Help Scout vs. osTicket

Small businesses that want a conversational type of customer support experience. Nothing wrong with support tickets, but it does make you feel like a number. Also, we needed to get up and running quickly so the "inbox" feel of the dashboard was already familiar with the team so they could adopt the new software quickly.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Extremely simple to use and understand as a user - treats communications like human beings and provides a much more personal feel to communication (as opposed to making people feel like numbers).
• The email newsletter.
• They are super responsive. They are pretty rad and transparent: if something goes wrong on their end they are not afraid of admitting fault. Which leads me to trust them because I can believe them. I know that tells you very little about the product, but as leadership, that's something that I really need
• Help Scout does exactly what it needs to (facilitate organized, efficient conversations between customers and support people) without getting in the way.

Incentivized

• Web based, so available from any web browser
• Free - no cost to the organization to buy
• Runs on linux - solid, secure, free

Incentivized

• It is a bit slow sometimes, but not very often.
• I've noticed more network errors with their server in the past year.
• Small annoyance - they use a lot of lightbox popups and if you click outside the box all of your work is lost.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

We are receiving feedback from the organizational level that they may want us to transition to a different solution to provide consistency across the company.

Incentivized

It does well what I was looking for on a ticketing tool

Help Scout is a great solution for support teams. There are many articles and webinars to help you learn how to use Help Scout. There are also many features to help make your workflows easier and more efficient. I would readily recommend Help Scout to any small or medium-growing support teams.

Incentivized

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.

Being open-source it is community supported. There is a hosted version that provides better support. Honestly, I have not really needed support

Incentivized

Grant all prerequisites are met, before installing to avoid any issue during the installation

This is tricky because there's helpdesk apps and chat apps (now Help Scout offers both). We first used just an email inbox (of course not scalable but we were very small), then we turned to Freshdesk, which was painful to use. It had some cool features but in general it was ugly, slow, using the interface was very non-intuitive and the prioritization was hard. I have to say this was more than a year ago, so probably they have changed, but anyway. Zendesk is very expensive considering the features are almost the same AND the chat app needs to be paid separately. As chat we used Tawk.to, it was functional but metrics were not that good and it was buggy at times. Comparing Help Scout with their competitors, at least for us, made it a no-brainer to hire them. The price was very attractive considering the amount of features, the great support and the quality of the app. I don't regret my decision at all because Help Scout, unlike other helpdesk companies, tries to have their app "smart" and not a big, corporate thing piled with features. It does what it needs, it's easy to use and helps you achieve your goals regarding support for your customers.

Incentivized

This company wanted to first explore how a ticketing/support system could benefit their organization before investing [in] a solution. Firstly osTicket is open source and doesn't have a license fee and secondly, because of [its] simplicity, it is quick to implement in the organization. These were the key 2 drivers to choose osTicket. Of course, there are trial versions of the other products available but the implementation time needed is longer since their functionality suite is larger than what osTicket offers. Those extra features aren't needed (yet) so that is the third and final reason why osTicket was chosen and probably will stay until the need for more functionality arises.

Incentivized

• We are able to retain our customer base due to the outstanding customer service our Customer Experience department provides. Without an organized tool like Help Scout, this would not be possible. We pride ourselves in quick response times to customers and are able to do so by effectively routing tickets to the right agents.

Incentivized

• Works well as a centralized support system for the businesses IT.
• The support team can evaluate all tickets that come in and easily evaluate priority, details, etc.
• If the escalated development team can be limited to their assignments only allowing them to retain focus.

Incentivized