Comments on: Help desk contenders: First Looks – commercial contenders

By: BackupBrain: My MicroISV Venture » Blog Archive » FogBugz vs HelpSpot…

Thu, 16 Mar 2006 02:55:15 +0000

[...] I wanted to link to it from here as it nicely follows my previous comparison of help desk software. He also brings up a point worth thinking about early on regarding keeping your help desk and bug tracking software separate. [...]

By: glenn

glenn — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 00:08:23 +0000

You're right, except for the Helpdesk casefile on SplashPool, there aren't many comparisons around of help desk software. It may not be the most comprehensive round-up, but both entries are my most visited posts, so hopefully they are useful starting point to other people. I'll have to check out your post as well.

By: Ian

Ian — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 03:27:51 +0000

Hey, not sure how I missed this one. Nice research. It's great to see you laying it out like this. I know many of my customers went through this exact process, but since nobody posts it up anywhere all that effort isn't turned into something productive for others. I just posted a little diddy about FogBugz and HelpSpot which you might find interesting as well.

By: glenn

glenn — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 03:18:03 +0000

Yes. This is one area where the commercial products seem to be quite far ahead of their open source counterparts. Some of the O/S solutions are really quite powerful and may be good for internal bug-tracking and/or project management for larger teams, but for any use that is “customer-facing” the commericial products are just, well, better.

The old adage, “You’ve got to spend money to make money”, applies here!

Thanks for the FogBugz clarification – it wasn’t too clear on the website how far the e-mail aspects went. It will be interesting to see what they add to FogBugz 5.

By: Ian M. Jones

Ian M. Jones — Sun, 26 Feb 2006 22:00:37 +0000

So, it looks to me that you’re leaning towards commercial products already, because of their tighter, better thought out feature set and support. Do you think you’re more likely to go for commercial?

Oh, by the way, FogBugz has a multiple mailbox feature too, you can grab emails from different mailboxes and have then go to different projects, with specific area, release, priority etc. FogBugz’s SPAM filtering is heaven sent too, works pretty well at filtering out the SPAM and can also sort emails into different areas based on their content once it’s trained. It’s email handling is very powerful.

Looking forward to seeing how you get on with these tools, it’s nice to see someone doing a proper independent comparison and test of them.

I should declare that I have an interest in FogBugz doing well as I make a reporting tool called CaseDetective for FogBugz.

By: glenn

glenn — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 09:02:19 +0000

Thanks for the reminder about OnTime, Gavin. It’s downloading now…

By: Gavin Bowman

Gavin Bowman — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 08:03:21 +0000

Glenn, while they are running this offer, you might want to take a look at Ontime’s bug tracker… they do have a link on their front page about using it as a helpdesk. I think today is the last day they are selling it for $5… at that price it’s worth picking up a copy just in case.

http://www.axosoft.com/Products/ontime.aspx?cn=otm_stepromo