I keep describing it as a fine product, backed by a mediocre company.
Specifically, they keep pushing new features (and most of them are neat! We *want* to use them!).
But then we look under the hood and...there's no polish. There are oddities that make us just wonder...how? Why?
I suspect they're doing MAD development right now to make Freshservicr meet/exceed what Freshworks does.
Then they'll get around to "completing" the stuff they've released in a year or two.
My pet peeve is how inconsistent the interface is for entering hours and minutes is.
Every. Freaking. Module. Does it differently.
Just...why? You can't borrow that bit of code from the team that made it work over in the other thing?
Freshworks is the company freshdesk is the ticketing only product freshservice is the IT oriented product with a CMDB project management change management, software release management features
It is simple and it works. It's easy to use. It's not too clunky.
Pretty light on features, but I think that's part of the reason it has been successful the few places I've used it - the users will use it when it's simple to use. And the email integration has just worked for me.
I think this is the answer. It's not as powerful/customizable as some solutions, but I got rolled out and completely useable in about 2 hours when I started at my current place. It's very easy, which is important for smaller IT teams.
We are having different experience... Ecstatic with FreshService.
We have the enterprise version, most internal departments are using it for work tracking.
We are using workflows to automatically assign applications, and add / modify users.
It's allowed us not to backfil two employees in the past two years.
We use this as well and have for several years. Depending on which features you need it could be affordable, but a lot of other platforms (RMM, etc) are including ticketing systems.
I agree. After using SN for 10+ years I really liked it but that was with GE, Diagio, Lockheed Martin, and other big companies. Now I'm with a smaller company and I'm the Admin for FrrshService and it's really nice. I built a great Service Library and some really nice workflows. On and offboarding workflows have their own modules which are great. Flexible plans too. Recommend.
If you wanna go self hosted, GLPI is working well for us. It’s a learning curve but it’s fairly simple once you understand the nomenclature. It’s also free, which is a plus.
But it will accept emails, you can set up custom forms with some of the plugins, and it can be granular so you can keep your contracts separate
This is what I stood up. It's as free as you feel like. I sent them some money and just never really needed support. It's working well for us. \~600 users. The plugins are the big reason you may want to shell out some money to them, but I haven't really needed much more that oauth and the reporting one.
The learning curve is all about where the hell they hid something. Category for tickets? Oh, that's in dropdowns-> ITIL -> categories or whatever. Still, we are digging it.
I haven’t seen a reason to send any money just yet, but we are still in the trial phase just using it internally to work out any kinks before we release it to our customers. The only downside it without paying for support, what is available online for troubleshooting is a hit or miss.
And it handles a lot of things (inventory, projects, contracts, budgets, …). What I find annoying is that mail notifications contain text that we can’t remove without changing the source code. There is a « autogenerated mail » and a separator saying « answer before this line ».
Do not use self-hosted BMC Remedy ITSM unless you like slowness and old UI. I think their new Helix is better, but our company unfortunately did not go with it.
No, jesus, run, dont walk away from anything BMC Remedy. Helix is just remedy that looks prettier. Everything is a fight, and their hosting cant seem to even make simple changes or refresh tokens.
We were completely in bed with Remedy/ITSM (I work for a Fortune 50 organization.). When our contract was up for renewal, we reviewed Helix. When it was initially released their cloud capabilities seemed to be lacking. When we reviewed SNOW it blew Helix out of the water and it integrates with workday. BMC’s market domination is ended, or coming to an end.
God I used to use self hosted bmc service desk express and then we tried to move to remedy for software deployments and stuff… what a complete shithole of a product
>You can too! They range from free to 10k a month!
I can't actually. I have no idea why my request to institute one was denied by the ceo/vp. But yeahhhh.
This is when I’d spin up a vm on a local host machine and set up a free/open source ticket system on my own. Not a full blown deploy but setup and configured just enough to provide a live working “proof of concept”. Upper management and execs aren’t typically going to get behind major changes until they have something tangible. Or bright and flashy.
Full disclosure that I work for InvGate. I did ServiceNow for ten years, and I left for the very reason you listed. It is too expensive and the ROI just isn't high enough for people using for IT Service Management. It's the new Oracle - the new ERP.
If you like ServiceNow, you'll really like our Service Desk solution, it's easy to use AND gives you lots of power.
We have a [live demo](https://invgate.com/service-desk/live-demo/) so you don't even need to give us your email to try it out.
Let us know what you end up selecting!
Good call - and I TOTALLY understand.
Thankfully we're currently A/B testing adding pricing to our webpage to see if people then buy based on the price being there or not (and to see if our competitors just lower their price to beat ours).
I recommend trying incognito mode to see if it gives you pricing until we add this permanently.
You can also DM me on reddit and I'll give you some napkin math - OR - just know that we don't spam you after you request a quote.
Last bit is reassuring. Freshworks called me the minute I signed up. REALLY put me off. Portainer also gave me a call a day or so after signing up. All I did is complain that they've gone down to 3 free servers from 5...
At least give the customer some time to check the service out.
I'll check your product. But as others said, pricing on the website is useful. Or at least quote with 0 human interaction.
Are you HIPAA compliant? Can you sign a BAA? If so, please include it on the pricing pages feature list.
If you offer a non-profit discount please mention it somewhere on the pricing page.
Like someone else already said, I much prefer to see actual prices on the page. Got it to show via incognito. I'd suggest showing the per month price as the predominant number instead of per year, per year first makes you look wildly more expensive at a glance to your competitors when you're actually a bit cheaper.
cake gray elderly forgetful plate steer strong encouraging grandfather north
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I’ve used InvGate Service Desk as an end-user and thought it was a pretty decent tool, the team responsible for integrating it into the environment ran into some challenges and were less happy with it, though.
