Three free open source ticket systems, three different personalities. Faveo is the modern Laravel-based helpdesk, osTicket is the classic lightweight workhorse, and GLPI is the heavyweight ITSM suite with deep asset management. The best one is the one that matches your actual job.
Ask the internet which free ticket system is best and you will get three fan clubs shouting. The truth is quieter: Faveo, osTicket and GLPI are all free, open source and self-hosted - and all three will work. They differ in what they were born to do. Choose by matching the tool to your office's real work, and you will be happy with any of them. Choose by feature-count bragging, and you will install twice.
Faveo Helpdesk is the modern one of the three - built on the Laravel framework by Ladybird Web Solution in India, designed for startups and SMEs, with a clean interface, email to ticket, departments, SLA management and a commercial ladder (Pro and Cloud editions, premium support) behind the free Community Edition for teams that later want vendor backing.
osTicket is the veteran - a widely used, completely free PHP ticket system that has served small teams for years. It covers tickets, email piping, departments, SLA plans and canned responses with almost no fuss and very modest server needs. Its interface feels plainer and older, because it is - and for many teams that plainness is a virtue.
GLPI is the heavyweight from France - an open source ITSM suite where the helpdesk is only one part. Its famous strength is asset management: computers, software, licences, contracts and inventory, tied to the tickets about them. If your job is IT asset control with tickets attached, GLPI is playing a different, bigger sport.
Give each tool its honest crown. Faveo wins on the modern helpdesk experience - a fresher interface agents take to quickly, a feature set shaped for customer and office support, and a vendor standing behind the product family if the desk becomes critical. osTicket wins on simplicity and lightness - the fastest install of the three, the smallest appetite for server resources, and an interface a non-technical agent understands in one sitting. GLPI wins on depth - nothing else free connects tickets to a full inventory of machines, software and contracts the way GLPI does.
Notice none of these crowns is about ticket handling itself. All three create, assign, track and close tickets properly. The differences live around the edges - and the edges are where your decision should come from.
Honesty about costs, too. GLPI's depth is heavy - more server, more configuration, and a learning curve that can swallow a small team's week; offices that only wanted a ticket queue end up maintaining an ITSM platform. osTicket's age shows - the interface looks dated to staff used to modern apps, and while the community is large, there is no vendor selling you a supported edition with a phone number attached; some advanced needs mean plugins and tinkering. Faveo's ladder is commercial - the free core is complete for ticketing, but the newest extras, premium support and AI-assisted features sit in paid plans, so a growing team may one day face a buying decision the other two never present.
All three share one cost equally: self-hosting. Updates, backups and security are yours on every one of them.
Three questions settle the choice for most small offices:
Still torn between two? Do not debate for a month - install both on a test server and run each for one real week with real tickets from real users. Free software makes this cheap; the only investment is a few hours. At the end of the week ask the agents one question: which queue did you open without being told to? The system the team opens on its own is the system that will still be alive in a year. The loser gets uninstalled, and you have lost nothing but gained certainty.
The video introduces Faveo Helpdesk and shows its setup on screen - watch it to see the Faveo side of this comparison with your own eyes before the trial week.
Watch Full VideoosTicket is famously the lightest and quickest install of the three, and Faveo is close behind on any standard Linux PHP and MySQL stack. GLPI asks the most of you - more configuration and a heavier platform - because it is a full ITSM and asset suite, not just a ticket queue.
GLPI, and it is not close. Asset inventory - computers, software, licences and contracts linked to tickets - is GLPI's home ground. Faveo and osTicket focus on the support desk itself; Faveo's wider product family sells service desk and asset features, but the free helpdesk core is a ticketing tool first.
Yes, but it is work - tickets and user history do not move between systems with one click, so expect a cutover where the old system becomes a read-only archive and new tickets start in the new system. That is exactly why a one week real trial before committing the whole office is worth the small effort.