this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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Ticketing system alternative to osTicket (alien.top)
submitted 10 months ago by Individual-Judge-243@alien.top to c/main@selfhosted.forum
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I am looking for an alternative to osTicket, which I currently use, and am hoping to call on the community's wisdom to steer me in the right direction. Please do share your recommendations and experiences. I was looking at Zammad quite seriously, but they do not have a system for collaborators that would work for me, and are resistant to the idea (rep kept refering to it as 'the collaborator mess', and ballpark pricing for developing an add-in seemed to be intended to make me go away).

A couple of requirements:

  • Some of my clients rely heavily on the 'collaborators' functionality on osTicket. I would require the ability to have multiple users on a ticket.
  • Some of my clients have office managers or IT departments/staff that would need 'manager level' access to see and respond to all of the tickets for thier company only.
  • I would like a polished, client facing portal for user ticket submission and for users/managers to track tocket progress.
  • Most of our tickets are currently submitted via email, so the ability to do so is a requirement, though I would prefer to move to a portal-type submission system, so tha ability to do that is required as well.
  • I am hoping to find a white label solution.
  • I am hoping to find an open source solution.
  • I am hoping to find a solution that has a process for feature requests, and if possible, some system for funding particular feature development for things that I might need later.
  • I am hoping to find something that is pretty to look at, since that seems to impress clients at least as much as function.
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[–] bobsbuttplug@alien.top 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

https://bestpractical.com/request-tracker

RT can do all this an more. It's written in modular perl so it's super easy to customize if you need to add to it. 5.0 is out and i've not messed with it, but it's a major development it looks like. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnEho2AemX0

I've deployed RT and paid them for support before, it's amazing what 10k a year gets you for support an custom work. Great company.

[–] Individual-Judge-243@alien.top 1 points 10 months ago

I am digging into RT. It looks very promising. Thank you!

[–] Daklyrus@alien.top 1 points 10 months ago

Request Tracker that’s what we are using. With some know how highly customizable and very solid.

[–] unofficialtech@alien.top 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Zammad may tick most of the boxes, though I'm not intimiately familiar with osTickets collaborator fuction. Zammad if others are on To/CC lines then when you "reply all" they stick with the ticket. THough in my install I see that it's not easy to see who's on a ticket. I'd be happy to let you be-bop around my home install sometime as a demo.

It has organizations and they can be selectively shared. Though, I think it's "all users can see all tickets within organization" or "all users can only see their tickets". Not a "users can see theirs, managers only can see organization".

It's a very polished interface, includes SSO integrations, and can be white labeled.

Has email scraping, form submission, and API/webhooks, and some workflow automation funciton.

​

It also has good agent-side support to have standardized signatures, response templates, and visibility on activity and some OK reporting.

[–] maevian@alien.top 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Yeah zammad is way better as it should be for it’s price

[–] unofficialtech@alien.top 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

For its price?

[–] maevian@alien.top 1 points 10 months ago

The price of zero

[–] Individual-Judge-243@alien.top 1 points 10 months ago

install I see that it's not easy to see who's on a ticket. I'd be happy to let you be-bop around my home install sometime as a demo.

Thanks for the suggestion and for the offer to poke around. We have demo'd Zammad pretty thoroughly and I have spoken with the developers at length about our needs. Unfortunately they exist under some pretty restrictive EU privacy regulations which would make collaboration unweildy (at least as our clients expect it), and the cost of building a patch for us was very prohibitive. They kept refering to what we were asking for as "that collaborator mess", and there was clearly little interest in including collaboration the way our clients use it.

Too bad, because it is a beautiful platform, and it has some increadible funtionality. Just won't work for us though.

They did mention that they are working on 'manager' level users (see thier own tickets and tickets for thier company, but not others).