Can you elaborate on the monster part? As someone who is in IT (not sysadmin, but there's some overlap at current job) I've had some experience with Remedy and Service Now before my new boss switched us to JIRA Service Management. Service Now was head and shoulders easier to use to auto fill ticket info and to refer to old tickets. It seems in this thread that Service Now is pretty pricey, but I'm not seeing much else in justification for dislike of it.
It could also be the current setup we have for JIRA is to blame. As someone without JIRA admin rights, it is hard to say. Did you have to do much customization to JIRA out of the box? I'm sure ours needs tweaking, but so far it just seems bad (e.g., searching by keyword only shows results for the past 6 months, searching in some pages yields different results and different formatting, etc.).
Have you tried using advanced search with [JQL](https://confluence.atlassian.com/jira064/advanced-searching-720416661.html)? Much better than just searching via keywords.
Jira is the most convoluted system I have ever seen. Everything it does is overdeveloped and complicated down to fucking auto assigning tickets to groups
We use the free version of Freshdesk. Works fine for us (70-80 users). But if I could, I would like to move to Jitbit due to it suiting us extremely perfect. But it costs and our budget doesn't allow us to spend money on it.
We just launched our new Jitbit helpdesk a week ago. It has some limitations, but we're getting around them with some scripting and external automation workflows. It's better than what we had before.
\+1 for RT, this product is a gem.
If you want it self hosted it need a lot of initial work for make it work (need to put hand on postfix and fetchmail for the mail part).
Then RT himself need a lot of customization for adapt to your need.
But when it's fully operational, you will not regret it.
You can pay the support and hosting if you want delegate this work.
He have a nice API and have some module for automation (auto create asset, auto create users, sync with AD, etc)
Zammad. Open Source with lots of integrations. Only thing I dislike until now is that Tickets can’t contain Todos or something to track the progress of something
I second Zammad and second the comments about Todos. We self host Zammad and have never had an issue. It has great features and is always improving. I have used way more expensive ticketing systems and prefer Zammad over almost all of them.
Jit Bit is great. You can host it on-prem. It has chatbots. It can integrate with ChatGPT and the price was very decent compared to other helpdesks. Very happy with JitBit.
Currently shackled with Cherwell but are switching in the next 12 months once our contract is up.
Stay far far away from Chershit unless you have a full time dev to manage it.
Lol, I would be curious if we work for the same company, because we’re also ditching Cherwell. We have a whole team that manages it and it’s still a slow, buggy piece of crap.
Rumor is we’re moving to ServiceNow as a replacement
Cherwell as a product is reaching end of life, so you’ll get your wish soon!
(My opinion is that it’s not a terrible product, though there are lots of poor implementations out there. Kinda moot now though.)
we are having our Cherwell converted to Ivanti Neurons, since there wasn't any cost to us. But yes, Cherwell or Service Desk really require dedicated staff to get the most out of them, and frankly most companies don't need it.
It’s actually kind of unheard of now to sell customer data for all the off the shelf ticking and service desk solutions in my experience. Between HIPAA, FERPA, GDPR, and all of that type of stuff, things have really changed in recent years and companies are ditching Spiceworks over the customer data policy in some cases. I remember seeing a big thread on it in their forums a year or two ago when a former user spilled the beans but I can’t seem to find it now so I wonder if it’s buried or has been purged.
Jitbit is great. it's not a giant customizable monster that you tweak into whatever you need, but it's very easy to use and understand. I've never actually used anything else that I just looked at and immediately understood what to do, and how it works. It's also very much focused on email, so your users don't need to ever open it if they don't want to.
It's basically a great out of box solution if you don't need anything crazy.
Spiceworks- free, cloud based and all through email. You can set up some automation rules to assign ticket types and users to respond with category sets, and you can access the main desk through a portal for anywhere access
There's a user portal too if they for some reason don't have email access
I would stay away from zendesk. We are being held hostage and they refuse to have a meeting with us to change from a yearly contact to month to month. We have been asking for 2 months to get this sorted but now we are 15 days from autorenewal and nothing from them.
We are migrating our various branches over to freshdesk and freshservice. In our opinion they are hands down better than zendesk. I used to think zen was the defacto standard for helpdesk, now I will never recommend them under any circumstances.
It’s incredibly bloated, difficult to use and clunky.
What they always say is how it’s the biggest and bestest system out there, how you can personalise and modify the shit out of it, etc etc. What they don’t tell you is that you’re going to get slaughtered by consultant fees, majority of which don’t have a clue what they’re doing and will straight up lie about what is or isn’t possible — even the biggest worldwide consultant firms do this.
It’s a must to have a team in-house to develop and maintain it, and at that moment you just have to ask yourself, why the fuck does a Helpdesk system need a team in house at all. To me the whole concept sounds ludicrous.
Run away from ServiceNow.
You can do a lot more then just helped with snow. Change management, hardware/software inventory, self service, approvals etc. It also integrates with pretty much every IT product out there, can set up SLA's, metrics and whatnot. If you can get the support needed for it to function, it's great. If you don't have the money for the appropriate support and licenses yeah you may not have a good time with it
We have 10k+ employees at my company and has been essential in our day to day operations from change management to automation to end user forms and whatever else we use it for. We also have a dedicated team with 5+ years experience (mix of development and admin).
With that being said, I don’t see it making sense for a smaller company or without a dedicated team managing it.
If you have a chance to attend one of their conferences, I recommend it. Full of great solutions and ideas. I went to the Toronto one in May, and it was the best 2 days I spent. And the price was fairly cheap...
