HN Explorer

Ask HN: Support SaaS

14 points by 3000 ↗ HN
hey,

im looking for some tool to handle support (tickets, email, live, KB etc) for my saas. whats everyone using or recommending? any one on HN run one?

grateful for suggestions.

have an awesome weekend!

26 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 53.1 ms ] thread
jebronie
Zammad (open source and self-hosted) for email tickets.
3000
nice, thanks!
sealeck
- Chatwoot - GitLab service desk - HubDesk.io
3000
nice ones, thanks
sunir
FreshDesk is pretty solid. Though their live chat is a bit weak. Olark is better (I worked there so I’m biased.)

Freshworks has a startup plan as well.

3000
thank you, startup plan is always welcome!
cmer
FreeScout is awesome and self hosted. Been using it for over a year and have been super happy.

Protip: use Gmail SMTP for ultimate deliverability. I personally have a local Postfix forwarding to Gmail. Works great because it keeps a queue and retries if there’s a problem. I found this solution more reliable.

3000
great tip. dont think i wanna self host though. will see, not decided yet.
auspex
You need to be careful using Google SMTP for business apps. It’s very easy to get your domain on spam lists.

I’d recommend moving to something like Mailgun or whatever as volume increases

ericpauley
For a long time when we didn't have much support volume we just used a google group that anyone doing tickets could access. This has the nice upside of being free.

We've used Teamwork Desk for the past few years and have been decently satisifed with it. It can be a little clunky at times and the help site feature has had some weird downtime, but for the most part it handles our small support workloads fine.

3000
will check it out, thank you for the suggestion
9woc
osTicket? Open-source and both self-hosted and cloud versions available.
pkrotich
I second this - but I’m biased! Thanks @9woc
jonathanbull
We went through about five different platforms for our SaaS (EmailOctopus) before settling on Help Scout. It’s excellent.
3000
thanks. your saas is on my list of signing up to later by the way :)
mooreds
We use Zendesk for tickets and email. Slack connect for live. Don't really have a KB, just a forum (nodebb) and docs (jekyll + asciidoc).
sidcool
I have heard great things about Zoho helpdesk ticketing system.
3000
ah yes, of course. thanks for the reminder!
aquark
We've used https://www.enchant.com/ for about a decade for email support .. it's great, does exactly what is is supposed to and doesn't add a bunch of 'cruft' on top. Had to check our volume, currently over 40,000 tickets in that time.

They do live chat too but we've never used that.

david_p
We’ve been using helpscout for the last 6 years, it’s good but we will be migrating to another service (to be defined) soon.

Reasons:

- they are expensive, and have announced a price increase next august

- they do not offer options to host data in europe

- they have no web ui for customers to track all their requests (helpscout is mail-only)

3000
thank you for the information, specially the euro thing.