# Incident management and on-call: what AI models recommend, October 2026

Gane Index, October 2026 Edition. Asked as "incident management platform" and as "on-call scheduling and alerting tool", six framings each, to fourteen models with search on, on behalf of a mid-market B2B company. Page: https://www.gane.ai/index/it/operations/incident-management-and-on-call/2026-10

This is the permanent record of the October 2026 Edition, published October 1, 2026 and superseded since. The current standing: https://www.gane.ai/index/it/operations/incident-management-and-on-call/index.md

**Standing:** incident.io leads with 32% of first choices; verdict contested. 60 first choices across the direct, paraphrase, budget and scale prompts.

## First-choice share

| Rank | Product | Share | Negative rate | Labels |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | [incident.io](https://www.gane.ai/index/it/vendors/incident-io/index.md) | 32% | 5% | 57 |
| 2 | [PagerDuty](https://www.gane.ai/index/it/vendors/pagerduty/index.md) | 15% | 33% | 72 |
| 3 | [Freshservice](https://www.gane.ai/index/it/vendors/freshservice/index.md) | 10% | 6% | 17 |
| 4 | [Squadcast](https://www.gane.ai/index/it/vendors/squadcast/index.md) | 8% | 4% | 25 |
| 5 | [Grafana IRM](https://www.gane.ai/index/it/vendors/grafana-irm/index.md) | 7% | 14% | 22 |
| 6 | [Opsgenie](https://www.gane.ai/index/it/vendors/opsgenie/index.md) | 7% | 72% | 50 |
| 7 | [Rootly](https://www.gane.ai/index/it/vendors/rootly/index.md) | 5% | 3% | 33 |
| 9 | [FireHydrant](https://www.gane.ai/index/it/vendors/firehydrant/index.md) | 2% | 10% | 21 |
| 12 | [Splunk On-Call](https://www.gane.ai/index/it/vendors/splunk-on-call/index.md) | 2% | 33% | 15 |
| 16 | [Jira Service Management](https://www.gane.ai/index/it/vendors/jira-service-management/index.md) | 0% | 20% | 25 |
| 65 | [ServiceNow ITSM](https://www.gane.ai/index/it/vendors/servicenow-itsm/index.md) | 0% | 64% | 22 |

Rank is by share of first choices among all 65 products named; products with the same share are tied, and the order among them carries no meaning. The table lists those with at least 10 labels.

## Each model's first choice on the direct prompt

- Claude Haiku 4.5: Freshservice; alternatives HaloITSM, Hyperping, ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, Rootly
- GPT-5.4 mini: incident.io; alternatives PagerDuty, Rootly
- Gemini 3.5 Flash: incident.io; alternatives FireHydrant, Freshservice, Rootly
- Perplexity Sonar: Freshservice; alternatives PagerDuty, Rootly, incident.io
- Grok 4.20: Freshservice; alternatives InvGate Service Management, Jira Service Management, ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, PagerDuty
- Mistral Small: Freshservice, PagerDuty; alternatives ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus
- DeepSeek V4 Flash: incident.io; alternatives Freshservice, Jira Service Management
- Llama 4 Maverick: no first choice
- Qwen 3.7 Flash: PagerDuty; alternatives Datadog Incident Management, FireHydrant, Opsgenie
- Kimi K2: incident.io; alternatives Squadcast
- GLM 4.7 FlashX: Rootly, incident.io; alternatives Jira Service Management, PagerDuty
- MiniMax M2.5: Freshservice, PagerDuty; alternatives Jira Service Management, incident.io
- GPT-6 Luna: incident.io; alternatives PagerDuty, Rootly
- Muse Glimmer 30B: Freshservice; alternatives PagerDuty, Rootly, incident.io

## Sources the answers cite

77 of 84 answers came back with a source list, from 14 of 14 models. Sites named in the most answers:

- incident.io: 55 answers, 140 citations
- rootly.com: 40 answers, 77 citations
- motadata.com: 35 answers, 35 citations
- g2.com: 31 answers, 45 citations
- pagerduty.com: 27 answers, 43 citations
- expertinsights.com: 25 answers, 26 citations
- complyjet.com: 24 answers, 24 citations
- blog.invgate.com: 22 answers, 26 citations

Pages named in the most answers:

- https://motadata.com/blog/incident-management-tools (34 answers)
- https://expertinsights.com/it-management/the-top-incident-management-software (25 answers)
- https://complyjet.com/blog/best-incident-management-software (24 answers)
- https://monday.com/blog/service/incident-management-software (19 answers)
- https://augmentcode.com/tools/best-incident-management-software (18 answers)
- https://blog.invgate.com/incident-management-software (18 answers)
- https://g2.com/categories/incident-management (18 answers)
- https://incident.io/blog/best-incident-response-tools-2026 (16 answers)
- https://rootly.com/blog/15-best-incident-response-software-platforms-for-modern-engineering-teams-2026 (15 answers)
- https://rootly.com/sre/choose-the-right-incident-platform-12-solutions-compared (12 answers)

## Warned against

- Opsgenie: 36 of 50 labels negative. "Do not buy standalone Opsgenie right now unless you are fully committing to migrating to the broader, consolidated Jira Service Management (JSM) ecosystem." (Gemini 3.5 Flash, scale prompt)
- PagerDuty: 24 of 72 labels negative. "Avoid PagerDuty unless you truly need enterprise-grade features" (Kimi K2, budget prompt)
- ServiceNow ITSM: 14 of 22 labels negative. "ServiceNow currently requires extra scrutiny due to its recent critical security disclosures" (Kimi K2, negative prompt)
- Jira Service Management: 5 of 25 labels negative. "the main platforms to be cautious about are Opsgenie, Jira Service Management... warn that its ITSM complexity can slow incident response" (Perplexity Sonar, negative prompt)

## Movement since September 2026

Floor: 11 points of share, measured on the calibration repeat.
Same leader: incident.io at 31%.

- Freshservice: 0% to 10%, +10. Inside the floor by 1 point · rank 15 → 3 of 57.
- PagerDuty: 22% to 15%, −7. Inside the floor by 4 points · rank 2 of 57, unchanged.
- incident.io: 25% to 31%, +6. Inside the floor by 5 points · rank 1 of 57, unchanged.
- Grafana IRM: 0% to 6%, +6. Inside the floor by 5 points · rank 17 → 7 of 57.
- Hyperping: 8% to 2%, −6. Inside the floor by 5 points · rank 5 → 11 of 57.
- Squadcast: 10% to 8%, −2. Inside the floor by 9 points · rank 3 → 4 of 57.
- Rootly: 8% to 6%, −2. Inside the floor by 9 points · rank 4 → 6 of 57.
- Better Stack: 6% to 4%, −2. Inside the floor by 9 points · rank 7 → 8 of 57.
- FireHydrant: 0% to 2%, +2. Inside the floor by 9 points · rank 16 → 9 of 57.
- Splunk On-Call: 0% to 2%, +2. Inside the floor by 9 points · rank 50 → 15 of 57.
- xMatters: 2% to 0%, −2. Inside the floor by 9 points · rank 13 → 18 of 57.
- Opsgenie: 8% to 8%, ±0. Inside the floor by 11 points · rank 6 → 5 of 57.

## Record

- Method: https://www.gane.ai/index/it/methodology
- License: CC BY 4.0. Cite as Gane Index, October 2026 Edition, www.gane.ai/index/it.