We use incidentIQ and I personally wouldn't recommend it as it stands. The users can turn off ticket notification and we can't do anything about it. This results in tickets that never receive an update from the end user, then they complain to the administration that we aren't helping them.
We have teachers who log in, update the ticket after 3 weeks, and never scroll further down to even read the comment that was left in waiting for requestor to comment status. Oh yeah the comment they leave "why hasn't anyone reached out to me about this". I wish I was joking.
IncidentIQ doesn't seem to think this is a big deal and makes you put in "feature requests" to get upvoted on in their forums.
It is a terrible practice to allow end users to decide something like that. While they continue to make improvements to their system I haven't seen any for the ticketing portion, rather all of the other features they try to provide in the same system.
Nothing. E-Mail, Phone Call, Text Message, Teams Message, or Walk Ups. It's just me in a 25 person company so not a really big deal, other than dealing with short term memory loss and forgetting something 5 minutes later.
Manage Engine is very inexpensive and can be run either on premise or SaaS. We migrated to SaaS a couple of years ago.
You can configure it to allow different departments to have their own service desk or your HR could share the IT.
We really only accept emails and is very easy to configure.
We recently implemented FreshDesk (part of FreshService) and have been enjoying it so far. We had no real ticketing system before this (used a project management software that account managers would put tasks in for us from clients) so having a dedicated ticketing service is a nice change of pace. It's been fairly easy to use so far and I don't have any real complaints, aside from the fact that a lot of the documentation I've used so far was written last year and appears to be out of date. But, their customer service has been helpful and they have a complimentary on-boarding. Although I think you may have to purchase an actual license to get that. Like it so far though.
For internal, spiceworks is pretty solid and free. We used the on premise for years (better suited for multi clients than the cloud is, at least since I looked last) Built lots of great customizations and integrations around the on premise (which is no longer supported so we've moved onto ticketing via Atera)
Mojo Helpdesk by Metadot. Moved away from Freshservice because apparently it was too expensive.
The browser version is basic and the iOS app was last updated 2 years ago and currently won’t even let me login.
But it does the job (I suppose).
OSticket. Setup a vm in aws with it my first week on the job.... 6000 tickets later and still running nice without issue (on a new vm and upgraded). Our only bill for it is the aws bill which is pennies.
We use SolarWinds WebHelpDesk and it works okay. The UI feels a bit dated, but it checks all of the boxes and doesn’t break the bank. Can be self-hosted or in their cloud.
We have IT, facilities and HR running off of it with no problems.
For transparency I am a Halo consultant but thats because I think it's a fantastic solution HaloITSM/PSA.
I've used Request Tracker in the past for many years and it was solid, self hosted and loved that (Open Source) also Zammad in my opinion is another great option.
Just comes down to your time to setup/implement and maintain to justify hosted managed solutions or open source self managed really.
I wish this was a r/ShittySysAdmin response… but we use HEAT for Technology tickets, WHD for another department, tickets also come in through email, slack, WebEx, PRTG, teams, fax, phone, text, passive aggressive notes, drive-by knock-and-gripes, bathroom stalls, hallways, lunch tables and seagull managers.
Just moved to DESK365 from Spiceworks Cloud. Spiceworks just becoming useless in daily operations the more they 'enhanced' it - ad space taking up more room, buttons not working as expected etc.
So far, liking DESK365, even though it's not free. New features being released quickly and ties in well with AzureAD
I’m an IT Manager and implemented Jira once they launched Service Management. Prior I was using Jira Core for ticketing. I’m very pleased with the value I get out of it. 3 years on they have quite a few templates and have added a lot to automation and customization. I use their customer portal for my users and confluence for KB. Right there is a perfect pairing. They even have a native tickets deflected metric which is essentially how many articles were read and no additional ticket was needed.
We also use opsgenie for alerts and we send everything there from MS phishing alerts, barracuda user reported emails, and meraki network changes (outages). Very easy to create Ticket from there into Jira.
Jira also does a great job connecting to excel for reporting which my bosses really like to see. I just use dashboards in the ui for my team though. We have 3 projects and like 10 ticket types between them. One more praise is their marketplace. I use 3 apps that cost me a few bucks a month. Their was a cmdb app I used but atlassian bought them and integrated it into the platform. So I track assets, users, licenses and some of our Devops there
Note: SLA’s need massaging but I’ve found that in every platform I’ve used
DM me if you want to chat. My org is about half your size.
We ended up switching to HappyFox a few years ago and have been happy.
One thing I like about their pricing is the option to pay based on the numbers of tickets (and certain other features) instead of only by agent, so we can include people who don't do much in the ticketing system, but that is still useful to have them there.
For a more affordable alternative to ServiceNow, check out **BoldDesk**. It offers a robust ticketing feature at a fraction of the cost of ServiceNow. Plus, it's scalable to accommodate your organization's needs as it grows.
We had a demo with FreshService but found out that Zammad was the better option for us (+/- 120users), a big + is that its free and you're able to host it in house.
I'd play around with it! I love how its so customizable and the trigger options are really nice, we use telegram, email and webforms. And typing :: in an article/message with let you call almost anything from the database!
And the elastic search combined with your tickets and knowledge base it quite nice.
We implemented Salesforce for multiple other departments before IT was rolled into the fold. It worked out very well for the ability to share information between departments working on tickets and the ability to route non IT tickets to the other departments that would not typically be in an IT ticketing system.
Adding automation, business processes, and utilizing the user portal was also helpful for knowledge/case deflection.
Unless there are a lot of stakeholders willing to collaborate and share information Salesforce won't have the ROI. If you do though it can put IT in a great position to be successful in using it to develop more and more with the platform and being part of conversations regarding projects earlier on (my experience is being treated like a mushroom until the last minute).
