OTRS

Puntos a favor

I love the ticket handling and speed of the interface. It's basic layout offers the basics you need to get up and running with a ticketing system.

Puntos en contra

The support is little to non-existent but that is expected with the free tier.

Puntos a favor

I've been using OTRS for quite a few years now, and it's an excellent piece of software that makes my life as a sysadmin/support desk guy easier. OTRS understands ITIL, end users and IT pros, and the software supports that. You can link tickets, make internal notes, make FAQs, paste images into text fields, send e-mails, etc. You can also do templates, customize columns, set alerts when things take too long, etc. It's really nice. It even works with our ADFS server, which is excpected of a tool like this, but still. In short, OTRS is versatlize and customizeable.

Puntos en contra

There have been minor (cosmetic) bugs here and there, every now and then, which are slightly annoying. Often you can fix these things yourself, but OTRS's configuration is very complex and requires some insight and experience. So in the end, you're gonna have to contact support or read the extensive manual. But buth those options work.

Puntos a favor

I used it for sometime in one of my assignments. It was a very basic tool with minimum customization. It just does its job and do not provide advanced features of ITIL framework. Reporting was not effective and so was its UI. We replaced this with more advanced CA Servicedesk. However as a freeware, it was good for initial use.

Puntos en contra

It is basic application and nothing much can be expected put of this. Ours is a ITIL compliant organization and need a more robust application.

Puntos a favor

Highly customizable. Perl backend "makes sense" and isn't opaque like some designs. It runs as a set of CGI, so that allows it to be wedged into most any webserver environment. We found it simple to run within an Apache / Linux environment.

Puntos en contra

The CGI-based design is relatively inefficient and can be sluggish without making some optimizations on the webserver side -- mod_perl in our case (relatively complicated). Docs are a bit sparse, though customer service is responsive.

Puntos a favor

The provided scalability really help us. As a new demand appears, we can set the software to fit to this new need. This is really a power way to work with software.

Puntos en contra

When I send some e-mail to, which is related to some active ticket, the emails go agrupated, so for any new e-mail sent, all the previous text are rewritten. In some tickets, there are a lot of du- or tri or quadri-plicated emails. I know this is just something I can solve by deleting the text before sendind it to OTRS, but, it would be amazing if OTRS could append only the new text to the ticket.