[reitanqild]

Nice work and thanks for sharing! And don't care about the PHP haters here.

For those who wants to go with hosted anyway, I'd recommend looking into Freshdesk instead of Zendesk.

Some reasons:

* Free tier up to three users

* Cheaper licenses once you leave the free tier. (IIRC)

* More features included by default in the free and lowest tiers. (IIRC)

Just be aware that a friendly Indian (or so I think) will call to try to upsell you : )

[darkvertex]

We use Freshdesk's "FreshService" ticket system at my workplace and the way it handles replies in one ticket from non-agents is absolute garbage.

You make a ticket by email, it adds to the system, a support agent is assigned to it, so far so good... then a developer with access to see the ticket goes to the ticket page and adds a helpful reply, except the ticket creator never hears about it. It's registered on the ticket web UI, but the creator of the ticket is ONLY notified of the responses by the support agent only. This sucks big time (and AFAIK is not configurable.)

Also god forbid someone uses email (or an email alias you're part of) to make the ticket and you accidentally do Reply All so your reply creates a brand new ticket just for you as opposed to appearing as a response in the initial ticket. It's so dumb. (You can get a ticket ID to put in a brand new email and then your reply would be registered but you need to know the ticket number first AND it still suffers the same issue that if you are not the support agent your reply is registered but never notified to the ticket creator.)

If your support is always 1-to-1 then by all means Freshservice is fine, though.

[vijayfreshdesk]

Hi Darkvertex. Sorry you had this experience with FS, but I blv you might have missed out some of the configurations in FS, which is why you feel the confusion. First off all, we dont block or restrict the developers from replying. While replying to the ticket, all you need to do is, toggle the option - Private/Public comment. For email replies this is very much configurable from your Admin > Observer rule. Create a rule to add a Public Note instead of a Private Note. If the reply is going to be via Email. If its going to be via the Ticket page itself, use the toggle below and change the reply to public. As for your 2nd point, we dont recommend using Alias emails because distribution list as Support or Helpdesk Email is a wrong method and has no accountability and hence we suggest using a proper support mailbox. This has been clearly mentioned in our Solution articles too, when you setup the Support mailbox. We suggest using a proper mailbox and use it in the system. Its just you need to setup the product in right manner, which will help you achieve you Support/Helpdesk model in the right way. If you need any assistance, we are more than happy to assist you

Thanks Vijay Freshservice Support

[brazzledazzle]

They should make it crystal clear that it doesn't send to the customer. That is garbage. But it makes sense if you think about it since you're likely paying per-agent. They don't want other users to workaround the licensing and act as agents since that's how they make money.

[reitanqild]

Ok, that's good feedback! I haven't used it wnough to notice. Thanks a lot.

[debaserab2]

I recently evaluated this space for my startup's needs. We ended up going with Uservoice because it seemed to be more "product focused". As we grow we can opt-in to the different uservoice products that focus specifically on more product management (things like idea aggregation/voting, feedback forums, roadmapping)

Our support volume is manageable by just a few agents. If we needed to manage teams of agents and different support channels, freshdesk or zendesk might have won out as they seem to be stronger in that area.

That said, you can't beat a free tier if all you need is a basic ticketing system. Just thought I'd share some of the other options out there.

[themartorana]

PHP is fine. How do you feel about Drupal haters?

[debaserab2]

Some of the Drupal hate I would say is a little more justified.

Saying this as someone who inherited several drupal projects that would have benefited greatly if they were coded from scratch (well, with standard library/frameworks) instead of "done the drupal way".

[reitanqild]

I don't know enough to say. I though most of the the Drupal hate was because it was coded in PHP I used it once and found the learning curve steep but concluded it was just me.