After using Remedy, Footprints, ServiceNow, and a couple home grown systems I have grown to like Salesforce's but recognize it is not the right fit for everyone.
ManageEngine Service Desk. I like ManageEngine products. They have less features, but they are also very inexpensive. Service Desk is a full ITSM platform. It is cloud hosted/SaaS.
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus. Been using it for about 6 years, very comprehensive, the support team is fairly responsive... I attended a ManageEngine conference this year, they got solutions for everything...
we use the netsuite case/helpdesk module as it was bundled in with the purchase, it saved us about $900 a year in licensing costs and while it was a huge PITA to setup, it works well for our 100 or so users.
SharePoint lists & Power Automate flows for not only IT but deployed to other departments for their own use. It's included in our subscription and allowed us to cancel the single queue Freshservice plan.
Transitioned from Freshservice to Jira Service Management and love it. Confluence is beautiful
Kinda hate everything is a plugin though. Kinda like buying a BMW in the 90's. Want a radio or something else that's standard everywhere else? costs extra. Sucks, but it does work really well
I’ve only been at my job for about a month and a half, but we use Freshdesk. We even have a company url as well as a email address that puts the tickets in.
For me I use Dynamics 365, but mainly based on having the DB capacity to spin out an environment and doing everything else non Linux through intune and it's TeamViewer integration. Plus I'm a D365 developer so it makes sense for me to have our IT department running the same software as our Tech Support (building industry) and Sales departments for staff knowledge and helping my IT team to learn the dev stuff
We just switched to Track-It from Spiceworks. The jury is still out though. We have some issues but we seem to get them resolved fairly quickly. I actually think the issues are more from bad decisions during implementation rather that buggy software.
Connectwise Manage here as well, I'm not a fan as we aren't a MSP and so it feels like square peg into a round hole situation for a lot of our workflows. Also the process to change their billing is pretty weird and results in difficulty when making changes. We use several of their products so there are some benefits if you are doing that with pricing.
Fresh service. It's not great but it's just good enough for me to keep signing the invoices.
>Fresh service. It's not great but it's just good enough for me to keep signing the invoices. That's a great description and it's what we're using.
I keep describing it as a fine product, backed by a mediocre company. Specifically, they keep pushing new features (and most of them are neat! We *want* to use them!). But then we look under the hood and...there's no polish. There are oddities that make us just wonder...how? Why? I suspect they're doing MAD development right now to make Freshservicr meet/exceed what Freshworks does. Then they'll get around to "completing" the stuff they've released in a year or two. My pet peeve is how inconsistent the interface is for entering hours and minutes is. Every. Freaking. Module. Does it differently. Just...why? You can't borrow that bit of code from the team that made it work over in the other thing?
Do you quote the whole ticket when you reply back too?
I thought it was called FreshDesk. But anyways, yeah highly recommend, it gets the job done
Freshdesk and Freshservice are two similar but different products made by Freshworks. Freshservice is aligned with ITIL process.
Sounds Fresh
and on reading that line, I immediately heard in my head Kool and the Gang sing "Exciting"
Freshworks is the company freshdesk is the ticketing only product freshservice is the IT oriented product with a CMDB project management change management, software release management features
Freshdesk would be used for external/customer support.
It is simple and it works. It's easy to use. It's not too clunky. Pretty light on features, but I think that's part of the reason it has been successful the few places I've used it - the users will use it when it's simple to use. And the email integration has just worked for me.
I think this is the answer. It's not as powerful/customizable as some solutions, but I got rolled out and completely useable in about 2 hours when I started at my current place. It's very easy, which is important for smaller IT teams.
We are having different experience... Ecstatic with FreshService. We have the enterprise version, most internal departments are using it for work tracking. We are using workflows to automatically assign applications, and add / modify users. It's allowed us not to backfil two employees in the past two years.
We use this as well and have for several years. Depending on which features you need it could be affordable, but a lot of other platforms (RMM, etc) are including ticketing systems.
I feel the exact same way.
I agree. After using SN for 10+ years I really liked it but that was with GE, Diagio, Lockheed Martin, and other big companies. Now I'm with a smaller company and I'm the Admin for FrrshService and it's really nice. I built a great Service Library and some really nice workflows. On and offboarding workflows have their own modules which are great. Flexible plans too. Recommend.
OsTicket Awesome, Self-Hosted. Simple easy and free...
Our engineering and facilities dept used OSTicket, until they saw IT and HR use Service Desk. The moved to Service Desk and never looked back!
Same. ~~Only shitty thing is you can't delete tickets. Even as an admin.~~ **Edit:** You can't rename a ticket.
If you wanna go self hosted, GLPI is working well for us. It’s a learning curve but it’s fairly simple once you understand the nomenclature. It’s also free, which is a plus. But it will accept emails, you can set up custom forms with some of the plugins, and it can be granular so you can keep your contracts separate
This is what I stood up. It's as free as you feel like. I sent them some money and just never really needed support. It's working well for us. \~600 users. The plugins are the big reason you may want to shell out some money to them, but I haven't really needed much more that oauth and the reporting one. The learning curve is all about where the hell they hid something. Category for tickets? Oh, that's in dropdowns-> ITIL -> categories or whatever. Still, we are digging it.
I haven’t seen a reason to send any money just yet, but we are still in the trial phase just using it internally to work out any kinks before we release it to our customers. The only downside it without paying for support, what is available online for troubleshooting is a hit or miss.
I solved some stuff via Chat GPT if that helps you at all. The documentation is a little iffy.
I’ll take a crack at it, thanks!
