Ask HN: Support SaaS | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Support SaaS

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hey,

im looking for some tool to handle support (tickets, email, live, KB etc) for my saas. whats everyone using or recommending? any one on HN run one?

grateful for suggestions.

have an awesome weekend!

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We've used https://www.enchant.com/ for about a decade for email support .. it's great, does exactly what is is supposed to and doesn't add a bunch of 'cruft' on top. Had to check our volume, currently over 40,000 tickets in that time.

They do live chat too but we've never used that.

thank you!

For a long time when we didn't have much support volume we just used a google group that anyone doing tickets could access. This has the nice upside of being free.

We've used Teamwork Desk for the past few years and have been decently satisifed with it. It can be a little clunky at times and the help site feature has had some weird downtime, but for the most part it handles our small support workloads fine.

will check it out, thank you for the suggestion

We’ve been using helpscout for the last 6 years, it’s good but we will be migrating to another service (to be defined) soon.

Reasons:

- they are expensive, and have announced a price increase next august

- they do not offer options to host data in europe

- they have no web ui for customers to track all their requests (helpscout is mail-only)

thank you for the information, specially the euro thing.

We went through about five different platforms for our SaaS (EmailOctopus) before settling on Help Scout. It’s excellent.

thanks. your saas is on my list of signing up to later by the way :)

FreeScout is awesome and self hosted. Been using it for over a year and have been super happy.

Protip: use Gmail SMTP for ultimate deliverability. I personally have a local Postfix forwarding to Gmail. Works great because it keeps a queue and retries if there’s a problem. I found this solution more reliable.

You need to be careful using Google SMTP for business apps. It’s very easy to get your domain on spam lists.

I’d recommend moving to something like Mailgun or whatever as volume increases

great tip. dont think i wanna self host though. will see, not decided yet.

Zammad (open source and self-hosted) for email tickets.

nice, thanks!

We use Zendesk for tickets and email. Slack connect for live. Don't really have a KB, just a forum (nodebb) and docs (jekyll + asciidoc).

thank you

FreshDesk is pretty solid. Though their live chat is a bit weak. Olark is better (I worked there so I’m biased.)

Freshworks has a startup plan as well.

thank you, startup plan is always welcome!

osTicket? Open-source and both self-hosted and cloud versions available.

I second this - but I’m biased! Thanks @9woc

thank you

I have heard great things about Zoho helpdesk ticketing system.

ah yes, of course. thanks for the reminder!

- Chatwoot - GitLab service desk - HubDesk.io

nice ones, thanks

We use HelpScout

thanks!

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