Issue tracking software

Effectively tracking, managing, and resolving issues from customers, employees, and business partners is critical for business continuity and success. Issues can be overlooked without proper bug reporting software, leading to unresolved problems and frustration for everyone involved.

Issue tracking software helps prevent these frustrations by enabling your business to monitor the status of each issue, prioritize tasks, assign responsibilities, and ensure timely resolution. Doing so can improve both the customer experience (CX) and bolster employee service, leading to a better overall employee experience (EX). In this guide, we detail 13 issue tracking software, including key features to look for so you can make the best choice for your business.

More in this guide:

• What is issue tracking software?
• How issue tracking software works
• Issue tracking system vs. bug tracking software vs. ticket tracking software
• The 13 best issue tracking software
• Benefits of issue management software
• Issue tracking example
• Frequently asked questions
• Use a simple issue tracking software to enhance efficiency

Issue tracking software is a tool that helps service teams document, prioritize, assign, and monitor the progress of issues from initial reports to resolution. It’s commonly used in customer support and IT to streamline workflows and enhance productivity.

These tools typically allow teams to log each issue, track its status, and notify stakeholders once it's resolved, ensuring that no issue slips through the cracks.

Issue tracking software provides a centralized platform where all reported issues, bugs, and tasks can be logged, tracked, and managed. Here's an overview of how it typically functions:

• Issue reporting: Users report issues through various channels such as email, Slack, WhatsApp, or a customer self-service portal.
• Categorization, prioritization, and assignment: The software uses information provided in the ticket, such as issue type or severity, to prioritize and assign it to the appropriate agent. This ensures that teams focus on the most critical problems first. Workflow automation and omnichannel routing may automatically route issues to the right personnel.
• Tracking and monitoring: As you work on issues, their status is updated in the system. Common statuses include "open," "in progress," "resolved," and "closed." This ensures transparency and allows team members to monitor progress. Also, team members can collaborate on resolving issues by adding comments, sharing files, and updating the issue details.
• Resolution and closure: Once you resolve an issue, it is closed within the system. The resolution details are documented for future reference, ensuring similar issues can be addressed more efficiently. The software can automatically send follow-up messages to confirm the resolution and gather feedback about the interaction.
• Reporting and analytics: Outside of in-progress issues, reports track support key performance indicators (KPIs), such as the number of issues, time to resolution, and common problem areas. This data helps organizations identify trends, improve processes, and make informed decisions.

AI-powered tools can significantly enhance this process by automating workflows, providing valuable insights, and assisting service teams in resolving issues more quickly and effectively.

The difference between an issue tracking system vs. bug tracking software vs. ticket tracking software is the specific functions of these tools. Bug and ticket tracking are part of the wider issue tracking umbrella, but issue tracking focuses on all issues, not just those related to bugs or the dev team.

Let’s take a look at what different issue tracking tools are available, including an overview of each product, key features, pricing, and free trial information.

• Zendesk: Best for AI-driven CX issue tracking and resolution
• Jira: Best for software development
• Zoho BugTracker: Best for automated bug tracking
• Nuclino: Best for collaborative documentation and knowledge management
• Redmine: Best for Ruby on Rails users
• YouTrack: Best for JetBrains users
• Asana: Best for project visualization
• Monday.com: Best for project management
• ClickUp: Best for sprint management
• Bugzilla: Best for free-to-use software development
• Notion: Best for workspace management
• nTask: Best for team resource allocation
• GitHub Issues: Best for open-source project collaboration

1. Zendesk

Best for: AI-driven CX issue tracking and resolution

Zendesk offers AI-powered issue tracking software that is fast to set up, easy to use, and highly scalable. Our software can handle any use case, whether resolving customer, employee, or business partner issues.

Zendesk AI is pre-trained on over 18 billion real service interactions, requiring no technical expertise to implement, allowing you to get started immediately. Seamlessly integrated throughout the solution, our AI streamlines the issue resolution process. AI-powered workflow automation tools ensure issues are directed to the right agent or department every time. Our intelligent agent copilot assists service teams in real time, offering proactive suggestions for resolving each issue, resulting in faster, higher-quality, and more consistent resolutions.

