Helpjuice vs. osTicket vs. Vision Helpdesk

Helpjuice is an excellent platform when you’re looking to modernize the way you create documentation. Many companies, especially larger corporations, are stuck in the past, utilizing PDFs and share drives to house and access procedures. With Helpjuice, we now have a centralized web-based platform that provides everything from analytic functions to standard templates, user-specific features, and more. My team specifically chose Helpjuice during the pandemic, when all the tech writers from my company (including myself) were moved into a single team. We needed to find a platform that would allow us to align our publishing standards while also moving us forward in the way we publish procedures. That platform was ultimately Helpjuice. Helpjuice certainly offers a variety of features, but one of the few drawbacks is that it does not incorporate or seem to integrate with any specific ticketing tool. While this isn’t an issue for me or my team, as we are required to use a specific tool internally, I can imagine that someone looking for a complete package with multi-step workflows and an intake process would not find Helpjuice adequate.

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

I think that there is probably nothing that Vision Helpdesk can't do given enough work to customize it. The problem is that you almost have to have someone dedicated to knowing everything there is to know about the system and then have them be the administrator of all the customizations and feature additions you want. It's great that it can do so much, but it's not great that it's so complicated and has very little out-of-the-box configurations.

Incentivized

• We were looking for a publishing feature where there would be some required oversight.
• We have really enjoyed the AI Tool of Wizardshot as it has helped reduce the time spent writing articles.
• The analytic dashboard to see who has contributed what and which articles are the most clicked on is wonderful

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

• The best thing for us - the timer. It's really cool. We can start the timer and end it when support finishes. It's very important for working with other companies we give support for.
• Good-looking, with good visualisation and usability dashboard.
• Ticket transfer between support users, comments, ticket printing.
• The best price and functionality, comparing to other help desks.
• Support. Best support I have seen on internet. Helped with setup, and helped with few minor questions.

• Article feedback disappears when resolved, would like to see a integration with Jira which we now use to track feedback changes.
• Analytics for the AI search would be appreciated. Currently we have no idea how many people are actually using this feature.
• A way to train the AI search bot. Currently there is no way to up/down vote answers or indicate how accurate or helpful an answer is.

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.

• Chat feature.
• Remote desktop.
• Get more integration with other software and Mobile apps.

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

For us it's really best solution.

HelpJuice is really amazing as a starter knowledge base vendor. They have great customer service and the ability to customize your website is endless. However, it is difficult to scale up.

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.

Really simple, good-looking interface, many features and customizations

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

Incentivized

Support from Vision Helpdesk was rather lackluster. We uncovered a bug pretty early on in our use of the system and it took them about a month to fix it. Our internal admin of the system had to keep pestering them to get it fixed. It wasn't critical to our business but was something we needed fixed and it just seemed like they didn't care that much about fixing it.

Incentivized

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

Prior to using Helpjuice, I was using Microsoft Publisher to create all the training materials and manuals for multiple divisions within my company. It was awful. It would lag whenever I opened larger manuals, it operated like software from the late 90s, it was not intuitive, from a design perspective, and after migrating to a MacBook Pro as my work computer, I discovered that the program was NEVER created for Mac OS, requiring me to run Windows on my MacBook whenever I had to update any procedures that hadn’t yet migrated to Helpjuice. What a nightmare.

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

Vision Helpdesk was more open for an NGO while the other companies were more attended on the "big-money", which we don't have as an NGO. Second point is that Vision Helpdesk is very easy and simple to use. Not too much installation, programming etc.

Incentivized

• As I mentioned, my productivity in terms of working around issues, asking for help, etc. is greatly reduced on a DAILY basis.
• I spend as much time finding bugs and filing tickets as I do writing content, and this was especially true at the beginning.
• The Doc Center looks nice, so you'd never know the pain behind it.

• 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

• Most cost-effective help desk software I have researched from Kayako to SAAS [products] like Zendesk.
• We got more features and easy customization done with Vision Helpdesk which where not possible for Zendesk and Kayako was too costly.
• Ticket tracking has been easier and faster with Vision Helpdesk; for our web hosting business we prefer a download version which is not possible with SAAS help desk providers ( Zendesk or Freshdesk).