osTicket is an open-source help desk / ticketing platform that can create inquiries online, through email, and through phone calls.
$9
per month
UserVoice
Score 9.5 out of 10
N/A
UserVoice collects and organizes feedback from multiple sources to provide a clear, actionable view of user feedback for product teams. With a customizable feedback portal, in-app widget, and direct integrations with your email client, CRM or support tool, it’s easy for your customers and internal team members to share feedback at anytime. The UserVoice platform allows you to manage all this feedback in a single view, analyze your data to make product decisions based on customer…
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.
UserVoice can be an affordable and powerful tool to start engaging customers and employees. It can help manage the entire feedback loop process. But your product management and development teams still need to do their jobs. Remember to have a response SLA in place and ownership for prioritizing and responding to the feedback.
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).
User interface is very simple. Learning the product and teaching the team how to use the product took hardly any time at all.
Gives visibility into what others are logging. We are able to append 'votes' to certain ideas, rather than having to create an existing idea from scratch.
Reporting. Tags allow to easily filter through ideas for roadmap planning.
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.
Have clear goals and owners established before you start using any tool like this. Very important to get accounts and rights setup so that there's no lag time in customer response once things go live. Make sure IT is involved if you plan to use the Single-Sign On (SSO) or any of the access control tools.
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.
I like the ease of integration into web and mobile apps for UserVoice. It's also a comprehensive bug reporting, user feedback, and knowledge base tool.
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.