With Zendesk Voice, you also unlock voice support for the AI era. You can resolve issues via live phone calls autonomously by creating genuine human connections. And gone are the days of rigid, inflexible interactive voice response (IVR) software—the tool uses natural language understanding (NLU) that gives empathetic, human responses to inquiries, avoiding the frustration of dealing with a clunky, rusty-feeling autonomous bot.

Zendesk AI agents, the industry’s most autonomous bots, can resolve even complex issues independently and provide 24/7 multilingual support. You can set one up in minutes by connecting it to your help center. For those without a knowledge base, our generative AI tools can quickly create help center content.

Our AI capabilities are seamlessly integrated into the omnichannel Agent Workspace, allowing users to submit issues over any channel. Then, agents and service teams can:

• Track, manage, and respond to issues from one central location.
• Access key contexts to personalize resolutions to each user’s unique needs.
• Collaborate on issue resolutions without leaving their workspace.

Additionally, AI can surface similar tickets, suggest macros, and edit the agent’s tone directly within the workspace to speed up resolution even more.

AI-powered reporting tools like Zendesk QA automatically review all service resolutions in real time, flagging outliers and escalations, and pinpointing areas for improvement to continuously optimize your operations. Our software is also flexible, allowing you to customize it to fit your needs, streamline your data, and automate processes across systems with over 1,800 pre-built apps and integrations from the Zendesk Marketplace.

G2 rating: 4.3

Capterra rating: 4.4

What people are saying:

• “Zendesk offers a lot of great automations and integrations that are essential to running a successful support desk.”
• “Good for building a knowledge base that’s user-friendly and simple to set up.”
• “The UI is clean and easy to steer, and automation features help in saving time.”

2. Jira

Best for: Software development

Teams use Jira issue tracking software to plan, track, and manage software development projects. Its reporting and analytics features provide insights into project progress, team performance, and potential bottlenecks. Jira offers different ways to visualize work, including Kanban and Scrum boards, backlogs, and timelines.

Users can create and assign issue tickets, track their progress through customizable workflows, and collaborate with teammates through comments and discussions. Users can also plan and track short- and long-term projects using a timeline view.

G2 rating: 4.3

Capterra rating: 4.5

What people are saying:

• “Jira is incredibly flexible, and it is tailored to fit the needs of our teams and workflows.”
• “Even though the UI is simplistic, it just offers too much functionality, which might be overwhelming for first-time users.”
• “It is hard to understand how it all ties together because it is over-engineered to a point where the usability suffers.”

Learn more: Discover how Jira integrates with Zendesk and how Zendesk vs. Jira compare.

3. Zoho BugTracker

Best for: Automated bug tracking

Zoho BugTracker is an issue tracking software that teams can use to identify, track, and resolve bugs within their projects. Users can record and track bugs based on pre-determined criteria like severity and due date. Zoho BugTracker includes automation features that enable administrators to trigger status updates and email notifications when preset rules are met.

The issue tracking system also includes time-tracking capabilities that let team members log billable and non-billable hours. Additionally, users can communicate with teammates using in-app discussions and activity streams to keep everyone informed.

G2 rating: 4.4

Capterra rating: 4.7

What people are saying:

• “Great project automation, SLA, & business rules.”
• “Some integrations are missing, which would make the instrument even better.”
• “Sometimes it’s buggy and unresponsive.”

Learn more: Discover how Zoho BugTracker integrates with Zendesk and how Zendesk vs. Zoho compare.

4. Nuclino

Best for: collaborative documentation and knowledge management

Nuclino is a workspace platform that helps teams collaborate on documentation and knowledge management while tracking issues within projects. Its real-time collaborative editor allows multiple team members to work on the same document simultaneously. Teams can collect and organize project information, track bugs, and document solutions.

