Great software for all levels of expertise; spend and do no work, or save and customize as far as your mind can innovate!
December 14, 2018
Great software for all levels of expertise; spend and do no work, or save and customize as far as your mind can innovate!
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with osTicket
osTicket is being used at our institution as a Research Request Ticketing System. While we began with a hosted subscription, we quickly migrated to the open source version since we realized the SaaS version would prevent us from customizing to the extent we envisioned. We have built this ticketing technology to assign, track, manage and process all institutional data requests that stem from our division of the institution. The entire institution uses the system, however our department develops the technology in a way that presents a tracking system for data needs.
- In the open source version of this software, you can essentially customize the product in endless ways while you're saving capital by not having this hosted for you.
- The fact that this company has created an OS version and made it available to eager developers says a lot about the company. It says that they recognize businesses' need to customize software and allow them the ability to do so.
- osTicket's community forum is constantly evolving with new ideas and from osTicket releases. This means that almost every idea that comes to you as a user, as far as improvements, ends up being heard.
- osTicket's hosted version is expensive and customization is kind of hard to come by. So, unless you have programming-proficient developers on hand (we do!) you will need to accept the options that you are paying for.
- osTicket's community forum has had some bugs recently as they have rolled out a new platform for it. For people who rely on the community forum extensively, this is a set back. Again, this is more of an issue for those using open source and not the SaaS version.
- 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.
It's important to note that we went back and forth between keeping a hosted subscription to osTicket and jumping ship into our own world of osTicket development, since even these two internal products can be compared. We did look at Zendesk but that was only after we decided to forge our own development. Zendesk did not have an open source version we could use (at the time).