osTicket is an open-source help desk / ticketing platform that can create inquiries online, through email, and through phone calls.
$9
per month
Soffront CRM
Score 7.0 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Soffront offers Soffront CRM Software for Sales, Marketing and Service, which the vendor says is a comprehensive, yet user-friendly platform. All submitted, assigned and resolved cases are tracked within a customizable dashboard. Customer support ticket submissions are automatically routed to the most knowledgeable reps, ensuring the best support. Service Level Agreement (or SLA) Alerts make sure support never falls below committed levels of service. According to the vendor, the product…
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.
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).
The email marketing platform is wonderful. It allows for tracking and you can do AB testing with it as well.
Landing page and form placement with other companies have also been easy. Regardless of website or landing page that you use the forms integrate and you get an email notification whenever a new lead is added to the database.
The overall layout of the CRM is also nice to use. You can open up different tabs with information on and then go back to a previous tab without having to use the browser controls. It makes navigating and comparing information very easy to do.
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.
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.
Soffront performs many of the same functions as both of these providers but it offers a great deal more all in one place. I do not have to log into different programs or switch programs to get the information that I need. This has greatly increased efficiency. The pricing for Soffront is also better when you add in the other features that it comes with, in fact it saved me money when I switched.
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.
The software has been positive for especially on the email marketing side. I have seen about a 23% increase in revenue and new contacts by using the email marketing feature.
The landing page and form integration has averaged me about 20 new leads a month for my business which is plenty to keep us busy and on track for growth of the business.
