osTicket

What osTicket does

osTicket is a long-running open source support ticket system that is still actively maintained. It turns email, web form submissions and phone calls logged by agents into tickets, and sends each one to a department and an agent or team. On the web form, customers choose a help topic, which sends the request to the right department and can show its own custom form.

Ticket filters inspect incoming tickets and can route, assign, reject or auto-reply to them. SLA plans set response deadlines and mark tickets as overdue, with alerts and escalation. Agents can assign, transfer and refer tickets, split work into tasks, and avoid collisions through ticket locking. Customers can check their tickets in a portal and browse a knowledge base of FAQs.

Plugins and customization

Custom fields, forms, lists and queues let you adapt osTicket to your process without changing code. Authentication and storage options come as core plugins from a separate repository: an audit log, two-factor authentication, LDAP and Active Directory, OAuth2, CAS, password policies, and filesystem or S3 attachment storage. They are installed as PHAR files in the plugin folder.

The open source edition has no feature tiers. osTicket’s features page states that there are no feature matrices: every installation gets the full feature set.

Self-hosting osTicket

osTicket needs PHP with the mysqli extension and MySQL 5.5 or later, running on Apache or IIS. The download page lists PHP 8.2 to 8.4, with 8.4 recommended, and a set of recommended extensions such as gd, imap, intl, mbstring, OPcache and APCu. You can install from the release package with its web installer, or from a Git clone with the manage.php deploy command. Upgrades are supported from version 1.6-rc1 onward. The README does not mention an official Docker image.

Because it is plain PHP and MySQL, osTicket runs on most web hosting plans and small virtual servers.

Hosted version

Enhancesoft, the company behind osTicket, offers a cloud-hosted version through its SupportSystem service, with a 30-day free trial and no free plan. It also sells commercial support for self-hosted installations.

Limitations

osTicket has no live chat widget and no social messaging channels, so it is an email and web form help desk. The interface and architecture are older than those of newer projects. Single sign-on, two-factor authentication and external storage need plugins, and the hosted service is sold as a separate brand.

Who it suits

osTicket suits organizations that want a dependable email and web form ticket system on standard PHP hosting, with routing by help topic and department and no paid tiers. It is common for small and mid-sized support teams and for internal IT help desks. If you need chat or messaging channels, look at Zammad or Chatwoot.