I’ve curated a list of 9 best incident response tools, plus 4 open-source options for you.
But first, a quick note: Many people mix up alerting, monitoring, and incident response. Incident response is what you do after receiving an alert. It includes alert acknowledgment, escalations, incident communication, post-incident analysis, and response automation.
Yes, some of these (incident communication and post-incident analysis) overlap with incident management. But that’s normal since both share common ground.
For every tool here, you’ll see 5 bullet points under “Why Choose [Tool]” covering these exact criteria—alert acknowledgement to response automation.
If you want a quick overview, check out the comparison table. And if you’re new to all of this, there’s a section dedicated to basics you can read or skip.
Let’s get started!
Table of Contents
New to Incident Response? Start Here
What’s an example of incident response?
Say your monitoring tool detects a database connection spike. The on-call responder gets alerted and acknowledges it. When they can’t fix it quickly, the system escalates to a senior Database Administrator. They create a war room in Slack, pull in the backend team, and post updates to the status page. After fixing the issue, they document the root cause, timeline, and create a playbook to automate the database restart for similar incidents in the future.
Why do you need incident response?
Without a structured incident response process, teams waste time figuring out who should respond, how to communicate, and what steps to take. This turns small issues into major outages. However, with an incident response, you get a clear plan to follow when things go wrong. This helps you minimize downtime, reduce business impact, and keep customers happy.
What is an incident response tool?
An incident response tool is software that helps you manage incidents from start to finish. It handles alert acknowledgment, escalation policies, team communication, post-incident analysis, and response automation.
Why do you need an incident response tool?
You cannot manually manage every incident, especially at scale. An incident response tool automates the process for you. It alerts the right person. It handles escalations if no one responds. It also centralizes all communication and actions in one place. This frees up your team to focus on fixing the problem.
What are the key benefits of incident response tools?
My Criteria for Incident Response Tools
When curating this list of the best incident response tools, I focused on these five core areas:
- Alert Acknowledgment: How the tool lets you acknowledge an alert across the dashboard, mobile app, or in Slack and Teams. Does it support auto-resolution and alert suppression?
- Escalation Management: How the tool handles escalations, backup responders, and timeouts, so issues reach the right person and never get missed.
- Incident Communication: Tools for fast team collaboration, like war rooms or shared channels, plus ways to update stakeholders and manage status pages.
- Post-Incident Analysis: Features for taking notes, building incident timelines, logging actions, and capturing what your team learns after each incident.
- Response Automation: Options for creating alert rules, running workflows, using playbooks, and automating fixes for common problems.
9 Best Incident Response Tools
*For pricing, I chose business/standard/Pro plans because they typically include the full range of incident response features that most teams need.
| Tool | Best For | Price* |
| Spike | Teams of all sizes wanting a simple, affordable, yet powerful tool | $14/user/month |
| PagerDuty | Large enterprises needing advanced automation and ML insights | $25/user/month |
| Incident.io | Teams managing incidents entirely within Slack or Teams | $25 + $20/user/month |
| Splunk OnCall | Teams already using the Splunk analytics platform | $15/user/month |
| Squadcast | SolarWinds users who need integrated incident response | $19/user/month |
| Zenduty | Teams wanting to connect incident response with ITSM workflows | $16/user/month |
| xMatters | Large enterprises with complex, customizable workflow needs | $39/user/month |
| Datadog OnCall | Teams invested in the Datadog observability ecosystem | $36/user/month |
| AlertOps | Teams needing highly customized, SLA-driven workflows | $22/user/month |
1. Spike
Spike is a modern incident response platform trusted by teams across 40+ countries. It brings alerts, collaboration, and automation together so you can resolve incidents faster. It has processed over 15 million incidents and delivered 750,000+ alerts to teams worldwide.
Why Choose Spike
- You can acknowledge alerts right from your dashboard, the mobile app, or directly in Slack and Teams. Spike also supports auto-resolution and lets you suppress alerts. An optional timeout can restart alerts if an incident is ignored.
- Spike simplifies escalations with clear, multi-level policies that are easy to set up. To make sure nothing is ever missed, it can automatically repeat escalations up to five times if an alert is ignored—a simple but powerful feature for guaranteeing a response.
- You get instant war rooms and shared channels for your team. Spike’s bots for Slack and Teams let you manage the entire incident lifecycle from within chat. You can also push updates to status pages for stakeholders.