The platform navigation has board, list, and graph views to help teams visualize relationships between issues and documents differently. Nuclino also offers embedded content capabilities, allowing users to integrate spreadsheets, videos, and other media into documents to provide comprehensive context for issue tracking. Teams can create nested pages to organize complex projects and use the search functionality to locate specific issues or documentation.

G2 rating: 4.7

Capterra rating: 4.7

What people are saying:

• “Very fluent handling of markdown for a scaling personal knowledge system.”
• “The search does not handle typos. It will show zero results if you mistype.”
• “You have to go to Nuclino to find information rather than an extension; we've switched to Guru since then.”

5. Redmine

Best for: Ruby on Rails users

Redmine is an open-source project management web application created via the Ruby on Rails framework. Teams can use it to track issues using a calendar, Gantt chart, or timeline view. Managers can set role-based access to projects and make them private or public. Users can log descriptions of problems, set priorities, and attach relevant files.

The software also has forum capabilities, allowing users to communicate with one another using project-based forums. Additionally, Redmine has time-tracking functionality that lets users log hours for specific issues and projects.

G2 rating: 4.0

Capterra rating: 4.1

What people are saying:

• “Since Redmine is an open-source project, it is highly customizable.”
• “It is not suitable for clients with sensitive data, as tickets are visible to everyone.”
• “When an organization gets bigger, Redmine has lots of missing features.”

Learn more: Discover how Redmine integrates with Zendesk.

6. YouTrack

Best for: JetBrains users

YouTrack by JetBrains offers cloud- and server-based project management, team collaboration, and issue tracking tools. Users can apply pre-made workflow templates or create their own using a drag-and-drop builder to automate issue life cycles.

Teams can create a knowledge base to store information and share it with customers or among themselves. Users can also tag other team members in articles to involve them in discussions or correct information. The YouTrack bug-tracking tool includes built-in time-tracking features to monitor the time spent on issues, subtasks, and more.

G2 rating: 4.3

Capterra rating: 4.5

What people are saying:

• “The best thing about YouTrack is its flexibility and ability to adapt to different workflows.”
• “Great issue tracker, but reports are not very customizable.”
• “Youtrack has some annoying bugs, kinks, and UX flaws.”

7. Asana

Best for: Project visualization

Asana is a project management tool with features for marketing, operations, IT, and product departments. With it, teams can manage tasks, engage in automation, monitor resource management, and more.

The product’s capabilities focus more on the IT side of issue tracking. Teams can use one of Asana’s bug tracking templates to get started. From there, organizations can customize the template with custom fields so employees and customers can input all the relevant information they need. Beyond that, businesses can monitor issue tracking performance through reporting and analytics dashboards, team project status updates, and project views. The latter allows teams to organize and visualize work as a Kanban board, list, timeline, calendar, or Gantt chart.

G2 rating: 4.4

Capterra rating: 4.5

What people are saying:

• “The UI is very neat, and there are lots of options for folders and sub-folders for tasks.”
• “The integrations could be significantly stronger.”
• “Not user-friendly for an office setting.”

Learn more: Discover how Asana integrates with Zendesk.

8. monday.com

Best for: Project management

As a work management platform, monday.com helps teams visualize workflows for project management, marketing, sales, IT, and operations use cases. Its subproduct, monday dev, offers issue tracking.

With monday dev, internal teams can manage the product development process from initial strategy to launch. During sprints, managers can create new entries for known bugs, assign them to team members, and monitor progress as the issue gets resolved. Beyond that, the wider monday.com platform offers dashboards and reporting to monitor KPIs and bug tracking, workflow automation to reduce repetitive tasks, and AI features that can help teams summarize and improve project management tasks.

G2 rating: 4.7

Capterra rating: 4.6

What people are saying:

• “Implementing and integrating it business-wide was a breeze.”
• “Does its job, but has some bugs.”
• “It doesn't integrate well with email.”

Learn more: Discover how Monday.com integrates with Zendesk.

9. ClickUp

Best for: Sprint management

ClickUp is a project management and productivity tool with features for marketing, sales, HR, and project management teams. For issue and bug tracking applications, it has automations for sprint management and sprint points so managers can monitor workflows during product development.

