Help desk comparison…
Posted by glenn on January 30, 2006 in Help Desk Software |
I am about to begin a comparison of the various web-based help-desk/support centre software out there at the moment with a view to implementing one of them for my own business.
It may be a case of the “cart before the horse” seeing as I haven’t released any products or services yet to provide support for, but my plan is to have my virtual infrastructure in place early on.
So, the logical place to start is to gather a list of possible contenders in this space. So far, I have the following:
- Commercial:
- Ferrysoft Help Desk
- FogBugz
- HelpSpot
- HelpDesk Connect (added to the list, 9/Feb. Thanks, Terry)
- Open Source:
I’ll update this list to link to the relevant reviews as I complete them.
Hey, just caught this. Looking forward to seeing what you think.
Hopefully I’ll have time to start on this shortly. I’ll at least try and start playing with one off of the list in a few days…
I have gone through a similar exercise. I loaded up several on my web site and played with them. I wound up decided to use http://www.helpdeskonline.net I have no affiliation with them and have only used their I plan on subscribing closer to launch.
Here is what led me to that decision. As a microISV, I expect to do most of the help desk work myself to start. However I do other consulting and need to be away from the base computer. Thus a very important feature for me was ticket escallation via mail. With their setup, I can dynamically configure unanswered tickets to be forwarded to my blackberry or cell phone after an interval.
I also wanted mail-in tickets without registration. Foolish as I may be, I believe it is important to make pre-sales support as easy as possible for potential customers.
I spent several hours getting one of the PHP support desk packages to meet my needs. Then I found these guys: Ten dollars a month flat fee per operator. So if you have three people and never need them to be logged in at the same time you can get by on one operator license. Thus $120/year — or about 1 third of what I spent (in my time) trying to select a package.
somehow my grammer got more mangled than usual. The first paragraph should say something like: “I wound up deciding to use … I have only used their demo site (you can set up your own demo). I plan…
I still have no affiliation with them; I can’t say if they are responsive or friendly or anything like that.
Thanks for that info, Terry. I hadn’t heard of helpdeskonline.net before, so I’ll add it to my list and check it out.
I do still like the idea of something I can host myself, but it’s feature list looks good enough that I’ll still consider it (and the price seems reasonable).
Thanks again for the suggestion. Good luck with you own, Micro-ISV. Don’t forget to let everyone know when you get a blog up
[...] I thought a better way to start my comparison of available help desk software would be to go back and have a look at each of their sites, check out any online demo versions and draw up a short list of contenders for further evaluation (i.e. actual installation on my own site). The list came from my previous post. [...]