- For post-incident analysis, Spike logs every step from alert to action. This gives you clear incident timelines and detailed notes. It stores all notes, logs, and links with Jira, Linear, and ClickUp.
- You can automate your response with alert rules and playbooks. You can run scripts, pause alerts, or create tickets in your project tools. To get started, you can use Spike’s ready-to-use alert rule templates.
Price: $14/user/month
Best for
Teams of all sizes who want a simple, user-friendly, affordable yet powerful incident response tool.
Hear what Muhammad Hani, Head of Engineering at Thndr, said about Spike
2. PagerDuty
PagerDuty is an industry veteran designed for large organizations. It offers advanced automation and machine learning capabilities at a higher price tag.
Why Choose PagerDuty
- You can acknowledge alerts from the web, mobile, email, SMS, phone, and chat tools like Slack and Teams. Multiple people can acknowledge the same incident. PagerDuty supports auto-resolution when monitoring tools fix the issue.
- Flexible escalation policies help you set custom delays, repeat cycles, and route alerts based on severity, time, or service. Escalation rules adapt based on context and past incidents, so teams don’t miss anything.
- You get built-in conference bridges, Slack integration for live updates, and status page management for stakeholders. You can view runbooks or dashboards right from incident alerts to guide your response.
- PagerDuty logs every step of an incident. You get full timelines, action details, and structured post-mortems, plus automatic action items. It connects with your other documentation tools for easy knowledge sharing.
- You can automate responses with Event Orchestration, automated scripts, and multi-step workflows. PagerDuty lets you trigger diagnostic checks and run fixes before paging responders.
Price: $25/user/month
Best for
Large enterprises that need a feature-rich tool with advanced automation and ML-powered insights and have the budget for it.
3. Incident.io
Incident.io is a chat-first incident response tool designed for modern engineering teams who want to manage incidents smoothly inside Slack or Microsoft Teams.
Why Choose Incident.io
- You can acknowledge alerts and manage incidents entirely within your chat application. The platform also uses AI to help triage alerts, suggesting whether you should act now or defer.
- Escalations follow the on-call schedule and move to the next responder after a set timeout. You can route by severity, service, or time of day and add backup layers.
- For every incident, the tool automatically creates a new Slack channel to keep collaboration focused. It also provides automated, real-time status pages to keep stakeholders informed.
- Post-incident analysis is simplified with tools that generate reports and timelines. Its AI features can build a ready-made postmortem, complete with contributing factors and follow-up actions.
- You can automate triggers, workflows, and common responses. Playbooks run in Slack, and the platform’s AI can suggest or even execute follow-up actions.
Price: $25/user/month + $20/user/month for on-call
Best for
Teams that want incident response fully integrated into Slack or Teams, with automation, status updates, and AI-powered workflows.
4. Splunk OnCall
Splunk OnCall (formerly VictorOps) is an enterprise incident response platform that combines Splunk’s powerful analytics.
Why Choose Splunk OnCall
- You can acknowledge alerts in the web dashboard, mobile app, by SMS, phone, or chat tools like Slack and Teams. More than one team member can acknowledge the same incident. Splunk OnCall auto-resolves incidents when monitoring tools fix the problem.
- Flexible escalation policies help you set delays, repeat cycles, and send alerts to the right people. Machine learning suggests responders based on past incidents and expertise, so alerts reach the right person.
- Real-time collaboration happens in interactive timelines with built-in conference bridges and live chat updates. The tool syncs with service desks and other platforms to give you a single view of each incident and keeps stakeholders updated.
- You get a full timeline of every incident, plus detailed logs and post-incident reports. You can filter messages, add notes, and create action items to help your team improve for next time.
- Response automation includes an Alert Rules Engine for smart routing and adding context to alerts. You can run scripts, trigger workflows, or route specific alert types to the right teams based on patterns.
Price: $15/user/month
Best for
Teams already using the Splunk ecosystem who want to combine powerful data analytics with incident response capabilities.
5. Squadcast
Squadcast is an incident response platform that specializes in intelligent alert routing and noise reduction. Recently acquired by SolarWinds, Squadcast now offers deep integrations within the SolarWinds ecosystem.
Why Choose Squadcast
- You can acknowledge alerts in the web dashboard, mobile app, or directly in Slack and Teams. Squadcast cuts alert noise with deduplication and suppression rules.