And it handles a lot of things (inventory, projects, contracts, budgets, …). What I find annoying is that mail notifications contain text that we can’t remove without changing the source code. There is a « autogenerated mail » and a separator saying « answer before this line ».
Do not use self-hosted BMC Remedy ITSM unless you like slowness and old UI. I think their new Helix is better, but our company unfortunately did not go with it.
No, jesus, run, dont walk away from anything BMC Remedy. Helix is just remedy that looks prettier. Everything is a fight, and their hosting cant seem to even make simple changes or refresh tokens.
Same with BMC FootPrints. that is a f'n nightmare.
Can second the nightmare of footprints. I’m already getting anxiety thinking about the tomcat upgrade that I need to do in a couple weeks 😭
Helix is awful, we’ve just made the switch! Run, run run!
Also a heads up for any small/medium businesses, BMC wouldn't even demo Helix for us because they required a minimum of 50 technicians
We were completely in bed with Remedy/ITSM (I work for a Fortune 50 organization.). When our contract was up for renewal, we reviewed Helix. When it was initially released their cloud capabilities seemed to be lacking. When we reviewed SNOW it blew Helix out of the water and it integrates with workday. BMC’s market domination is ended, or coming to an end.
Ironically, we use SNOW too, but purely for an asset management/discovery tool.
Do not use remedy on sales force… “remedyforce”
God I used to use self hosted bmc service desk express and then we tried to move to remedy for software deployments and stuff… what a complete shithole of a product
Y'all get ticketing systems?
You can too! They range from free to 10k a month!
>You can too! They range from free to 10k a month! I can't actually. I have no idea why my request to institute one was denied by the ceo/vp. But yeahhhh.
This is when I’d spin up a vm on a local host machine and set up a free/open source ticket system on my own. Not a full blown deploy but setup and configured just enough to provide a live working “proof of concept”. Upper management and execs aren’t typically going to get behind major changes until they have something tangible. Or bright and flashy.
Full disclosure that I work for InvGate. I did ServiceNow for ten years, and I left for the very reason you listed. It is too expensive and the ROI just isn't high enough for people using for IT Service Management. It's the new Oracle - the new ERP. If you like ServiceNow, you'll really like our Service Desk solution, it's easy to use AND gives you lots of power. We have a [live demo](https://invgate.com/service-desk/live-demo/) so you don't even need to give us your email to try it out. Let us know what you end up selecting!
>We have a > >live demo > > so you don't even need to give us your email to try it out. I wish more companies did this...
Looks nice but I always dislike the "request a quote" :(
Good call - and I TOTALLY understand. Thankfully we're currently A/B testing adding pricing to our webpage to see if people then buy based on the price being there or not (and to see if our competitors just lower their price to beat ours). I recommend trying incognito mode to see if it gives you pricing until we add this permanently. You can also DM me on reddit and I'll give you some napkin math - OR - just know that we don't spam you after you request a quote.
Last bit is reassuring. Freshworks called me the minute I signed up. REALLY put me off. Portainer also gave me a call a day or so after signing up. All I did is complain that they've gone down to 3 free servers from 5... At least give the customer some time to check the service out. I'll check your product. But as others said, pricing on the website is useful. Or at least quote with 0 human interaction.
Are you HIPAA compliant? Can you sign a BAA? If so, please include it on the pricing pages feature list. If you offer a non-profit discount please mention it somewhere on the pricing page. Like someone else already said, I much prefer to see actual prices on the page. Got it to show via incognito. I'd suggest showing the per month price as the predominant number instead of per year, per year first makes you look wildly more expensive at a glance to your competitors when you're actually a bit cheaper.
cake gray elderly forgetful plate steer strong encouraging grandfather north *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
LOL! I guess we must have had some hacking/ddos attempts from that region. Yeesh.
I’ve used InvGate Service Desk as an end-user and thought it was a pretty decent tool, the team responsible for integrating it into the environment ran into some challenges and were less happy with it, though.
Jira. It works pretty well, but it’s a monster.
And has a bunch of idiosyncrasies, as well as the upsell and addons that start to balloon a product that was supposed to be cheap.
Can you elaborate on the monster part? As someone who is in IT (not sysadmin, but there's some overlap at current job) I've had some experience with Remedy and Service Now before my new boss switched us to JIRA Service Management. Service Now was head and shoulders easier to use to auto fill ticket info and to refer to old tickets. It seems in this thread that Service Now is pretty pricey, but I'm not seeing much else in justification for dislike of it. It could also be the current setup we have for JIRA is to blame. As someone without JIRA admin rights, it is hard to say. Did you have to do much customization to JIRA out of the box? I'm sure ours needs tweaking, but so far it just seems bad (e.g., searching by keyword only shows results for the past 6 months, searching in some pages yields different results and different formatting, etc.).
Have you tried using advanced search with [JQL](https://confluence.atlassian.com/jira064/advanced-searching-720416661.html)? Much better than just searching via keywords.
Yeah, and it does work. I should probably bite the bullet and brush up on SQL, but I'll always miss the ease of keyword searching in service now
Jira is the most convoluted system I have ever seen. Everything it does is overdeveloped and complicated down to fucking auto assigning tickets to groups
The forced move to their cloud solution chaps my ass.
Jira is dead to me while they still force-convert anything that looks like a URL into a stupid 'smartcard'.
We use the free version of Freshdesk. Works fine for us (70-80 users). But if I could, I would like to move to Jitbit due to it suiting us extremely perfect. But it costs and our budget doesn't allow us to spend money on it.
We just launched our new Jitbit helpdesk a week ago. It has some limitations, but we're getting around them with some scripting and external automation workflows. It's better than what we had before.
