9 Best Open Source or Free Ticketing Systems for Business Support

A help desk ticket system is essential for managing whether support tickets are submitted by customers or employees.

But what if we don’t use it?

Your service request may get lost somewhere in the shuffle.

This can cause customer dissatisfaction, affect employee productivity, and damage the organization’s reputation in the market.

But a good ticketing system can improve customer satisfaction, improve agent productivity, and save you even more time and money.

After understanding how useful ticketing systems can be for businesses, let’s take a look at the best open source or free ticketing systems available on the market.

What is the ticketing system?

A help desk ticket system is a software solution that helps you manage tickets generated by your customers or employees in case they encounter problems while using the products or services you provide.

A good ticketing system includes features that help you better serve your customers by replying to tickets faster, resolving issues faster, and collaborating across different teams and departments. . It can include basic functionality such as:

• Clear visibility into all tickets to assign, track, and prioritize tickets
• Automated routing and assignment
• Interact with collaboration tools like Slack, Trello, and WhatsApp
• automatic response
• Built-in knowledge base and FAQ
• Live dashboard to monitor trends and issues
• mobile application

Why do I need an open source free ticketing system?

In the early stages of your business, you may prefer email, such as Yahoo or Gmail, to manage your customer service. Provides a cost-effective, shared inbox for collaboration and support.

Still, email clients alone aren’t enough to manage growing customer requests. The complex structure with numerous folders and boring color codes can be confusing.

Additionally, customers will reach out to you not only through email, but also through social media, chat, phone, and other convenient channels. This means that you will end up needing too much integration.

However, with a ticketing system, you can effectively manage all your tickets and provide better customer support. This has the following advantages:

• Improving customer satisfaction
• Unified visibility of all tickets across channels
• High ticket withdrawal rate
• at a lower cost
• Improve compliance with better data management
• Effective collaboration between teams and agents
• Reduce response times and improve problem resolution rates
• Improving employee productivity

Next, let’s take a look at which open source ticketing systems are best for your business.

Haesuk

HESK , a free help desk ticketing software, is used by millions of users every day around the world. With over 820,000 downloads and over 18 years in development, it’s the go-to solution for setting up customer support portals and IT help desks for individuals, enterprises, and organizations alike. Notable users include Arkansas.gov, Flavor Art, CIRA, and the Western Australian Department of Education.

Main features:

• Organize your tickets into categories, sort by urgency, and filter conveniently.
• Set up employee accounts, limit functionality and access, and monitor who’s doing what.
• Our knowledge base addresses some common questions for users to solve on their own. You can also submit problems or questions.
• Every support ticket includes query details, so understanding the context allows us to provide better solutions.
• Easily assign tickets, attach files, add notes, track resolution time for each ticket, add notes, and change status.
• Over 100 options are available, including ticket templates, canned responses, custom status and data fields, and more.

The self-hosted version of HESK is completely free to use, even for commercial websites. We also offer a convenient HESK cloud option, where the HESK team takes care of all technical aspects so you can focus on providing support to your users and customers.

os ticket

With osTicket , you can easily streamline and scale your customer support and improve the user experience. You can get started using this tool in a few simple steps. Select the features you want, download the software, follow the easy installation process, install it right away, and start using it right away.

Main features:

• Ticket Filter: This ticketing software comes with a robust ticket filter system to ensure you get the right ticket to the right department. This also provides an organized environment.
• Dashboard Reports: Keep your helpdesk statistics up to date with simple and rich dashboards.
• SLA: osTicket offers a Service Level Agreement (SLA). This allows you to set your preferred business hours and rest assured that the system will take care of the rest of your time. You can also track tickets and their due dates and receive notifications and alerts for escalations and missed due dates.
• Customer Support Portal: Provides a powerful customer support portal that helps you maintain good customer relationships.
• Configurable help topics: Easily edit, delete, or add selected help desk topics at any time.
• Custom fields: Customize a user’s data when submitting a specific ticket to directly address their issue. Create custom lists, forms, and fields and add them to the appropriate tickets.
• Avoid agent conflicts: Avoid conflicts between staff by locking tickets while responding. Set a lock time to prevent other staff from responding to the ticket within that time.
• Auto-reply: When agents receive or open a message, they can use this feature to send an automated response. You can also customize responses for different help topics and departments.
• Thread actions: Agents can create a task or ticket from the thread entry of another task or ticket.
• Advanced search: Use to narrow down your search criteria.
• Ticket forwarding: Agents can forward, refer to, and assign tickets to another agent who is more appropriate for a specific issue.

osTicket has thousands and millions of customers spread over 190 countries and is completely free.

fresh desk

Deliver a great customer experience with Freshdesk’s free ticketing system. Easily sign up and use our forever free plan without a credit card. This tool automatically converts your issue or query into a ticket.

Ticketing software streamlines all conversations into one view, so you don’t have to switch between tabs or applications. Easily view current customer conversations and access past conversations and data to better support you.

Main features:

• Easily assign and prioritize tickets, and change status and properties for greater transparency.
• Get a single, easy-to-understand view of all customer queries across channels.
• Smooth collaboration between teams and agents directly from the ticketing interface.
• Monitor and track tickets with quick updates to improve problem resolution rates.
• Assign and route tickets received from multiple channels to the right agents and teams with workflow automation.
• An extensive knowledge base to help users find answers to frequently asked questions.
• Clear dashboards to monitor trends in real-time, detect potential bottlenecks and mitigate issues.
• Boost agent productivity with features like canned responses, call reminders, and customer follow-ups.
• Mobile application for Android and iOS to manage tickets on the go.

