Item: osTicket
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with osTicket

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

OsTicket is used by our IT Services area to provide support for our college departments and offices. It is our primary support system for service request ticketing, help topics, and ticket tracking. Utilized alone by over 1500 faculty, staff, paid students /researchers (RA, TA, GA, TF, etc.). We really like osTicket because it's easy to use for our end users, it's open source, it's free (without limiting any features), and we can host it internally. I would recommend osTicket to any small to medium sized organization that wants a simple to use support system that's both fully featured and completely free.

Pros and Cons

Pros

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).

Cons

Our biggest issue with osTicket is that ticket analytics is a little basic. It would be nice if there was some expanded statistics metrics like some of the other paid systems.
A minor complaint would be the basic user interface. When compared to other support systems it looks a little dated. However, I still prefer a solid easy to use and reliable system over a fancy interface.
Another minor complaint is the Framework, osTicket is built on PHP. While PHP is still very popular and widely developed for. There are some in the osTicket community that would like to see osTicket move to something more modern. Personally, I prefer osTicket's reliability over the implementation of the newest web programming languages.

Return on Investment

osTicket has greatly increased our end-user satisfaction. We have seen increased service response times and better tracking of support agents.

Alternatives Considered

Zendesk

While osTicket doesn't offer anywhere near the amount of features that Zendesk provides. OsTicket is completely free and doesn't have a monthly or per agent cost. Also, Zendesk doesn't offer any self-hosting options as opposed to osTicket which is completely open source and can be hosted anywhere.

Likelihood to Recommend

osTicket is very well suited for small to medium environments where the budget might be tight or a complex system isn't desired. The basic pillars of osTicket being that it is simple, lightweight, reliable, open source, and best of all free really make osTicket a great alternative to higher-cost customer support systems.

While osTicket does have shortfalls which would be bad for some environments—like not offering social media integration, lacking a flashy user interface, no detailed analytics (satisfaction, performance, etc.), no live chat/messaging, and any detailed customization requires PHP knowledge—osTicket is a great free and simple support system without the extra features and costs the alternatives offer.

osTicket Feature Ratings

Comments

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osTicket, a great open source support ticketing system