osTicket
Open-source help desk ticketing system. Routes emails, web forms, and phone requests into a unified agent workspace. Self-hosted, PHP, GPL-2.0.
What is osTicket
osTicket is a widely-used open source support ticket system. It integrates inquiries created via email, phone, and web forms into a single multi-user web interface, so agents can manage, organise, and archive every support request and response in one place. Built in PHP and released under the GPL-2.0 license, it has been in active development for over a decade and is one of the most popular self-hosted alternatives to commercial help desk suites like Zendesk, Freshdesk, and Help Scout.
Key features
- Unified ticket queue: Every customer request — whether it arrives by email, web form, or API — lands in a ticket queue where agents can reply, add internal notes, transfer between departments, and see when another agent is already viewing the same ticket to avoid double answers.
- Ticket filters and auto-responses: A rules engine lets you route tickets to specific departments and teams, set priorities, trigger canned auto-responses, and escalate issues without writing code.
- Help topics and custom forms: Build per-department intake forms that capture the exact fields you need (product, version, environment, attachments) before a ticket is even opened.
- SLA plans and reporting: Define service-level agreements with grace periods per department and priority, then measure response and resolution times with the built-in reports and exports.
- Knowledge base, tasks, and collaboration: A public and internal knowledge base, lightweight agent tasks, canned responses, and a plugin and theme system for extending the interface.
Self-hosting and how it compares
osTicket runs on a standard LAMP-style stack: PHP 8.2–8.4 with the mysqli extension, MySQL 5.5 or later (MariaDB works), and Apache or IIS. Deployment is a git clone followed by php manage.php deploy --setup /path, with git pull and a redeploy for upgrades. There is no database abstraction layer to configure, and no official Docker image — community images exist.
Compared to Zendesk, Freshdesk, or Help Scout, you avoid per-agent monthly fees and keep full control of customer data, but you take on updates, backups, and uptime yourself, and you miss the AI assistants, chat widgets, and marketplace integrations those suites bundle. For teams that want a capable, battle-tested help desk without the SaaS price tag, osTicket is still the default open source choice.
