see in a moment, one potential downside of using JSM as an incident management tool is its relative cost. Many key incident management features, like active incident monitoring, integrations, on-call scheduling, and major incident escalation, are restricted to higher pricing tiers.

Some teams may find the extent of customization available in Jira to be overkill. It offers tools for setting up highly automated workflows with custom transitions, roles, and conditions. Smaller teams might have a faster time-to-value with a more straightforward solution.

Additionally, while managing incidents in Jira is a very attractive option if we’re already using the platform or have wider ITSM needs, this might be excessive if you specifically want more of a standalone incident management tool.

Pricing

The wider Jira Service Management platform offers several licensing tiers, aimed at being a scalable model for teams of all sizes. This is priced on a per-agent basis, with a working free tier for up to three agents.

Paid licenses start at $23.80, but as we noted earlier, we’ll need at least a Premium license for many key incident management features. This bills at around $50 per agent, depending on user volumes.

Custom enterprise pricing is also available, including unlimited automations and more advanced security tools. Some other features, including self-hosting via Data Center and automated incident alerting via OpsGenie, are billed separately.

3. ManageEngine

Next, we have ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus. Like Jira Service Management, this is a full-featured ITSM platform offering tools for a range of processes, including an ITIL-aligned incident management solution.

Pros

ManageEngine is a strong option for teams that need a robust, feature-rich ITSM tool that offers intuitive use experiences and relatively easy roll-outs. The wider ManageEngine platform also offers a range of other IT solutions, including endpoint management and ITOps tools.

ServiceDesk Plus centers around a clean, easy-to-navigate ticketing and helpdesk UI. This means that we can quickly onboard agents and end-users alike with relatively little learning curves.

Another important strength is ManageEngine’s capabilities around asset management, configuration management, and SLAs, which provide important context to agents when responding to incidents.

Cons

While offering extensive configurability, ServiceDesk Plus’ customization options have a couple of key limitations. Whereas JSM offers a comprehensive visual automation builder, ManageEngine’s automations are primarily rules-based, which could be a limitation for certain use cases.

ManageEngine also offers a good range of integration options, but some solutions relevant to incident management, such as git tools, lack native connectors and rely on API requests or automation platforms like Zapier instead.

Like Jira Service Management, ServiceDesk Plus is a broader ITSM platform, so some of its capabilities may be surplus to requirements if you specifically want a tool for handling stand-alone incident management workflows.

Pricing

ManageEngine’s pricing is also agent-based, although there are additional costs associated with asset management nodes. The Standard tier is free for up to five users.

Paid plans start from $13 per technician per month in the cloud for the core service desk solution. However, some important features like problem management, change management, and service catalogs are billed as optional extras on this tier.

Full-featured Enterprise plans are available from $67 per technician per month, making this relatively affordable. However, it’s worth noting that on-premises solutions are priced differently across all tiers and can be significantly more expensive.

4. Zabbix

Zabbix is a somewhat different proposition to the other incident management tools we’ve seen so far. Whereas ManageEngine and JSM are full-featured ITSM platforms, this is primarily a standalone infrastructure monitoring tool.

Pros

Zabbix is an open-source monitoring tool that offers exceptional connectivity for servers, cloud infrastructure, applications, databases, IoT devices, and more. It offers a highly flexible platform for defining metrics, thresholds, and anomaly detection rules.

Another impressive element of this is Zabbix’s capabilities around trend prediction, including tools for forecasting problems or estimating the time until an incident threshold is reached.

As an open-source product, it offers a huge scope for customization and configuration. On the one hand, it offers extensive integration options via a platform API with over 200 methods. We can also modify the source code for more fringe requirements under the GNU license.

Cons

The primary downside of Zabbix is that it’s primarily a monitoring and discovery tool. As such, this only provides capabilities for certain elements of the incident management process.

For follow-on workflows or manual incident reporting, we may still need a separate helpdesk or ticketing platform. This would come with its own cost, so Zabbix may mainly be an attractive option to organizations with particularly large or complex IT estates.

By its nature, Zabbix may also require a relatively large amount of technical resources to implement, including integrating it across our environment. This could be beyond the means of many smaller IT teams, although partner services are available.

Pricing

Zabbix is available as either a cloud-based or open-source, self-hosted solution. There are several tiers of cloud licenses based on the number of assets we want to monitor, the number of data points we track against each, and the update rate we need.

These can range from $50 to over $5,000 per month, depending on your specific needs.

The self-hosted product is free to use, but tiered support options are also available. We may also want to factor in implementation costs, whether this is conducted internally or via a partner.

5. Zammad

Lastly, we have Zammad. This is a popular, open-source helpdesk and ticketing solution which can be leveraged for core incident management processes.

Pros

Zammad is a great option for teams that require an affordable ticketing solution with clean UIs and strong security credentials. It offers free SSO as well as LDAP support for user and rights management.

There’s also a lot of flexibility on offer for tailoring solutions to your specific needs. Zammad offers custom data objects and attributes within its ticketing platform. These can be created with admin settings rather than custom code, requiring little technical expertise.

For automations, we have a range of tools, including conditional triggers or custom macros. Zammad natively offers multi-channel support, but it also provides extensive integration options via its API and webhooks support.

Cons

However, Zammad also comes with some important downsides. While it’s a good option for affordably rolling out a service desk tool, capabilities for other wider ITSM practices are lacking, particularly compared to ManageEngine or Jira.

So, we’d need to consider additional solutions if we also wanted to handle the likes of change control or asset management. Take a look at our guide to the top free asset management tools for suggestions here.

Although Zammad is relatively flexible, it also lacks some key capabilities here. For instance, a visual builder for more complex automations or a low-code solution for shipping custom interfaces and workflow tools.

Pricing

Like Zabbix, Zammad offers both cloud-based and open-source self-hosted options. It’s also a highly affordable platform, with prices for the cloud version starting at $5 per agent per month for up to five agents.

For incident management, though, you’d likely want at least the Professional tier at $15 per agent, as this introduces individual roles and ticket objects. We’ll need a Plus license for more complex conditional logic or advanced reporting tools.

The open-source version is free to use, with a variety of consulting and support services available from $2,999 per year.

Turn data into action with Budibase

Budibase is the open-source, low-code platform that empowers IT teams to turn data into action. With extensive data support, autogenerated UIs, visual automations, optional-self hosting, and more, there’s never been a better way to ship secure internal tools .

Take a look at our features overview to learn more.