- Escalation policies route alerts to the right users with specific time delays. You can also set up round-robin escalations to distribute the on-call load evenly.
- Squadcast gives you dedicated channels in Slack and a built-in war room for your team to work together. You can also keep everyone in the loop with custom status pages.
- The platform automatically builds a detailed timeline for every incident. You can use postmortem templates to review what happened and find the root cause.
- You can automate your response with runbooks to handle common tasks. It lets you do things like create Jira tickets or run scripts automatically.
Price: $19/user/month
Best for
Teams already using SolarWinds products, as Squadcast integrates tightly with SolarWinds’ monitoring and ITOM suite.
6. Zenduty
Zenduty is a modern incident response platform now owned by Xurrent. It helps IT and DevOps teams manage alerts, coordinate response, and automate fixes with deep integration options for those using Xurrent tools.
Why Choose Zenduty
- You can acknowledge alerts on the dashboard, mobile apps, email, phone, SMS, Slack, and Teams. The tool supports auto-resolution, advanced alert suppression, and gives instant context with AI summaries.
- Flexible escalation policies use multi-level backups and timeouts. AI-powered scheduling and override history make sure the right people are paged, even with complex rotations.
- Zenduty opens incident rooms in Slack or Teams and starts conference calls. Stakeholders get automated status updates and templated messages for clear communication.
- The platform tracks every step, including notes, logs, and timelines. It even offers AI-generated postmortems. Teams can use RCA templates to document fixes.
- You can automate responses with playbooks, custom workflows, and alert routing. The workflow engine can pass info to tools like Jira, start tasks, and close incidents automatically.
Price: $16/user/month
Best for
Small to mid-sized teams who want to connect their incident response with ITSM workflows, especially those already using Xurrent’s platform.
7. xMatters
xMatters, now part of Everbridge, is an enterprise service reliability platform. It focuses on automating complex incident response workflows for large organizations.
Why Choose xMatters
- You can acknowledge alerts from the web, mobile, phone, SMS, email, and chat tools like Slack and Teams. Multiple people can work on the same incident. xMatters also auto-resolves issues when monitoring tools confirm a fix.
- Escalation policies are flexible, with custom delays and backup responders. You can route alerts based on skills, location, or language. This helps page the right expert for the job, not just who is on call.
- You get automated conference bridges and other built-in collaboration tools. The Incident Console gives a live view of each incident, with real-time status updates and links to your team’s chat channels.
- xMatters provides full incident timelines and detailed logs of all actions. You can create structured post-incident reports with automated action items to help your team learn and track improvements.
- You can create custom workflows with a visual, drag-and-drop builder to automate scripts, ticket updates, and notifications. The tool also filters and groups related issues to prevent alert storms.
Price: $39/user/month
Best for
Enterprise organizations looking for customizable incident response, workflow automation, and deep ITSM integrations.
8. Datadog OnCall
Datadog OnCall is an incident response tool built directly into the Datadog observability platform. It combines monitoring, alerting, and incident response in one place for teams already in the Datadog ecosystem.
Why Choose Datadog OnCall
- You can acknowledge alerts from the Datadog dashboard, mobile app, or with push notifications. Alerts include metrics, traces, and logs for quick triage. Datadog OnCall supports alert suppression and auto-closes incidents if monitors clear the issue.
- Escalation is simple with flexible schedules, automatic service ownership, and multi-layer rotations. Teams always get alerted, no matter the time zone.
- Incidents get a shared timeline for live collaboration, with Slack integration and automated status page updates.
- You get detailed logs, full incident timelines, and analytics to spot trends. Teams can review page history and document learnings inside Datadog.
- You can trigger custom workflows, run scripts, or update tickets automatically from alert data. Datadog’s workflow automation ties monitoring and incident response together, making it fast to fix recurring issues.
Price: $36/user/month
Best for
Teams already invested in the Datadog ecosystem who want seamless integration between their observability data and incident response workflows.
9. AlertOps
AlertOps is an incident response platform known for deep customizations and strong SLA-based workflows. It brings together routing, communications, and automation.
Why Choose AlertOps
- You can acknowledge alerts from the dashboard, mobile app, phone, SMS, email, Slack, or Teams. It also has heartbeat monitoring to find silent failures and lets you customize notifications with advanced suppression rules.
- Escalation policies are highly customizable. You can route alerts by time, role, or team, and it can even escalate before an SLA is breached. The tool automatically loops in multiple teams and can set up recurring cycles.
