Incident management tools with a free plan in 2026
Incident roles, channels, timelines, runbook automation and postmortems: the work that starts once someone has acknowledged. This list has 10 incident management tools. Of these, 8 are open source, 10 have a free plan and 8 can be self-hosted. Checked by hand on 30 September 2026.
- 1
Dispatch
Netflix's open source incident management tool that creates Slack channels, documents and tickets for each incident and tracks roles, tasks and timelines.
- 2
Event-Driven Ansible
Rulebooks that listen to events from monitoring tools, webhooks or Kafka and trigger Ansible playbooks, used for automatic remediation. Open source core, supported in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.
- 3
FireHydrant
Incident management platform with runbooks, Slack and Teams incident channels, retrospectives and status pages. Bought Blameless in 2024 and agreed to join Freshworks in December 2025.
- 4
HolmesGPT
Open source agent that investigates alerts by querying Kubernetes, Prometheus, logs and other sources with an LLM and summarises likely root causes. CNCF sandbox project started at Robusta.
- 5
Incident Bot
Self-hosted Slack or Matrix bot for incident response: opens channels, tracks severity, status and roles, posts a digest and builds postmortem documents.
- 6
incident.io
Incident management run from Slack or Microsoft Teams: declares incidents, assigns roles, keeps timelines, automates workflows and drafts postmortems, with status pages and on-call.
- 7
K8sGPT
CLI and operator that scans Kubernetes clusters for problems and explains them in plain language using an LLM backend of your choice. CNCF sandbox project.
- 8
Rundeck
Runbook automation server that wraps scripts and commands into access-controlled jobs that operators or alerts can trigger. The commercial edition is PagerDuty Runbook Automation.
- 9
Runme
Turns Markdown runbooks into runnable notebooks in VS Code or the terminal, so operational steps can be executed and tested. A Linux Foundation project, started by Stateful.
- 10
StackStorm
Event-driven automation engine that runs rules, workflows and ChatOps actions in response to alerts and events, often used for automatic remediation.
Side by side
| Tool | Pricing | Free plan | Open source | Self-hosted | Declare from chat | Incident channels | Incident roles | Severity levels | Timeline | Workflows | Status page updates | Postmortems | Follow-up actions | Paging |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dispatch | Free | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | - | Yes | Yes | No |
| Event-Driven Ansible | Free plan | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| FireHydrant | Free plan | Up to 10 responders, 1 public status page | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| HolmesGPT | Free | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | No | - | Yes | No | - | - | No |
| Incident Bot | Free | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| incident.io | Free plan | Basic plan: Slack/Teams incidents, status page | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| K8sGPT | Free | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | - | No | No | No | No |
| Rundeck | Free plan | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| Runme | Free | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | - | No | No | No | No |
| StackStorm | Free | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | Yes | No | No | No | No |
Yes: confirmed in the tool's documentation. No: documented as not offered. -: not confirmed. Plans and prices change; check each tool's own site before you decide.
More lists
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- Best incident management tools in 2026 10
- Open source incident management tools in 2026 8
- Self-hosted incident management tools in 2026 8
- Alerting tools with a free plan in 2026 58
- Alert routing tools with a free plan in 2026 7
- Alert notification tools with a free plan in 2026 13
- On-call tools with a free plan in 2026 17
- Status page tools with a free plan in 2026 15