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osTicket
54 · CautionVeteran PHP support-ticket system that routes inquiries from email, web forms and phone.
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Directory / Helpdesk & live chat / osTicket
osTicket
Veteran PHP support-ticket system that routes inquiries from email, web forms and phone.
Will it still be around?
Health 54/100 · Caution
Activity, bus factor and issue responsiveness. Breakdown
Alternative to
Savings proposal
A 25-agent team on Zendesk Suite Professional pays about $2,875 a month. Self-hosting osTicket costs about $132 a month to run plus $480 to set up, so it pays for itself in month 1 and saves about $98,268 over three years.
List price: Zendesk Suite Professional, billed annually. Marked most popular. Suite Team is $55 per agent. Source, checked 2026-10-07.
Saved over 3 years
$98,268
Pays for itself
Month 1
Saved in year one
$32,436
Each month
$2,875 → $132
Show as a table
| Month | Zendesk | Self-hosted | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Today | $0 | $480 | −$480 |
| Month 3 | $8,625 | $876 | $7,749 |
| Month 6 | $17,250 | $1,272 | $15,978 |
| Month 9 | $25,875 | $1,668 | $24,207 |
| Month 12 | $34,500 | $2,064 | $32,436 |
| Month 18 | $51,750 | $2,856 | $48,894 |
| Month 24 | $69,000 | $3,648 | $65,352 |
| Month 30 | $86,250 | $4,440 | $81,810 |
| Month 36 | $103,500 | $5,232 | $98,268 |
Assumptions you can change
Self-hosting osTicket usually means one small container and a database. Hours are for one engineer; the server cost is a typical cloud VPS with backups and grows with the number of people using it.
Not included: paid editions or features of osTicket (see What's free?), large data migrations, and compliance work. All amounts in US dollars at list price; your negotiated price may differ.
Health score: 54/100
Activity45% weight
75/100
- Last commit 112 days ago (76/100).
- 81 commits in the past 12 months (83/100).
- 4 releases in the past 12 months (67/100).
Bus factor30% weight
13/100
- Top contributor wrote 90% of the last 81 commits (past 12 months).
- 8 people authored those commits.
Responsiveness25% weight
64/100
- 79% of all issues are closed (880 open, 3246 closed) (81/100).
- 16 of 30 recent issues got a reply or were closed (53/100).
Score v2. How the health score works.
License
GNU General Public License v2.0 · Open source (copyleft)
OSI-approved license that requires sharing changes under the same license when you distribute (AGPL: also when you offer it over a network).
Detected by GitHub as GPL-2.0.
What's free?
Enterprise features many open-core projects keep for paid plans.
| Feature | Self-hosted, free? |
|---|---|
| SSO (SAML) | Unknown |
| SSO (OIDC) | Unknown |
| SCIM provisioning | Unknown |
| Audit logs | Unknown |
| Role-based access control | Unknown |
| Multi-tenancy | Unknown |
We haven't verified which of these features are free for this project yet.
GitHub metrics
| Stars | 4.0k | Forks | 1.8k |
|---|---|---|---|
| Last commit | 4 months ago | Commits, 12 months | 81 |
| Releases, 12 months | 4 | Last release | 4 months ago |
| Contributors | 121 | Active authors | 8 in last 81 commits |
| Open issues | 880 | Closed issues | 3.2k |
Snapshot from 2026-10-08.