7 Best crisis management tools: A guide for marketers

No brand is immune to a crisis, but the right preparation can make all the difference. Whether it’s a product recall, a data breach or a social media scandal, a crisis can damage an organization’s reputation, break customer trust and even lead to financial losses. Even with a crisis management strategy in place, a dedicated tool will empower businesses to navigate these incidents effectively. From social media monitoring to streamlined communication, these tools are essential for protecting your brand’s reputation.

This guide will dive deeper into what crisis management tools are, their benefits and the best available options to monitor and protect your brand from a social media crisis.

What are crisis management tools or software?

Crisis management tools are digital solutions designed to help businesses anticipate, manage and recover from the impact of crises. These tools include capabilities such as social listening, internal and external communication coordination and planning and preparedness.

According to The 2025 Sprout Social Index™, consumers say brands should make responding to customers their top priority in 2025. Which means it’s important for brands to be ready if and when crises arise. Businesses can identify potential threats before they escalate, respond swiftly and protect their brand reputation.

Benefits of using crisis management tools

Crisis management tools empower businesses to respond swiftly and effectively. These tools offer many benefits that can help organizations deal with even the most difficult situations. They can monitor and alert you in real time, make communication easier and work across teams more efficiently.
When you’re ready, download our crisis management plan template to prepare your team should a social media crisis arise.

Faster and more efficient crisis response

During a crisis, every second counts. These tools use advanced algorithms and artificial intelligence to analyze data in real time, identifying potential threats and providing early warnings.

Improved communication and collaboration

Effective communication and collaboration are essential for managing a crisis successfully. These tools facilitate seamless collaboration between different teams and departments within an organization. They provide a centralized platform where team members can access real-time updates, discuss strategies and ensure that all stakeholders are aligned and working towards a common goal.

Enhanced situational awareness and decision-making

By using real-time data in a crisis management tool, businesses can gain a comprehensive understanding of the situation and make informed decisions about the appropriate response. Features like Spike Alerts notify businesses of sudden changes in conversation volume or sentiment, ensuring prompt response.

Reduced risk of reputational damage

In today’s interconnected world, a crisis can spread like wildfire. Crisis management tools help businesses proactively address and manage crises, protecting their brand image.

Increased crisis preparedness and resilience

Regular use of these tools helps businesses develop a crisis-ready culture, ensuring they’re prepared for any eventuality. By continuously refining their crisis management strategies, businesses can build resilience and become better equipped for crises.

Top 10 crisis management software

1. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a comprehensive social media management platform with robust crisis management capabilities, including social listening, real-time monitoring and engagement tools. With its suite of tools, Sprout equips businesses to proactively address and mitigate potential crises.

Sprout’s advanced social listening abilities allow you to monitor conversations and sentiment about your brand in real-time. This enables you to identify and respond to emerging issues before they escalate. Sprout’s Smart Inbox centralizes all incoming messages, comments and mentions, making it easy to track and respond to conversations across multiple social channels.

The platform’s Spike Alerts feature immediately notifies you of sudden increases in message volume or mentions, giving you a head start in addressing potential crises. In the event of a full-blown crisis, the Pause All feature allows you to halt all scheduled content with a single click, preventing any further missteps. With Sprout Social, you can confidently navigate any crisis, protect your brand’s reputation and emerge stronger than ever.

2. Sprinklr

Sprinklr provides a unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform designed to help large enterprises manage brand reputation and crises at scale. It centralizes over 30 digital channels, offering a single source of truth for monitoring and response.

Its AI-powered features detect anomalies in conversation volume or sentiment, while advanced governance and automated workflows ensure responses are compliant and efficient. This makes it a comprehensive command center for enterprise-level crisis management.

3. Talkwalker

Talkwalker is a social intelligence platform that offers a suite of tools that can help in social media crisis management. It tracks brand mentions, relevant keywords and hashtags across various social media platforms, news sites, blogs and forums. Its social listening features let you watch conversations and brand sentiment in real time. This helps social media professionals respond quickly to developing crises, which can help avoid reputational impact.

 

4. Brand24

Brand24 is a media monitoring tool that gives businesses real-time mention tracking and AI-driven insights. It tracks conversations across millions of online sources, helping teams detect potential crises with customizable alerts. The platform’s AI-powered sentiment analysis and “Storm Alert” feature for sudden conversation spikes provide an early warning system to protect brand reputation.

5. Meltwater

Meltwater‘s media monitoring and social listening platform can be an asset for social media crisis management. By providing real-time alerts and sudden spikes in brand mentions or negative sentiment, Meltwater enables businesses to closely monitor emerging issues. This type of early identification empowers social media professionals to take swift action.

6. Resolver

While Resolver is primarily known for risk management and incident response, its features can be applied to social media crisis management as well. By streamlining incident logging and categorizing, task management and communication, Resolver can help teams coordinate their response to a crisis that originated on social media. Users can also track the severity of the crisis and its impact on your brand.

It’s important to note that Resolver has some social listening and monitoring capabilities, but they might not be as comprehensive as a dedicated social media management tool that offers social listening.

7. Factal

Factal provides real-time, verified risk intelligence to help teams get ahead of physical-world incidents before they escalate on social media. Its newsroom of journalists verifies breaking events, allowing you to respond faster and reduce misinformation risk. The platform uses geofenced monitoring to alert you to incidents near your stores, offices and event venues.

Unlike traditional social listening tools that track chatter, Factal verifies events at the source. This gives marketers a critical head start on social media spikes caused by real-world disruptions, a capability that complements any crisis management toolkit.

8. Everbridge

Everbridge is a critical event management platform that delivers enterprise-grade mass notification and incident orchestration. When a social issue becomes an operational incident, the platform helps you coordinate stakeholders, issue advisories and manage approvals at scale. Its multichannel notifications reach people via SMS, voice, email and push alerts.

Everbridge is purpose-built for critical communications, not just social monitoring. It operationalizes internal alignment so your public-facing responses on social media remain consistent, timely and accurate during high-stakes incidents.

9. Muck Rack

Muck Rack is a public relations management platform that connects social crisis response with PR and earned media management. When brand sentiment is at risk, its tools allow you to monitor press coverage, find relevant journalists in its database and coordinate statements with key stakeholders. This ensures your social and PR responses are perfectly aligned.

While other tools track social conversations, Muck Rack operationalizes the earned media side of a crisis. It unifies journalist outreach and coverage intelligence, giving your team the tools to manage your brand’s narrative across all channels.

10. Determ

Determ is an AI-driven media monitoring platform that gives teams enterprise-level alerting without the heavy lift. It tracks conversations in real time across social media, news sites, forums, blogs and reviews. The platform uses AI-powered sentiment and topic clustering to automatically isolate emerging issues before they gain momentum.

Determ emphasizes real-time detection and intelligent noise filtering, making it a strong choice for teams that need speed and value. Its custom spike alerts and shareable dashboards support a fast, coordinated response to any developing crisis.

Prepare your team for the unexpected

In today’s digital landscape, crisis management tools are no longer optional—they’re essential. By investing in the right tools and creating a proactive crisis plan, businesses can protect their reputation and keep customers’ trust. Don’t wait for a crisis to happen—empower your business with the tools it needs to succeed. Download our crisis  management template to prepare your team when a crisis happens.