osTicket

Last reviewed Sep 13, 2026 · 759 words

osTicket costs nothing per agent, which is the number that keeps a 2003-vintage PHP help desk in production at thousands of small organisations while Zendesk charges per seat per month. Email comes in, a ticket exists, an agent replies from the web and the customer gets a threaded email back. It has done that reliably for over 20 years, and it looks like it. Whether the interface bothers you is the entire decision.

What you get for the ugliness

More than the screenshots suggest. Tickets arrive from email, a web form, or the REST-style API, and get routed by help topic to departments and teams. SLA plans put a due date on every ticket and flag overdue ones. Canned responses, custom forms and custom fields per help topic, internal notes invisible to the customer, ticket merging, a customer portal with a knowledge base, and LDAP or Active Directory login for staff through the official plugin. The workflow is simple enough that a new agent is productive in an afternoon, which the pros list calls "easy for staff to learn" and which matters more than the UI the day you onboard a volunteer.

The install is classic PHP plus MariaDB

osTicket runs on PHP with MySQL or MariaDB and wants about 512 MB of RAM for a small team. Bare-metal is the documented path: unzip the release into the web root, create the database, walk through the web installer, then delete the setup/ directory and make include/ost-config.php read-only, both of which the installer nags you about for good reason. Docker images are community-maintained; the one under the osticket namespace on Docker Hub is the usual choice, and it takes the database connection and admin account as environment variables. Whichever route, put it behind a reverse proxy with TLS, because agent logins and customer data cross this thing all day.

Email fetch is the part that breaks

Inbound mail is the product, and it depends on a loop that most people configure wrong the first time. osTicket polls your support mailbox over IMAP or POP3, or accepts mail piped in from a local MTA. The polling only happens when the cron job runs, and by default that means "auto-cron", which fires when a staff member loads a page. On a quiet weekend that is nobody, and tickets sit in the mailbox. Disable auto-cron and run the real one:

*/5 * * * * www-data php /var/www/osticket/api/cron.php

Outbound mail needs a working SMTP relay, and osTicket will happily let you save a broken one. Send a test ticket to yourself from an outside address, reply from the agent view, and confirm the round trip before opening it to customers. The ticketing category covers what the newer tools do differently here, and mostly the answer is "the same, with a nicer settings page".

Upgrades and plugins want care

Upgrades are a file replacement followed by a visit to the web upgrader, which migrates the database schema. Back up the database first, every time. Plugins ship as .phar files dropped into include/plugins/; the LDAP one and the S3 attachment storage one are the two most installs need. The community is large but the core team is small, so read the forum before a major version jump.

When a newer help desk is the better pick

Zammad is the modern rival: chat channels, a much better agent interface, proper full-text search, and a heavier stack with Elasticsearch and PostgreSQL that wants 4 GB of RAM where osTicket wants a fraction of that. FreeScout is the middle option, a shared-inbox style tool that is lighter than Zammad and prettier than osTicket. If your support is email-only and your agents are few, osTicket loses nothing that matters. If you want live chat, social channels or a searchable history across 100,000 tickets, pick Zammad. Anyone leaving a paid tool should read the Zendesk alternatives page before deciding.

What I'd do

For a small team, a club, or an IT department of three, osTicket behind Caddy, real cron every 5 minutes, IMAP fetch from a dedicated support mailbox, nightly database dump. Set up help topics and one SLA before inviting anyone. Accept the interface; the people using it stop noticing within a week. If you have the RAM and a real need for chat, Zammad is worth its weight. Otherwise this is the boring, correct answer it has been for two decades.