
Ask HN: Support ticketing system - jacquesm
Hello HN'ers,<p>I'm in the market for a new support ticketing system.<p>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.<p>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.<p>What kind of ticketing system would you recommend ?<p>Which ones would you definitely stay away from ?
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ezmobius
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.

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makecheck
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.

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warfangle
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.

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joeythibault
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!

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jaddison
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.

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

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plusbryan
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.

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jaddison
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.

~~~
plusbryan
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.

~~~
jaddison
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>

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pmikal
<http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/>

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andrewl
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.

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johnnyg
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/>

~~~
pospischil
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.

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mrchucho
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.

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

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

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pospischil
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.

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merrick33
We just integrated zendesk into django using an app called django_zendesk, so
far so good.

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bayareaguy
_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.

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

