osTicket is an open-source help desk / ticketing platform that can create inquiries online, through email, and through phone calls.
$9
per month
TeamSupport
Score 8.5 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
TeamSupport is customer support software built for B2B software and technology companies. The solution offers ticket management, a customer and contact database, reporting and analytics, multi-channel support, built-in collaboration tools, and many native integrations.
We've only worked with two of the competitors of TeamSupport, Salesforce.com and osTicket, and the differences are staggering.
Salesforce.com can be extremely complex and overly cluttered, where TeamSupport is simple and concise. TeamSupport is not simple in that it is without …
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.
TeamSupport is a great ticketing/help desk platform for small companies. It gets the job done and allows for multiple teams to manage workloads. It is not best for bigger organizations as there are lots of lacking features (mobile app, integrations, robust Jira/Confluence like system). The support for TeamSupport is great too. They usually get in touch with customers quickly when the system is down and they resolve issues quickly as well.
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).
There were other customer support software companies that I looked into at first, however TeamSupport provided exceptional customer service themselves. I paid close attention to how they handled me as a customer to see if they were a company that would understand my desire to give exceptional customer service to my clients and if they had the tools to make the experience easy. Every interaction with them was very positive.
Since we needed TeamSupport's software embedded into our software application to give our users easy access to the support tools, the staff at TeamSupport needed to answer many questions and work with our developers to make this possible. They were always willing to take the extra step to ensure a smooth set up.
As we continue with TeamSupport, I am especially impressed with the sincerity of the CEO, Robert C. Johnson, and his commitment to us so that together we can deliver exceptional customer support.
We would like to see a structure to the ticket numbering system. In a previous system we had a numbering system like this mmddyy-xxxxxx This was very easy to see when a ticket was created based on just it's number. Currently with TeamSupport they assign a random number to tickets that is not very informative without a created date field.
Reports are nice but lack some rollup capabilities that are needed. Any given report can only work against two data tables at max. This is a limitation that we had to create custom contact fields to get around. They store phone, address and base contact info in separate tables. This makes it impossible with a standard system to create a report of all tickets along with the ticket and contact information in one report. The previous system we were on, allowed you to tie as many related data tables together that was needed to create one high level report.
Need Ability to notify external users of ticket activity in regions. So what I mean is we have FAE's in the field that want to know what their customers are asking for their region. They don't want or need a TeamSupport account but want simple e-mails of activity. This has been a lost feature for us going to a new system. I have to create a manual report each week and forward to the people that want this kind of information.
Ticket Automation rules will only run against a ticket one time. I understand why they did this to prevent uncontrolled loops but it would be nice to be able to set a limit that was greater than one. This limitation often causes us to have to write multiple rules to handle certain ticket cases.
We are very likely to renew. We have been using TeamSupport for years and have tested a few other ticketing software solutions. We utilize several project management solutions to date and are always looking for better more efficient ways. Team Support is great at working with us and allows us to report issues well.
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 think some things could be a little more user-friendly: specifically the dashboard. Although it's fantastic and makes life so much nicer, I'd like to have more control on it's customization. I'd like to be able to default what's collapsed and what's expanded...instead of everything expanding by default each time I load it. But the portal offers great tools and guides on workarounds.
TeamSupport's ease of use and the way it benefited our company overall. From cost improvements, ROI, and overall management of team members it gets high marks. We are better able to support our customer base by providing improved support in a more timely fashion. The End User view of IT Support overall has improved just through using this platform in our company.
Data import was the most difficult hurdle for us to get over. The mass import was handled through an Excel spreadsheet. TeamSupport doesn't use Microsoft Office products for the most part so they were relying on Google Docs which has limitations over Excel. Special characters and html in import cells can be a issue with importing. When creating a data export from your current system, special care needs to be taken so that the data is able to be processed into TeamSupport without issues.
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.
TeamSupport is a much more modern, intuitive and user-friendly version of NetSuite with many additional bells and whistles. NetSuite has a business only facade with a rather clunky interface and system. TeamSupport compares favorably and meets business needs while being a much more advanced and modern solution.
TS keeps adding new features without making sure the program is reliable as-is. The program is frequently offline which makes for significant frustration on my part
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.