The tool has an issue tracker template that teams can use to add to their workflow. Organizations can customize the statuses, views, fields, and project management interface to best fit their team. With it, managers can create assignments for individual issues, assign work to team members, monitor progress, and set deadlines.

G2 rating: 4.7

Capterra rating: 4.6

What people are saying:

• “ClickUp is extremely flexible and user-friendly.”
• “The learning curve is steep, and the system requires regular maintenance, making it a challenge for smaller teams without a dedicated admin.”
• “The UI is not intuitive, it’s too cramped, and there’s a lot of stuff taking [up] vertical space.”

Learn more: Discover how ClickUp integrates with Zendesk.

10. Bugzilla

Best for: Free-to-use software development

Bugzilla is a product that helps teams plan, organize, and release software. It is a free-to-use, open-platform software with issue tracking, reporting, and workflow management features.

Bug lists give teams a unified view of all known issues, which users can format in HTML, Atom, iCalendar, CSV, and XML. Reporting features help businesses manage bugs over time, while duplicate bug detection can alert team members if they are trying to document an already established bug. Managers can create custom workflows to help teams stay on track and run sanity checks that check for database inconsistencies.

G2 rating: 3.9

Capterra rating: 4.1

What people are saying:

• “Great open source tool to manage and track bugs.”
• “Bugzilla is what it says it is: bug tracking software. And not much else.”
• “Rigid. No custom workflows.”

11. Notion

Best for: Workspace management

Notion is a workspace management tool that helps teams collaborate on projects and documents. Its features allow businesses to create internal knowledge bases, manage projects, and organize employee calendars.

Notion’s issue tracking starts on the Tasks page. From here, businesses can create project management workflows, monitor team progress, and track issues like product bugs or customer service inquiries. Managers can modify the interface to take an Agile or Kanban approach and customize the process to assign tasks and implement deadlines.

G2 rating: 4.7

Capterra rating: 4.7

What people are saying:

• “Notion is my secret superpower.”
• “It’s hard to learn or use sometimes. The learning curve is quite high.”
• “The search feature is really hard to use and doesn't really return the results I need.”

Learn more: Discover how Notion integrates with Zendesk.

12. nTask

Best for: Team resource allocation

As a project management platform, nTask is designed to help teams allocate resources while tracking issues and managing tasks. It offers issue tracking capabilities that allow managers to identify, assign, and monitor bugs and problems throughout the project lifecycle.

The software includes resource management functions that enable teams to balance workloads, track time spent on issue resolution, and visualize team capacity. Gantt charts and Kanban boards on nTask provide different ways to track progress on issues, while its meeting management tools help teams coordinate bug resolution sessions with built-in agenda creation and follow-up task assignment. The platform also offers risk management capabilities for teams to identify potential issues before they become problems.

G2 rating: 4.4

Capterra rating: 4.2

What people are saying:

• “This communication tool stands out with its agile methodologies.”
• “From day one, nTask seems to have a slow loading time compared to other software.”
• “The interface is not very intuitive, and I found myself preferring other solutions.”

13. GitHub Issues

Best for: Open-source project collaboration

GitHub Issues is a tracking tool integrated into the GitHub platform for development teams to manage bugs, enhancements, and other tasks for software projects. It's accessible to open-source collaborations where multiple contributors may work on different aspects of a project simultaneously.

To organize workflow, the system allows users to create issue reports with custom labels, milestones, and assignees. GitHub Issues integrates with pull requests, enabling developers to link code changes to the issues they resolve. Other features include project boards for Kanban-style workflow management, issue templates to standardize bug reporting, and powerful search functionality to filter issues by numerous criteria. Teams can also use GitHub Actions to automate various aspects of the issue tracking workflow.

G2 rating: 4.7

Capterra rating: 4.8

What people are saying:

• “A great value for effective, reliable source control.”
• “GitHub Enterprise sales and pricing [are] very opaque and arbitrary.”
• “The CI tools are just not right there yet.”

