Jira Service Management (formerly Jira Service Desk, now including features from the former Mindville Insight, acquired by Atlassian in June 2020) is a service desk software that is purpose-built for IT, service, and support teams. The software provides everything IT and support teams need out-of-the-box for service request, incident, problem and change management. Jira Service Management integrates seamlessly with Jira Software so that IT and development teams can work better together. Users…
$0
per month
osTicket
Score 7.8 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.
It will be well suite for large Organization where many team members involved from various Geographical location's in a single project or program as that would help greatly with this Agile Project Management tool. And, its may not be the right option for small organizations and also less of the need for co-located teams 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.
Integration with many of the most common tools companies are using (Slack, MS Teams, Salesforce, ... etc)
Natural workflow with Jira (as product development / project management tool) which makes the full fix and follow up of the tickets / issues very easy to follow
Allow multiple different entry points and work flows for as many different needs your teams / company have
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 gave JIRA a score of 9 since I am happy with the service it offers. I can easily see the SLA since it gives me visibility. I can pull up the reports I need. I can reach out to our clients using the PR ticket so it is hassle-free for me.
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.
I have not used the technical support from Atlassian. In terms of online help and resources, they are a bit limited thus making it more of a challenge to troubleshoot issues and learn more functionality. There aren't a lot of resources available on the Atlassian site besides developer documents. It would be nice to have a blog or forum where users can get the help they need.
Zendesk is a similar ticketing system that our organization used before JIRA Service Desk. The main drawback of Zendesk was that it can only be used as a cloud service. This means that our company data would be living on the internet at the hands of their security team. Another drawback of this is the price is significantly more expensive rather than hosting it yourself. Zendesk does have some additional features such as commenting on multiple tickets at once that JSD does lack. However, switching to JSD was significantly more cost effective because we have the ability and the infrastructure to host our own ticketing system, something that Zendesk could not provide. Ultimatley switching to JSD saved us money and allows the ability for integration with all of the other Atlassian Suite products that we use on a day to day basis.
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.
