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

IT AI Recommendation Index, September 2026 Edition. Asked as "incident management platform" and as "on-call scheduling and alerting tool", six framings each, to twelve models with search on, on behalf of a mid-market B2B company. Page: https://it-ai-index.com/operations/incident-management-and-on-call/

**Standing:** incident.io leads with 25% of first choices; verdict contested. 51 first choices across the direct, paraphrase, budget and scale prompts.

## First-choice share

| # | Product | Share | Negative rate | Labels |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | incident.io | 25% | 0% | 50 |
| 2 | PagerDuty | 22% | 31% | 59 |
| 3 | Squadcast | 10% | 0% | 25 |
| 4 | Rootly | 8% | 0% | 42 |
| 5 | Hyperping | 8% | 0% | 14 |
| 6 | Opsgenie | 8% | 59% | 46 |
| 7 | Better Stack | 6% | 6% | 17 |
| 8 | xMatters | 2% | 36% | 11 |
| 9 | Jira Service Management | 0% | 11% | 28 |
| 10 | Freshservice | 0% | 20% | 15 |
| 11 | FireHydrant | 0% | 18% | 17 |
| 12 | Grafana IRM | 0% | 29% | 14 |

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

- Claude Haiku 4.5: Rootly; alternatives Freshservice, Squadcast, Zenduty
- GPT-5.4 mini: incident.io; alternatives Jira Service Management, Opsgenie, PagerDuty
- Gemini 3.5 Flash: incident.io; alternatives Better Stack, Rootly
- Perplexity Sonar: incident.io; alternatives Freshservice, Jira Service Management, PagerDuty, Zenduty
- Grok 4.1 Fast: PagerDuty; alternatives Rootly, Squadcast, Zenduty, incident.io
- Mistral Small: PagerDuty, incident.io; alternatives Freshservice, Zenduty
- DeepSeek V4 Flash: incident.io; alternatives FireHydrant, Rootly
- Llama 4 Maverick: no first choice
- Qwen 3.7 Flash: PagerDuty, Zenduty; alternatives Freshservice, Hyperping, Opsgenie, incident.io
- Kimi K2: PagerDuty; alternatives Freshservice, Rootly, Zenduty, incident.io
- GLM 4.7 FlashX: Zenduty; alternatives Jira Service Management, Opsgenie, Rootly, incident.io
- MiniMax M2.5: PagerDuty; alternatives Freshservice, Jira Service Management, Rootly, incident.io

## Sources the answers cite

65 of 72 answers came back with a source list, from 12 of 12 models. Sites named in the most answers:

- rootly.com: 42 answers, 58 citations
- hyperping.com: 36 answers, 42 citations
- incident.io: 35 answers, 96 citations
- monday.com: 25 answers, 25 citations
- augmentcode.com: 22 answers, 22 citations
- xurrent.com: 21 answers, 24 citations
- complyjet.com: 16 answers, 16 citations
- expertinsights.com: 15 answers, 15 citations

Pages named in the most answers:

- https://hyperping.com/blog/best-incident-management-tools (28 answers)
- https://monday.com/blog/service/incident-management-software (25 answers)
- https://rootly.com/blog/15-best-incident-response-software-platforms-for-modern-engineering-teams-2026 (23 answers)
- https://augmentcode.com/tools/best-incident-management-software (22 answers)
- https://xurrent.com/blog/top-incident-management-software (17 answers)
- https://complyjet.com/blog/best-incident-management-software (16 answers)
- https://expertinsights.com/it-management/the-top-incident-management-software (15 answers)
- https://betterstack.com/community/comparisons/incident-management-tools (11 answers)
- https://viewpointanalysis.com/post/incident-management-software-options-2026 (10 answers)
- https://hyperping.com/blog/best-oncall-scheduling-tools (9 answers)

## Warned against

- Opsgenie: 27 of 46 labels negative. "Verdict: Caution Advised / Plan Migration Immediately ... standalone OpsGenie is facing deprecation, with the full sunsetting scheduled for April 2027" (Qwen 3.7 Flash, negative prompt)
- PagerDuty: 18 of 59 labels negative. "One of the most widely used platforms, but has received significant criticism for: High costs... Poor support" (MiniMax M2.5, negative prompt)
- Splunk On-Call: 8 of 17 labels negative. "Avoid ... basic tools like VictorOps/Splunk On-Call (now pricier, less innovative)" (Grok 4.1 Fast, direct prompt)
- ServiceNow: 7 of 12 labels negative. "Avoid enterprise-heavy like ServiceNow (too complex/pricey)" (Grok 4.1 Fast, direct prompt)

## Record

- Method: https://it-ai-index.com/methodology/
- Raw judge labels and full responses: https://it-ai-index.com/data/
- License: CC BY 4.0. Cite as IT AI Recommendation Index, September 2026 Edition, it-ai-index.com.