HelpSpot is an affordable, web-based help desk system. It is available as a SaaS product or can be hosted by the customer behind a firewall. Pricing is by named user.
$49
per month
osTicket
Score 7.7 out of 10
N/A
osTicket is an open-source help desk / ticketing platform that can create inquiries online, through email, and through phone calls.
HelpSpot is well suited for streamlining support ticketing within the organization. By providing a single point of contact to email for support, we were able to increase response time and case resolution by approximately 30% through the increased efficiency of ticket routing via workflows and the ability for IT support staff to grab tickets from the queue instead of having them pile up in a mailbox that contains other emails as well.
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.
HelpSpot was great for organization. Having different queues allowed each of my team members to organize their conversations with the customer and quickly retrieve the history of the ticket.
HelpSpot is a fairly simple tool that has a friendly user interface. With it's more modern look, it made it easier for me personally to navigate and train team members on how to use it successfully.
HelpSpot allowed our team to view the responses section, which allowed our team to cut down on the time we spent responding to a ticket.
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).
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.
HelpSpot appears to be more of an old-school product but much of the recent technology is running under the surface. It has much of the compexity and customization available with Jira in tandem with the easy communications interface, not unlike Zendesk ,and some of the potential archival intelligence (in the works) of Fogbugz
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.
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.
