It’ll be interesting to follow the results of this experiment to see how much of an impact this has on his sales.
And, Ian, the only other opensource product I can think of that you’ve left off is: ZenTrack.

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.

Ferrysoft Help Desk : I discovered that this is now free of charge for the single user version, which is a bonus. One user at the moment is fine, although if I wanted to add more concurrent users in future it is expensive here compared to other the alternatives: US$570 per extra user! (compared with US$358 for HelpSpot, US$258 for FogBugz for buying the first two licenses). Nothing in its design or feature list jumps out at me to suggest that it is worth that much extra.

It’s also based on Microsoft SQL Server, which I’m not familiar with but there is an Express Edition which is available free which can run it.

helpdeskonline.net: This solution is different from the others in that it is a hosted solution. Now, considering I’m developing a hosted web service myself, I’m obviously not against hosted solutions. However, in this case, I am not sure how well this would work in terms of being able to integrate it smoothly into my own site.
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HelpSpot: This one I definitely wanted to have a closer look at as its feature list had a number of interesting options, such as knowledge books and its customisation options.

From reading their website, Userscape seem to have a philosophy of building in options to aid in integrating HelpSpot with other systems wherever applicable. To a large extent this makes up for not having access to the source code (it’s Zend encoded). For instance, the black box authentication feature that lets you tie it into your own sign on system, the email as a service feature, or the live lookup system that sounds useful for hooking into your CRM system. I don’t know how well all these things work, but I like the thinking behind them. Let’s hope HelpSpot continues down this path.

Knowledge Books are a bit of a twist on the standard FAQ facilities, and I can see how users would find this easier to navigate being just like the contents of a book. To really make this a great tool for managing your product’s documentation it would be nice to have a script or button to run through and convert a knowledge book into a print-ready PDF file.

Apart from the tour, two preview articles on Ian Landsman’s blog provide some good details into how HelpSpot works:

• HelpSpot Sneak Peek 1: Request Page
• HelpSpot Preview 2 – The Workspace

They were written during HelpSpot’s beta so I suppose some things could have changed.

“So many other help desk management solutions crowd the page with dozens of form fields on this page even when most of these fields are never used on any one request.”

That quote reminds me of BugZilla, whose interface was the main reason that I was turned off using it.

“Help desk software is intrinsically a ‘high read’ environment. There’s simply alot of information that needs to be consumed by staff members …. An effective approach is to use colors and images to give a quick understanding of the situation.”

Yes, and from the screenshots they appear to have worked out some nice efficient layouts and colour schemes to help with this. It is (seemingly) simple ideas such as this that can make a huge difference to a user’s usage of a product. I know personally, I am much more inclined to keep using software that assists me like this without getting in the way.

“HelpSpot integrates seamlessly with one or more email accounts. For example, keep you requests organized by having several support email accounts: support@example.com, passwords@example.com, printers@example.com. Emails from different accounts can be automatically assigned to a request category and even assigned to a specific user.”

From what I can gather most help desk software is designed to work with a single support address (osTicket, FogBugz). This feature could be especially useful to categorise requests from more than one product/service. e.g. support@myproduct.com and help@thoughtfiler.net.

I’m quite impressed with this package, it is obvious that a lot of thought and careful design have gone into it. Basically, it just looks like a web application that would be easy and enjoyable to use. I think it would definitely be worthy of a proper trial.

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FogBugz: Now this one has to be good doesn’t it? After all, it has Fog Creek and the infamous Joel behind it. Although hopefully it treats data better than CityDesk, which only succeeded in corrupting databases when I gave it a trial, and was quickly removed! Anyway, one feature of their website provided an excellent way to get an initial feel for the software – the Fogbugz movie.

Something that this has that the others don’t is source control integration. I imagine having bug fixes/features linked to the relevant check-ins could be very useful after projects have been going awhile.

On the other hand, it does not seem to have any concept of a user portal like HelpSpot does. Nor does there seem to be any mention of the use of templates to integrate the system into your own site, although Fog Creek confirmed that you do get all the source code and that, most of the layout is in CSS files and therefore customisable.

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Of course, FogBugz may be about to become the big winner and blow all the competition out of the water, with FogBugz 5 soon to enter beta. So it may be worth checking this out in a few weeks to see what has been added.
Kayako eSupport: This seems to be a popular package on the net, especially for hosting companies. The customer portal page of their online demo was instantly familiar from previous tickets I’ve logged in the past with various companies.