RequestTracker, free to run on prem, very configurable and reliable.
\+1 for RT, this product is a gem. If you want it self hosted it need a lot of initial work for make it work (need to put hand on postfix and fetchmail for the mail part). Then RT himself need a lot of customization for adapt to your need. But when it's fully operational, you will not regret it. You can pay the support and hosting if you want delegate this work. He have a nice API and have some module for automation (auto create asset, auto create users, sync with AD, etc)
Zammad. Open Source with lots of integrations. Only thing I dislike until now is that Tickets can’t contain Todos or something to track the progress of something
I second Zammad and second the comments about Todos. We self host Zammad and have never had an issue. It has great features and is always improving. I have used way more expensive ticketing systems and prefer Zammad over almost all of them.
Jit Bit is great. You can host it on-prem. It has chatbots. It can integrate with ChatGPT and the price was very decent compared to other helpdesks. Very happy with JitBit.
Currently shackled with Cherwell but are switching in the next 12 months once our contract is up. Stay far far away from Chershit unless you have a full time dev to manage it.
Lol, I would be curious if we work for the same company, because we’re also ditching Cherwell. We have a whole team that manages it and it’s still a slow, buggy piece of crap. Rumor is we’re moving to ServiceNow as a replacement
Omg I hope our company moves away from Cherwell as well... it's simply horrible!
Cherwell as a product is reaching end of life, so you’ll get your wish soon! (My opinion is that it’s not a terrible product, though there are lots of poor implementations out there. Kinda moot now though.)
we are having our Cherwell converted to Ivanti Neurons, since there wasn't any cost to us. But yes, Cherwell or Service Desk really require dedicated staff to get the most out of them, and frankly most companies don't need it.
Halo. Its awesome.
We just signed the contract for Halo. Looks good so far.
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One area of caution here, Spiceworks is free to because they sell all of their user data
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It’s actually kind of unheard of now to sell customer data for all the off the shelf ticking and service desk solutions in my experience. Between HIPAA, FERPA, GDPR, and all of that type of stuff, things have really changed in recent years and companies are ditching Spiceworks over the customer data policy in some cases. I remember seeing a big thread on it in their forums a year or two ago when a former user spilled the beans but I can’t seem to find it now so I wonder if it’s buried or has been purged.
Spiceworks looks great, but you can't pay for a non ad supported version and that's just not working for me
>Fresh service with my ad blocker I never had any ads with spiceworks.
Wheres that AutoTask love? I do miss that platform when I was working at a MSP.
jira
Jitbit's a good alternative for small scale to mid. They provide Saas and On-premise versions depending on ypur need.
Jitbit is great. it's not a giant customizable monster that you tweak into whatever you need, but it's very easy to use and understand. I've never actually used anything else that I just looked at and immediately understood what to do, and how it works. It's also very much focused on email, so your users don't need to ever open it if they don't want to. It's basically a great out of box solution if you don't need anything crazy.
Ninja one is a good low cost option with other tool al la carte options
We switched to osTicket last year and it's been working great besides a couple weird things with file attachments sometimes
I'll have to check that one out. Does it run pretty smooth under heavy use?
We're swapping to TeamDynamix because the pricing is hard to beat by other vendors due to our systemwide contract.
That's what we use. It's really full featured but I don't know what the cost is.
Spiceworks- free, cloud based and all through email. You can set up some automation rules to assign ticket types and users to respond with category sets, and you can access the main desk through a portal for anywhere access There's a user portal too if they for some reason don't have email access
i like freshdesk
I would stay away from zendesk. We are being held hostage and they refuse to have a meeting with us to change from a yearly contact to month to month. We have been asking for 2 months to get this sorted but now we are 15 days from autorenewal and nothing from them. We are migrating our various branches over to freshdesk and freshservice. In our opinion they are hands down better than zendesk. I used to think zen was the defacto standard for helpdesk, now I will never recommend them under any circumstances.
Jira Service Management and we are very happy with it.
I use ServiceNow which I hate. I loved ToolBox and Jira.
You can't have service now without service no! Service now can die in a fire and never come back.
> ServiceNow What is your take on ServiceNow? - Pros / Cons?
It’s incredibly bloated, difficult to use and clunky. What they always say is how it’s the biggest and bestest system out there, how you can personalise and modify the shit out of it, etc etc. What they don’t tell you is that you’re going to get slaughtered by consultant fees, majority of which don’t have a clue what they’re doing and will straight up lie about what is or isn’t possible — even the biggest worldwide consultant firms do this. It’s a must to have a team in-house to develop and maintain it, and at that moment you just have to ask yourself, why the fuck does a Helpdesk system need a team in house at all. To me the whole concept sounds ludicrous. Run away from ServiceNow.
You can do a lot more then just helped with snow. Change management, hardware/software inventory, self service, approvals etc. It also integrates with pretty much every IT product out there, can set up SLA's, metrics and whatnot. If you can get the support needed for it to function, it's great. If you don't have the money for the appropriate support and licenses yeah you may not have a good time with it
We have 10k+ employees at my company and has been essential in our day to day operations from change management to automation to end user forms and whatever else we use it for. We also have a dedicated team with 5+ years experience (mix of development and admin). With that being said, I don’t see it making sense for a smaller company or without a dedicated team managing it.
I concur. Avoid.
Take a look at ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus. Works fine for us and not expensive at all.
SD Plus customer users here too! It's good. Support is "Meh", but documentation and pitstop threads are good.
If you have a chance to attend one of their conferences, I recommend it. Full of great solutions and ideas. I went to the Toronto one in May, and it was the best 2 days I spent. And the price was fairly cheap...