- AlertOps gives you real-time team chat and automatically creates war rooms in your chat tools. You can use status pages and message templates to update stakeholders quickly. All stakeholder notifications are automated and tracked.
- The platform saves a full history for every incident, with detailed logs, timelines, and postmortem templates. Incidents are linked to enriched alerts and runbooks, which help teams document issues and spot trends.
- You can automate responses with custom playbooks, no-code workflows, and event orchestration. AlertOps triggers scripted actions, creates ITSM tickets, and runs workflow steps based on alert data.
Price: $22/user/month
Best for
Mid-sized IT and DevOps teams that need customized, SLA-driven alerting and incident response workflows.
Why Isn’t OpsGenie on the List?
That’s a fair question.
For years, OpsGenie served as a reliable incident response platform. We even praised its features in our blog post An Ode to OpsGenie. However, I didn’t include it in this list.
The reason is straightforward: OpsGenie is shutting down. Atlassian already stopped new sales for OpsGenie on June 4, 2025, and scheduled a complete shutdown on April 5, 2027.
This means if you’re looking for a new incident response tool, you can’t choose OpsGenie anymore.
I’ve covered the OpsGenie shutdown in detail in these blog posts:
- OpsGenie Shutdown: What You Need to Know and Your Next Steps
- OpsGenie Alternatives: Your 12-Point Evaluation Checklist
- 6 Better OpsGenie Alternatives You Can Switch To
With OpsGenie shutting down, many businesses are moving to Spike with 50% off. Learn more →
Open-Source Incident Response Tools
Open-source incident response tools give you complete control over your setup. They are often free to use, making them a good option for teams with tight budgets or very specific needs.
Here are a few popular open-source options:
- GoAlert is a simple, self-hosted tool focused on reliable SMS and voice incident notifications. It’s best for teams wanting a lightweight setup they can run themselves.
- Grafana OnCall works well if you’re already using Grafana for monitoring. You can manage incidents, alerts, and schedules directly from the Grafana dashboard.
- Dispatch brings incident coordination to your stack with case tracking, role assignment, and Slack integration. It helps small teams keep everyone informed during major outages.
- Keep lets you route and group alerts from different sources using a YAML configuration. It’s a flexible option if you want to manage alert flows in code.
Open-source tools sound appealing because they’re free. But keep in mind, your team will spend time setting them up, keeping them updated, and fixing issues. Someone on your team needs to know the tool inside out.
Paid tools cost less in the long run when you count the hours spent on support and maintenance for open-source tools. Also, with paid tools, you get dedicated support whenever you need it.
Final Thoughts
Picking the right incident response tool is about more than just logging tickets. It’s about finding a platform that helps your team stay calm and focused when things go wrong. Every tool on this list can get that job done, but they all do it differently.
Some tools are built for huge companies with complex needs, like PagerDuty or xMatters. Others live inside your chat tools, like Incident.io. And some, like Datadog OnCall or Splunk OnCall, connect directly to your monitoring data.
Then, there’s Spike, which focuses on making incident response simple for everyone. It brings fast alerting, clear collaboration, and smart automation together in one place, without the complexity.
If Spike sounds like the right fit, you can try it free for 14 days and see how it works for your team.
FAQs
What is an incident response plan?
An incident response plan is a step-by-step guide your team follows when things break. It lays out who responds, what they do, and how they talk to each other during an outage. It helps teams fix problems quickly and keeps everyone on the same page.
What are the stages or steps in incident response?
Incident response typically follows five key stages:
- Detection: Your monitoring tools spot the problem and send an alert
- Response: The on-call engineer acknowledges the alert and starts investigating
- Mitigation: The team works to stop the immediate impact and restore service
- Recovery: Systems are fully restored, and you confirm everything works normally
- Review: You analyze what happened, document lessons learned, and update your processes
What are the best practices to design an incident response plan?
Here are four essential practices for building a solid incident response plan:
- Define clear roles and responsibilities so everyone knows who does what during an incident
- Create escalation paths with backup contacts so alerts never get missed
- Set up communication channels and templates for updating stakeholders quickly
- Build runbooks for common issues so your team can fix problems faster
Is Jira an incident response tool?
Jira is a project management tool, not a dedicated incident response platform. While you can create tickets and track work in Jira, it lacks critical incident response features like alert acknowledgment, escalation policies, real-time collaboration, and automated notifications.