The portal page has a nice clean and simple look to it that’s appealing, although the lack of an integrated forum (ala Helpspot & FogBugz) is a disappointment. However, having a Downloads library integrated in a help desk system seems like a neat idea. Seems like a potentially good way to organise all of those supplemental files that only certain users will need to download for specific purposes.

The system does appear to be template-based, which should make it possible to integrate with your own site, similar to HelpSpot.

They have a number of pricing options available:

Personally, I wouldn’t want to lease software for something as business critical as a help-desk package so the Owned option would be the only one I would consider here, which is reasonably priced.
Conclusion: Hmm… I think I need a comparison table next… but I am currently leaning towards HelpSpot as having the best all-round feature set and customisation options… although it may be worth waiting a week or three to see what Fog Creek have in store for FogBugz 5…

Let’s start with the Open Source sector…

BugZilla: This is one of the more well known of the O/S contenders in the bug and issue tracking space. It’s also part of the Mozilla Foundation, and so has plenty of users and developers working on it.

My first impression of BugZilla was… ugh! This is a definite hacker’s tool. It gives the impression of something that was just hacked together years ago and has just kept growing since. Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing but when I am wanting to present a certain impression to my future client-base this just wouldn’t work – there’s no KISS principle in this design. And the number of fields that you seem to need to fill in to log a bug or support request, well, it just seems too much for most users. Hmm… moving on…

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Double Choco Latte: Now this is quite a big package, so allow me to start with the intro from the DCL site:

Double Choco Latte is a GNU Enterprise package that provides basic project management capabilities, time tracking on tasks, call tracking, email notifications, online documents, statistical reports, a report engine, and more features are either working or being developed/planned. It can be displayed inside of a phpGroupWare installation or be used stand-alone. It is licensed under the GPL (GNU Public License), which means it is free to study, distribute, modify, and use.

Covers a fair range of tasks, eh? Have a look at its feature set to get more of an idea of what it covers. Guess what though? I goofed when I put it on my original list! It’s not really the type of help desk/support/bug-tracking tool that I’m looking for.

However, that said, if I was doing my development as part of a small team I would seriously consider using it as as a project management tool. For instance, its use of wiki’s for each project as a documentation tool sounds interesting; each project gets its own wiki integrated into the system but not publicly accessable.
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osTicket: I liked this package as soon as I saw it. It may not be as full-featured as some but it’s got a clean, simple and appealing interface.

I liked the fact that a customer doesn’t even need to create an account (or, remember a login) to log a request, which is especially good if they’re frustrated!

To check on their request they can just come back to this page, enter their e-mail, paste in a ticket number and click the button. Beautiful! Nice, simple, straightforward design for users.

It’s lacking some of the niceties of other systems such as FAQs, Knowledge Bases, forums, etc, but I like the look of this system.
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ZenTrack:

“Zentrack is a fully customizable help desk, bug tracking, and project management system. It is designed for systems with less than 10,000 users…”

Zentrack appears to be designed as an XOOPS module, which is great if you already use it as your site’s CMS, but it’s a tad annoying if you only want ZenTrack and have to install XOOPS as well. (A quick look in my hosts Fantistico says that XOOPS is a 7MB install before ZenTrack)

Anyway, they do have a features list and online demo available to play with.
The first thing I noticed about this was that it appears users have to create an account first before they can submit a ticket. I prefer the osTicket approach instead, although it can be setup so that all e-mails sent to a specific address get turned into tickets. That’s a reasonable compromise.

The screen presented to the user on login though looks awfully cluttered, especially with the multiple levels of tabs. I can see users getting awfully confused trying to navigate around. There does not appear to be any way to turn off, or hide, unwanted tabs.

The impression I get is that this package would be better suited for use as part of a larger company’s internal help desk. In this situation, where employees would be better able to get used to the system, and have access to in-house documentation, I can see it being a better fit.

To sum up: I realise this was neither the most extensive nor the most scientific round-up, but I don’t really have the time or inclination to spend too long getting bogged down just looking at help desk systems.

So, from this small selection, osTicket is the “winner” and the one I like the best.

Coming up, I want to have a look at a few of the commercial options and see what they have to offer…

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:
• BugZilla
• Double Choco Latte
• osTicket
• ZenTrack

I’ll update this list to link to the relevant reviews as I complete them.