Learn more: Discover how GitHub integrates with Zendesk.

Issue management software can bring several benefits to your organization. Read on to discover some of the most important.

Increases productivity

Issue tracking software enhances productivity by expediting the resolution process in several ways:

• AI-powered automation: Intelligent bots, such as AI agents, can autonomously answer questions and resolve complex issues in multiple languages around the clock. This automation ensures faster ticket resolutions, even during peak times.
• Self-service support: Tools like self-service portals and AI-powered knowledge bases empower users to resolve their own issues, freeing up your issue tracking teams to focus on more complex tasks.
• Intelligent ticket routing: AI can tag and direct issues to the appropriate teams based on intent, sentiment, and language, reducing your team's manual workload and ensuring that issues are addressed by the right people promptly.

Overall, the right issue management software can boost agent productivity and deliver more effective service to end users.

Improves collaboration

Problem management software fosters collaboration by centralizing communication and creating a shared understanding of tasks. Team members know which support tickets have been assigned to whom and their progress, so nothing falls through the cracks. This includes inquiries from an email ticketing system and social media, voice, and other channels—Zendesk is a fully omnichannel-capable solution.

Communication tools also make it easier for teams to work together on tasks by discussing issues and sharing files. This transparency promotes teamwork, encourages collective problem-solving, and ultimately leads to more efficient and successful project completion.

Maximizes visibility

Issue tracking software provides unprecedented transparency across all operational levels. With comprehensive dashboards and detailed reporting features, managers can monitor issue status, team performance, and resolution times in real time. These visual analytics transform complex data into actionable insights, allowing leadership to easily:

• Identify and correct bottlenecks
• Track progress against SLAs
• Make informed, data-driven decisions

For team members, this visibility means having immediate access to complete issue histories, including past interactions and resolution attempts. There’s less redundant work and more time to solve problems or focus on strategic work. Plus, with customizable views, stakeholders at all levels can access the information most relevant to their roles. Everyone stays aligned while maintaining focus on their specific responsibilities.

Speeds up gap and inefficiency detection

Customer service quality assurance (QA) tools significantly improve efficiency by automating the QA process and providing in-depth analysis of service interactions. These tools can automatically score 100 percent of service interactions, ensuring consistent evaluation standards. Doing so helps identify patterns and trends in service quality, highlighting areas that consistently perform well and those needing improvement.

AI-powered reporting generates actionable suggestions based on this analysis, offering concrete steps to enhance service delivery. This allows teams to quickly address issues, implement best practices, and continuously refine their processes, improving operational efficiency.

Automates workflows

Automated workflows in issue tracking software offer teams numerous benefits by streamlining and standardizing the issue resolution process. By automating repetitive tasks like issue routing, notification triggers, and status updates, teams free up valuable time for focusing on complex problem-solving.

With workflow automation software like Zendesk, you can create object triggers that extend your workflows past tickets to automate actions that affect products, contracts, and more. This not only improves productivity but also minimizes human error and ensures consistency.

Now that we’ve covered a few issue tracking software options and the benefits they can bring to your organization, let’s dive into a brief example:

1. Issue reporting: A customer started a ticket with a business’s AI agent, reporting that they couldn’t complete a purchase and received an error message.
2. Categorization, prioritization, and assignment: The AI agent determined that the issue required human agent intervention. The bot gathered all the necessary information on the customer’s problem and automatically assigned it to the appropriate support agent. It then transferred the ticket to the agent with the full context of the situation.
3. Tracking and monitoring: The agent reviewed the ticket and investigated the issue while keeping the customer updated. Internally, the support team collaborated with other departments through direct messages or side conversations, added relevant notes, and updated the ticket where needed.
4. Resolution and closure: After investigating the issue, the support team determined that there was a temporary glitch in the payment processing system. They resolved the issue and contacted the customer to inform them they had fixed it. They also apologized for any inconvenience. The ticket was then closed, and the solution was documented in the ticketing system for future reference.

The above example was from the perspective of a customer service team, but a similar framework would apply to internal teams fixing a product glitch.