ChangeGear Service Desk vs. osTicket

1. What kind of service-levels are you looking to establish? 2. Are there other programs you are going to be using for other aspects of 'the job?' 3. How many employees are going to be needing access to ChangeGear? 4. Do you want a highly configurable product or something that will come out of the box pre-set? 5. Are you looking to keep track of equipment deployed to the customers you support?

Incentivized

For beginning smaller companies that are in need of partially automating their incoming requests this product is easy to set up and will assist in structuring these request[s]. These requests can come in via email/phone or web portal. For companies that are beginning to streamline their support procedures, this tool can be a first step into automating part of these processes. This is also how user[s] should see it. It is merely a tool that can assist in structuring the incoming request flow the rest still has to be fit into business processes.

Incentivized

• Change Control
• Ease of Use
• Simplicity

Incentivized

• osTicket is extremely user friendly for end users and support agents. It's very easy for new end users to put in a service request. This aspect of simplicity is important because we don't have to train new users on how to put in service requests.
• Feature wise osTicket has everything you need without being overly complicated or cluttered. This is important for us because it allows for faster support times and happier end users.
• Lightweight and very reliable, osTicket uses PHP and MySQL. Setup is easy and it can be hosted internally or externally web hosed. Also, since it relies on PHP it gives you flexibility to use Apache, Nginx , Lighttpd , IIS, etc.
• Thriving community: the community behind osTicket is feature-wise. Which is very helpful if you have any questions.
• Best of all, osTicket is completely free and open source. While they do offer pair tier cloud-hosting and enterprise support. The free version offers all the features of the paid tiers (minus hosing and support).

Incentivized

• Not sure if this is due to our back end, but ChangeGear Service Desk can sometimes bog down. Speed can always be improved and, while version 6 has been impressive so far, slow downs are still common.
• Browser compatibility can sometimes be hit or miss. Certain fields would not work on Chrome, so our department has required FireFox. I have not tested 6 on other browsers but hopefully the upgrade has taken care of this.
• The communications with customers are not easy to sift through. With limited attention spans, seeing a subject line filled with 'gibberish' causes our customers to either delete or leave the message forever unread. Again, not sure if due to our implementation, but I would clean that sort of thing up.

Incentivized

• Language package should permit also the translation of the templates
• It should not require the user to enter his details when creating a new ticket. This should be filled automatically
• Improve the layout of the ticket messages to facilitate reading and interpretation.

It does well what I was looking for on a ticketing tool

Because it allows me to work in (probably) the most organized way possible. It allows me to collaborate quickly and rather effortlessly with coworkers within my team and other teams in the Technology department. The deduction in rating is due to the issues with speed and browser compatibility. Version 6 has been a revelation but I as always, there's room for improvement.

Incentivized

I am familiar with osTicket and this allow me to teach all the staff and support them whenever they have any concern regarding the usability and following processes.

Being open-source it is community supported. There is a hosted version that provides better support. Honestly, I have not really needed support

Incentivized

Grant all prerequisites are met, before installing to avoid any issue during the installation

Simpler and easier to implement.

Incentivized

osTicket has proven to be a very useful tool for the team to help support the business. Open-source was the right price point and self-hosting as mentioned was quite important (however I believe that osTicket does have a hosting solution available if needed). Jitbit was a close contender but didn't like how it doesn't separate people submitting tickets from users acting as agents. So all in quite happy with the choice.

Incentivized

• Better Response Time
• Email Tracking of Tickets
• Change Control Module Simplicity

Incentivized

• When we had a hosted version of osTicket, we were saving some time by having them work on our setup, but we were spending a lot. Switching to our own osTicket build from their open sourcing not only saved us money upfront but we actually spent LESS time developing because we knew our ideas and didn't have to explain them to another (unrelated) party.
• Creating our own ticketing infrastructure for institutional data requests has been a game changer for us. We have been able to interface with our enterprise email client and create a level of customization that meets our existing informational technology culture.

Incentivized