Intercom creates modern Customer Service software that aims to redefine how businesses support their customers. The platform connects businesses directly to customers using powerful messaging and automation. According to the vendor, Intercom enables teams to scale support without investing more resources - leading to happier customers and more efficient support teams.
$39
per month per seat
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.
$9
per month
Pricing
Intercom
osTicket
Editions & Modules
Essential
$39
per month per seat
Advanced
$99
per month per seat
Expert
$139
per month per seat
The Early Stage program
From $65 for 5 support seats
per month
Proactive Support Plus add-on
from $99
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Intercom
osTicket
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
AI customer service features included in every plan.
Intercom integrates Help desk, AI Chat bot, and Proactive support.
Well suited for real time customer support needs - that's where it really shines. Well suited for proactive outreach and the ability to gather feedback from customers + surveys. Less appropriate for a non techie company to set it up, basically any sort of changes in integration have to be done by an engineer.
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.
Intercom's ability to centralize customer communication is a game-changer.
Intercom's automation features have saved us time and streamlined workflows.
Help desk for users.
Intercom seamlessly integrates with a variety of other tools and platforms, enhancing its functionality and making it a central part of our tech stack.
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).
We have been and will be continuing our journey with Intercom and nothing too concerning has happened that I have experienced or heard of that has us on the edge yet. If it ever happens it will be something along the lines of "Outgrowing" the use of need of the platform.
Everything is very straightforward and easy to see, explore, and use. Intercom provides walkthroughs and helps guides in case something is not apparent to the user and has their agents available to help. I always feel confident when exploring new features or making changes that I can have it accomplished due to the service they provide.
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.
Intercom is the premier customer support/engagement model and it definitely has one of the top tier customer support teams as well. I don't think I have ever waited more than 5 minutes to get the information I need or get help with an issue. They are incredible and I aim to model our customer service department after them.
We've used both Drift and Salesforce chat at Owl Labs in the past, and I didn't find them to meet our needs or customer needs the way Intercom has been able to. Intercom ranks higher for us regarding Integrations offered, customization, AI functionality, and user-friendliness. In the past, if chat visitors would click around our website, they'd have to start their chat over again from the start and lose their communication history with us. We also found that Salesforce chat did not have enough customization that we needed. One small example is that in Intercom, you can see when another teammate is looking at a chat and tag them in notes to collaborate. We didn't have access to anything like that when using Salesforce chat. Intercom has made it easy to work alongside one another to be more efficient.
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.