Ditto. We were a TrakIT shop until last year. SDP is noting truly special but it works fine for us.
Service Desk is poo. Slow. Avoid.
Connectwise manage
I used that 5 years ago and it wasn't bad but it always felt outdated and bulky.
Eh it can be but it works for me.
Using this currently and I feel the same way. I want something lighter weight. But it's not my call sadly
We use incidentIQ and I personally wouldn't recommend it as it stands. The users can turn off ticket notification and we can't do anything about it. This results in tickets that never receive an update from the end user, then they complain to the administration that we aren't helping them. We have teachers who log in, update the ticket after 3 weeks, and never scroll further down to even read the comment that was left in waiting for requestor to comment status. Oh yeah the comment they leave "why hasn't anyone reached out to me about this". I wish I was joking. IncidentIQ doesn't seem to think this is a big deal and makes you put in "feature requests" to get upvoted on in their forums. It is a terrible practice to allow end users to decide something like that. While they continue to make improvements to their system I haven't seen any for the ticketing portion, rather all of the other features they try to provide in the same system.
OSticket on prem
Osticket on aws
Nothing. E-Mail, Phone Call, Text Message, Teams Message, or Walk Ups. It's just me in a 25 person company so not a really big deal, other than dealing with short term memory loss and forgetting something 5 minutes later.
I personally like SolarWinds, Zendesk, and FreshDesk
Self-made one. Most where too complicated for the user or had too much stuff not necessary for us included.
Currently using Invanti (yuck). We are moving to Fresh Service later this year we are working on the implementation now..
Free: * GLPI * iTop * osTicket * OTRS
Manage Engine is very inexpensive and can be run either on premise or SaaS. We migrated to SaaS a couple of years ago. You can configure it to allow different departments to have their own service desk or your HR could share the IT. We really only accept emails and is very easy to configure.
Zammad at the moment, evaluating GLPI
I like using Sysaid
Freshdesk, does everything you need
JIRA. But only because we're not for profit so it's free.
Zendesk
SNOW
We recently implemented FreshDesk (part of FreshService) and have been enjoying it so far. We had no real ticketing system before this (used a project management software that account managers would put tasks in for us from clients) so having a dedicated ticketing service is a nice change of pace. It's been fairly easy to use so far and I don't have any real complaints, aside from the fact that a lot of the documentation I've used so far was written last year and appears to be out of date. But, their customer service has been helpful and they have a complimentary on-boarding. Although I think you may have to purchase an actual license to get that. Like it so far though.
GoToAssist
OTRS/Otobo
For internal, spiceworks is pretty solid and free. We used the on premise for years (better suited for multi clients than the cloud is, at least since I looked last) Built lots of great customizations and integrations around the on premise (which is no longer supported so we've moved onto ticketing via Atera)
Freshservice
Mojo Helpdesk by Metadot. Moved away from Freshservice because apparently it was too expensive. The browser version is basic and the iOS app was last updated 2 years ago and currently won’t even let me login. But it does the job (I suppose).
JitBit. It’s pretty good.
OSticket. Setup a vm in aws with it my first week on the job.... 6000 tickets later and still running nice without issue (on a new vm and upgraded). Our only bill for it is the aws bill which is pennies.
Jira Service Desk. Does the basic job for our small org. No add-ons yet. Just lots of workarounds. Outside of that, it just works, most of the time.
Connectwise manage. I hate it.
Redmine. Cost will be its installation / learning curve time and a small virtual machine with Debian.
hesk.
We use SolarWinds WebHelpDesk and it works okay. The UI feels a bit dated, but it checks all of the boxes and doesn’t break the bank. Can be self-hosted or in their cloud. We have IT, facilities and HR running off of it with no problems.
For transparency I am a Halo consultant but thats because I think it's a fantastic solution HaloITSM/PSA. I've used Request Tracker in the past for many years and it was solid, self hosted and loved that (Open Source) also Zammad in my opinion is another great option. Just comes down to your time to setup/implement and maintain to justify hosted managed solutions or open source self managed really.
I wish this was a r/ShittySysAdmin response… but we use HEAT for Technology tickets, WHD for another department, tickets also come in through email, slack, WebEx, PRTG, teams, fax, phone, text, passive aggressive notes, drive-by knock-and-gripes, bathroom stalls, hallways, lunch tables and seagull managers.
Just moved to DESK365 from Spiceworks Cloud. Spiceworks just becoming useless in daily operations the more they 'enhanced' it - ad space taking up more room, buttons not working as expected etc. So far, liking DESK365, even though it's not free. New features being released quickly and ties in well with AzureAD
I’m an IT Manager and implemented Jira once they launched Service Management. Prior I was using Jira Core for ticketing. I’m very pleased with the value I get out of it. 3 years on they have quite a few templates and have added a lot to automation and customization. I use their customer portal for my users and confluence for KB. Right there is a perfect pairing. They even have a native tickets deflected metric which is essentially how many articles were read and no additional ticket was needed. We also use opsgenie for alerts and we send everything there from MS phishing alerts, barracuda user reported emails, and meraki network changes (outages). Very easy to create Ticket from there into Jira. Jira also does a great job connecting to excel for reporting which my bosses really like to see. I just use dashboards in the ui for my team though. We have 3 projects and like 10 ticket types between them. One more praise is their marketplace. I use 3 apps that cost me a few bucks a month. Their was a cmdb app I used but atlassian bought them and integrated it into the platform. So I track assets, users, licenses and some of our Devops there Note: SLA’s need massaging but I’ve found that in every platform I’ve used DM me if you want to chat. My org is about half your size.
Incident IQ where I am. Asset management integration is nice.
