Helpdesk & Ticketing

Last reviewed Aug 26, 2026 · 449 words

Support tickets are text, so a helpdesk is one of the cheapest things you can self-host: everything worth running in this category fits in 512 MB to 2 GB of RAM, on a VPS that costs less per month than one Zendesk agent seat. The trade is that you become responsible for the one feature that makes or breaks a helpdesk, and it is not the interface. It is email.

How to choose a helpdesk

Test email piping before anything else. A helpdesk earns its keep by turning inbound mail into tickets and threading replies correctly; a tool that mangles reply threading is worthless no matter how modern it looks. Every serious option here supports it, but the setup effort differs, so run one real conversation through your candidate before migrating.

Then decide how much system you want. If the job is "shared support inbox," a focused tool like osTicket or Libredesk is enough. If you are an IT department that also needs asset inventory, GLPI folds ticketing into ITIL-style service management with LDAP and a large plugin ecosystem. If you want omnichannel chat plus CRM, Erxes exists, but it is rated Hard at 2 GB and you should be sure you need all of it.

Finally weigh age against polish. This category splits between 2003-era PHP veterans and rewrites from 2021 onward. The veterans are stable and well documented but look dated; the rewrites (Libredesk, Peppermint, Frappe Helpdesk) have clean interfaces and short track records. Neither side wins outright.

Where to start

osTicket (3,897 stars, GPL-2.0, in production since 2003) is the safe pick: email and web-form ticket creation, SLA routing, canned responses, custom forms, and staff learn it in an afternoon. Its interface genuinely looks dated; nothing else about it is. GLPI (6,265 stars, also from 2003) is what I would hand an IT team, because tickets plus inventory in one system beats two disconnected tools. Libredesk (2,808 stars, Go, first released 2024) is the modern option that keeps operations simple: a single binary with shared inboxes, SLAs, and automation rules, with the caveat that the project is young.

Hi.Events is a different kind of ticket

One catalogue collision worth flagging: Hi.Events (4,000 stars) sells event tickets for concerts and conferences, with checkout and attendee management. Fine software, wrong shelf, and mixing it into a helpdesk shortlist wastes an evaluation slot.

For a first-timer, deploy osTicket. Twenty-three years of routing other people's support email is exactly the kind of boring reliability you want under the inbox your customers write to.