Freshdesk’s ticketing system integrates with over 650 applications, including billing software, CRM systems, and more. However, the free plan has limited features such as social media and email ticket management, knowledge base, and 1-click reporting. So, if your requirements are higher, try our paid plans starting at $15 per agent per month.

solar winds

SolarWinds ‘ free ticketing software provides automation and simplification to streamline incident management and ticketing. A central web interface for help desk management helps you manage end-user tickets and track the lifecycle of service requests from ticket generation to resolution.

Main features:

• This tool stores all data in a central location and associates multiple issues with a single issue.
• Faster ticket resolution and efficient support ticket management.
• Track ticket status and individual performance so you can understand how effective your help desk is.
• Reminders and alerts for SLA violations.
• Intuitive self-service and service request portal for customers.
• An extensive database containing answers to frequently asked questions reduces the volume of service requests.
• Automate ticket assignment and routing based on ticketing requirements.
• Automation features include asset management for software and hardware inventory.
• LDAP authentication and Active Directory.
• Easy login with no obligation or expiration date.
• Cross-platform: Available for Mac, Linux, and Windows.

SolarWinds’ free ticketing system is perfect for small businesses. If you’re a large company, you might want to try a Web Help Desk (WHD) .

fluent support

If you’re looking for effective, fluent, and fast ticketing software for WordPress, try Fluent Support . This makes your customer support more efficient and reliable, ensuring your customers are always happy.

Build a powerful help desk solution in WordPress with Fluent Support. This is a unique system with great features. It provides WordPress performance tracking, autoresponders, user information, product-based support, and more.

Main features:

• Easier ticket management by allowing agents to sort and filter variables to establish priorities.
• Agents can easily track their own progress and the number of tickets they have to encounter.
• This platform is a single page application (SPA) built using REST APIs and VueJS. Therefore, it is incredibly fast in an orderly environment.
• You can navigate to multiple pages without any delay.
• Enable automatic ticket assignment and priority-based responses.
• Internal memo to ensure efficient communication without repeating tasks or wasting time with repetitive replies.
• Custom fields like radio selections, checkboxes, WooCommerce orders, etc. help you collect more information.
• Integration with popular tools like Slack, Discord, and WhatsApp.

Other features include advanced filtering, unlimited tickets, priority management, activity logs, customized email notifications, and more.

open support

OpenSupports is a simple ticketing software that is free to download. You can easily access the source code on GitHub and even contribute as a developer if you want. You can choose whether your customers can generate tickets using a form or by simply logging in.

Main features:

• We currently support 10 languages, with more coming soon.
• Option to create articles about how-to guides or frequently asked questions (FAQs).
• It provides a flexible, responsive, and easy-to-use interface.
• Easy to use and clean admin panel to manage the tickets you receive.
• Search and filtering tools to efficiently find and distribute tickets.
• Custom answers to frequently asked questions.
• Improved responsibility management through different roles and authorities of staff members.

OpenSupport uses technologies such as NodeJS, React, PHP, MySQL, Redux, and Ruby to balance compatibility and modern development.

UV desk

UVdesk is a free, enterprise-level help desk ticketing system built on the standard PHP framework Symfony. Deliver PHP extensibility and adaptability for any use case to provide improved customer service.

Main features:

• You can customize your help desk to suit your requirements.
• Use branding that aligns with your organization or product/service.
• With the help of a knowledge base, you can provide the end user with the best possible explanation of the functionality and leave room for any doubts.
• By configuring your mailbox to turn incoming emails into helpdesk tickets, you can stay on top of potential customers and continue providing top-notch customer support.
• Work smarter and save your replies to make the most of your time.
• Use smart tools to hold, route, manage tickets, and distribute work.
• Easily manage your teams and agents, no matter the size of your organization.
• Workflow automation for repeated tasks.
• Easy to install and set up with just a few clicks via Softaculous.

This open source ticketing software is modular. So you can develop modules on top of it. You can also use, modify, and inspect the source code to make it suitable for your use case.

Spice Works

Start managing your help desk tasks and tickets effectively with Spiceworks ticketing software. This cloud-based software comes preconfigured for you, so you can get up and running quickly with no maintenance or server procurement required on your part.

Main features:

• Easily reply, accept tickets, add comments privately, and quickly close tickets using an intuitive interface.
• Custom fields make it easy to track tasks and tickets.
• Monitors, custom ticket attributes, ticket rules, and alerts simplify your job.
• The IT Help Desk provides reports with important information such as ticket updates and work.
• Start secure support sessions remotely and assist remote employees.
• Mobile app that provides the latest updates on your tickets with push notifications directly to your tablet or phone.
• Track projects and requests to improve customer support.
• Easy to set up in minutes. Just install the software and log in.
• Customizable user self-service portal.

Apart from the above, you can also integrate with Active Directory to automatically add, tag, and authenticate users.

Faveo

The web-based ticketing system Faveo is easy to install and use. It is a cost-effective solution for businesses, small businesses, and startups. There are two options for this. Either use an affordable cloud solution or host it directly on your own servers.

Main features:

• A built-in knowledge base allows organizations to share valuable information with customers and staff.
• Faveo can be heavily customized based on your business requirements.
• You can rebrand and change colors to match your company’s style and logo.
• Unlimited agents and priority support.

Faveo supports omnichannel integration with social media and email platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, MSG91, and Active Directory.

If you want more control and functionality, you can try out these top SaaS helpdesk solutions.

last word

With help desk ticketing software, you can increase employee productivity, problem resolution rates, save time and money, and improve the customer experience.

So, you can choose any of the above open source or free ticketing systems for your support team based on your business requirements, customized base, and number of agents.

Next, check out which help desk SaaS platform is right for your business.