Ask HN: Support ticketing system | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Support ticketing system

18 pointsjacquesm22 comments

Hello HN'ers,

I'm in the market for a new support ticketing system.

So far we've been using a todo list on steroids, and it has served us well, but we need more features that this one does not contain, so the time has come to upgrade.

The biggest missing feature is good email integration, so whatever will replace this should at least do that well, furthermore we have a ton of stuff on the go, development in several branches with a beta environment for each of them.

What kind of ticketing system would you recommend ?

Which ones would you definitely stay away from ?

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Tender or zendesk are both great products, and they each have different use cases. We use both of them for our support ticketing for engineyard. We use tender for our community support/forum/faq type of stuff d we use zendesk for our paid 24/7 support needs.

Both of these platforms have great API's and good email integration and they are both highly recommended.

Trac is the best I've used so far. It is extensible, and yet the out-of-the-box setup is very useful on its own.

If there is one I would absolutely stay away from, it would be Remedy (from BMC software). Remedy, even after all these versions, has one of the worst interfaces I have ever used, and has a lot of illogical limitations.

Had to deal with Remedy for about a year and a half at a previous job. It was extensively customized for our needs, but it was still slow, annoying, unintuitive, and not very helpful. I would never wish the pain of Remedy on anyone.

I've used Basecamp, Trac and Bugzilla. All are easy to use (and we've had some very non-technical users on them). My favorite though was trac, very easy to use, easy to set roadmaps and milestones. The bonus with bugzilla is that its more flexible (we're managing several development initiatives simultaneously). Basecamp is inexpensive, but I didn't find it as useful in managing bugs and support tickets (it was very useful in managing a grant application process though).

http://www.bugzilla.org/ http://trac.edgewall.org/

Personally, I don't think that the mode matters as much as consistency in method. I've successfully managed support tickets for smaller projects on a series of google doc spreadsheets without any problems. It makes for easier sharing with the client as well.

Bugzilla might fit your needs best out of the three I know about. Good luck!

It looks like you're approaching the question from a project/client point of view; I think the OP meant from a product/user point of view.

ie. user purchases your product, has problem/question, emails support@example.com and the support ticketing system picks up the email, autoresponds, etc.

I think what you're talking about is a bit different... although please do correct me if I'm wrong.

I've never personally used it, but I've heard really good things about ZenDesk (http://www.zendesk.com/).

We use ZenDesk, and it's been fantastic. Their API is also first-class, which helped us integrate it more cleanly with our app.

I've used zendesk and it's pretty awesome. They've made some pretty serious billing mistakes with my account though, and they've been experiencing some growing pains (corrupt database, site unavailability), so I'm not sure if I can wholeheartedly recommend them. The tool itself is fantastic.

The only major one that I've had passing experience with is Kayako SupportSuite (http://www.kayako.com/solutions/supportsuite/). I don't know how it stacks up against competitive products.

I believe it is PHP-based as well, if that matters.

The price is pretty good though - ~$500 for an 'owned' license (http://www.kayako.com/purchasing/pricing.php).

All that said, I'm interested to see what other options people suggest.

From experience, Kayako is a disaster. Horrendous support and a platform that has had only minor upgrades for several years make it an unwise choice.

Perhaps you're right. I don't particularly know that it's the best tool, but the OP could always try it out for themselves:

http://www.kayako.com/trial/license.php

http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/

We've had good results with FogBugz. We are a group of eight developers and user support staff in a company of 300, and it's the right size for us. We have a bit under 15,000 cases in the system, going back to June 2006, so I can't say we're stressing the system. I don't know how it would scale.

I used Trac briefly about four years ago and liked it, but it was a bit of a bear to install. On the other hand, you spend the majority of your time using a system, not installing it. Once installed it was fine. I liked the front-end to Subversion a lot, and the integrated wiki was a huge plus. It's written in Python, but there was a time when the Ruby developers used it, although they moved to Redmine a while ago.

I hear good things about Redmine. Sounds like Trac, but improved. I'm planning on experimenting with it.

We used Basecamp a couple of years ago to plan a major overhaul of our flagship web site, and it was a good fit. But we maintain the web site with FogBugz, which we feel is a better fit for development and maintenance as opposed to project planning.

I would no longer choose to work with any sort of tracking system that didn't have an integrated wiki that gave you easy cross-linking between wiki pages and cases or tickets.

We run redmine for issue and code tracking. I like it but the support community working on it is fairly small and releases are not too frequent.

http://www.redmine.org/

So do we. The interface isn't the greatest, but it is configurable enough (on screen, no coding required) to cover just about anything. And if for some reason it doesn't do what you need, and you can't configure it to do so, it's written in rails so diving in is no trouble at all.

We have been using Zendesk for over a year and absolutely love it. Highly configurable, very easy to use and fantastic email integration. Highly recommended.

Jira works for this pretty well. It's not free, but it's got good integration points, and easily customizable workflows.

I've heard good things about TenderApp - http://tenderapp.com/

No one has mentioned it, but sifter looks like a great app (www.sifterapp.com). I tried it for a project I was working on, mostly because I was curious about the interface. It was much more than we needed, but could be a great option for you.

We just integrated zendesk into django using an app called django_zendesk, so far so good.

The biggest missing feature is good email integration

I would suggest looking at RT: Request Tracker. It has excellent support for creating and managing tickets with email.

We've been using Hesk and I'm perfectly happy with it.

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