osTicket and OTRS - a comparison

While I have been a fan of OTRS for many years and like the interface, reporting and usability of it, I recently chanced across osTicket (from the TV series Mr Robot). It looked interesting and a client I have wants an internal ticket management system (they had also seen it). After a bit of to and fro, they agreed to some research time and I set up osTicket.

My usual server OS is Ubuntu's latest LTS. In this case, 16.04LTS. The problem is, it ships with PHP7, and osTicket doesn't play nicely with that. There is a good tutorial over on Chubbable that's worth checking out: https://chubbable.com/osticket-install-guide/2#ubuntu-based

Have a look at that if you want to install it - it's pretty straightforward.

So my impression of osTicket is that its pretty good. The interface is reasonable intuitive and I've set it up at home to manage the stuff I'm going (but mostly just to play with it). There is a client interface and an agent interface. The Agent interface gives you access to tickets and tasks. Tickets are the top level action, tasks are a part of tickets. In this way, some basic project management can be applied. Here are a few different views that are available:

osTicket Dashboard

osTicket Task view - got some work to do on NFS No Limits!

osTicket Tickets

You can see in the Tickets there is an NFS No Limits ticket. Under the tasks panel, you can see I've broken this down further into the things I need to do with that Ticket. I imagine with multiple agents, the tasks could be spread around.

So why not migrate to osTicket? The ability to capture time in osTicket seems to be hideously complicated to implement. Perhaps I need to do more research into that, but in OTRS its pretty straightforward. For a company just interested in getting things done, then the time capture isn't so important, but for us - its a big part of the job being completed. Reporting is still something I need to investigate. The reporting in OTRS is great (once you get your head around it) so I'll be interested to play with osTicket a bit more and see how it goes. Stay tuned for more updates...!