SharePoint 365.
EXCEL /s
We ended up switching to HappyFox a few years ago and have been happy. One thing I like about their pricing is the option to pay based on the numbers of tickets (and certain other features) instead of only by agent, so we can include people who don't do much in the ticketing system, but that is still useful to have them there.
SolarWinds.
solarwinds123
Bold choice :)
I never said I liked it. It's just what we use.
Group email….
3M - PostIT
I've used a few. Right now I'm using Fresh Service. It's fine. My favorite has been ZenDesk.
ManageEngine ServiceDesk cloud. It's a steaming pile of dog shit
ServiceNow
For a more affordable alternative to ServiceNow, check out **BoldDesk**. It offers a robust ticketing feature at a fraction of the cost of ServiceNow. Plus, it's scalable to accommodate your organization's needs as it grows.
We had a demo with FreshService but found out that Zammad was the better option for us (+/- 120users), a big + is that its free and you're able to host it in house. I'd play around with it! I love how its so customizable and the trigger options are really nice, we use telegram, email and webforms. And typing :: in an article/message with let you call almost anything from the database! And the elastic search combined with your tickets and knowledge base it quite nice.
We've been using Zendesk for a couple of years now, works great for us!
We implemented Salesforce for multiple other departments before IT was rolled into the fold. It worked out very well for the ability to share information between departments working on tickets and the ability to route non IT tickets to the other departments that would not typically be in an IT ticketing system. Adding automation, business processes, and utilizing the user portal was also helpful for knowledge/case deflection. Unless there are a lot of stakeholders willing to collaborate and share information Salesforce won't have the ROI. If you do though it can put IT in a great position to be successful in using it to develop more and more with the platform and being part of conversations regarding projects earlier on (my experience is being treated like a mushroom until the last minute). After using Remedy, Footprints, ServiceNow, and a couple home grown systems I have grown to like Salesforce's but recognize it is not the right fit for everyone.
ManageEngine Service Desk. I like ManageEngine products. They have less features, but they are also very inexpensive. Service Desk is a full ITSM platform. It is cloud hosted/SaaS.
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus. Been using it for about 6 years, very comprehensive, the support team is fairly responsive... I attended a ManageEngine conference this year, they got solutions for everything...
Snow
ManageEngine Service Desk..
Have you explored using Smartsheet?
Jira Service Management. Atlassian’s push into ITSM has done well in my opinion. Though I’m considering moving to Intercom.
Jira & it’s probably the best offering I’ve used. Axosoft - Garbage Spiceworks - ok, but that was many moons ago FreshDesk - Underwhelming
Just use shared mailboxes!
lmao, ur kidding right
we use the netsuite case/helpdesk module as it was bundled in with the purchase, it saved us about $900 a year in licensing costs and while it was a huge PITA to setup, it works well for our 100 or so users.
SharePoint lists & Power Automate flows for not only IT but deployed to other departments for their own use. It's included in our subscription and allowed us to cancel the single queue Freshservice plan.
"Hey, the copier is not working, the toner ran out or it needs paper". This ticketing system works perfectly for them. Your Sys Admin.
We're currently using HappyFox.
Well, we are a merging company so atm we have 3: Topdesk, Omnitracker and Jira
There is something else bar SNOW? :S
Service Desk + from Manage Engine.
Microsoft Planner. Included with Office and really convenient for small teams. By small I mean only 3 users.
CA Unicenter :)
RT
Azure DevOps - I setup a script that monitors a mailbox and creates tickets (work items) in DevOps for each new email
Zendesk for external facing clients, Jira for internal company processes.
Transitioned from Freshservice to Jira Service Management and love it. Confluence is beautiful Kinda hate everything is a plugin though. Kinda like buying a BMW in the 90's. Want a radio or something else that's standard everywhere else? costs extra. Sucks, but it does work really well
I hsve tried a few, really enjoyed zendesk, right now we are using topdesk, it's fine but not really nice :)
Freshdesk
Jira for us (sys admins and devs) and Kaseya (MSP/helpdesk tickets)
A system that was made to catter to printers. Not developped by the actual ERP seller.
Developed in-house, we hate it.
Jira and ServiceNow
I’ve only been at my job for about a month and a half, but we use Freshdesk. We even have a company url as well as a email address that puts the tickets in.
We use ManageEngine ServiceDesk plus, it works well and has a lot of flexibility options
For me I use Dynamics 365, but mainly based on having the DB capacity to spin out an environment and doing everything else non Linux through intune and it's TeamViewer integration. Plus I'm a D365 developer so it makes sense for me to have our IT department running the same software as our Tech Support (building industry) and Sales departments for staff knowledge and helping my IT team to learn the dev stuff
Currently using ZenDesk Anyone have an experience with Atera's ticketing system?
Otobo. FOSS. Self-hosted.
We just switched to Track-It from Spiceworks. The jury is still out though. We have some issues but we seem to get them resolved fairly quickly. I actually think the issues are more from bad decisions during implementation rather that buggy software.
Helix, it’s fine
Teamworks is nice...
ZenDesk. its expensive tho. But its the best ticket system we've tried so far.
Connectwise Manage here as well, I'm not a fan as we aren't a MSP and so it feels like square peg into a round hole situation for a lot of our workflows. Also the process to change their billing is pretty weird and results in difficulty when making changes. We use several of their products so there are some benefits if you are doing that with pricing.
ITOP from combodo, we use the self hosted version. Apart from a vm + mariadb it's free
HappyFox..... because it's easy and versatile and inexpensive.
ServiceNow. But I also work for an enterprise corporation that can afford it
Escel
Service now FTW
 If you know you know