The Helpdesk Schools Can Actually Afford.
IT, housing, dining, facilities, admissions, and the registrar all need a ticketing system.
Per-agent pricing means choosing who gets one.
Only IT gets a helpdesk. Everyone else gets a shared inbox.
At a typical university, IT handles trouble tickets. Housing handles maintenance requests. Dining handles complaints. Facilities handles work orders. Admissions handles prospective student inquiries. The registrar handles enrollment issues.
Every one of those departments needs a tracking system. With per-agent pricing, only IT can justify the cost. Everyone else uses email, spreadsheets, or paper forms. Requests get lost. Follow-ups fall through. Nobody has a clear picture of what’s open, what’s overdue, or who’s responsible.
osTicket Awesome is a flat annual fee with unlimited agents. Every department gets a seat. Every staff member who handles requests gets access. The cost is the same whether you have 5 agents or 50.
Connects to the directory you already run.
osTicket Awesome ships with LDAP and Active Directory integration pre-installed. Students, faculty, and staff authenticate with their existing campus credentials. No separate accounts to create or manage. No password reset tickets on day one.
For institutions using Microsoft 365, the Microsoft OpenID Connect plugin is also pre-installed. Single sign-on works out of the box.
When a student submits a ticket through the client portal, they log in with the same credentials they use for everything else on campus. One less password to forget. One less account for IT to provision.
IT trouble tickets. Housing maintenance. Dining feedback. One system.
osTicket Awesome’s custom help topics and intake forms let you build department-specific workflows within a single installation.
IT Help Desk
Password resets, network issues, software requests, lab equipment problems. Auto-route by issue type. LDAP lookup populates the student’s name and ID automatically.
Housing and Residence Life
Maintenance requests with room number, building, and urgency fields. Priority coloring lets supervisors triage safety issues at a glance.
Facilities Management
Work orders from 30 buildings routed to regional maintenance teams. Keyboard shortcuts let dispatchers process requests twice as fast.
Admissions
Prospective student inquiries through a branded client portal. Parents and applicants see a professional interface, not a form from 2008.
Registrar
Enrollment issues, transcript requests, grade disputes. Custom forms capture the specific fields each request type needs.
Dining Services
Feedback, allergy reports, catering requests. Each with its own intake form and routing rules.
Each department sees only their own queue. Custom SLA targets ensure housing safety issues get faster response than dining feedback. One installation, one annual cost, every department covered.
Your international students don’t have to struggle with the interface.
osTicket Awesome ships with 49 language packs pre-installed, including full right-to-left support for Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Urdu. The client portal displays in the student’s preferred language.
For universities with significant international enrollment, this is the difference between a support system students can use independently and one that generates its own support tickets because nobody can read the interface.
90 custom translation keys per language pack let you tailor terminology to your institution. “Ticket” becomes “Request” or “Case.” “Department” becomes “Office.”
Student records. Faculty data. Your servers.
Support tickets at a university contain student IDs, enrollment information, housing assignments, financial aid details, and sometimes medical or disability accommodation data. For institutions subject to FERPA, storing that in a cloud vendor’s system introduces third-party access risks and complicates compliance.
osTicket Awesome is self-hosted on your campus infrastructure. The data never leaves your network. You control the encryption, access, backups, and retention. No Data Processing Agreements to negotiate with a SaaS vendor. No third-party subprocessors handling your students’ information.
Universities and institutions already trust osTicket Awesome.
osTicket Awesome is already running at Oxford, Cambridge, Columbia, Ohio State, Florida A&M, the University of Wisconsin, Colorado State, LSU, the University of Zurich, BITS Pilani, and dozens more. The open-source osTicket engine underneath powers even more, including IIT Bombay, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, and the University of Kansas.
Four Oxford colleges and counting.
Balliol, Hertford, Linacre, and New College each adopted osTicket Awesome independently. No top-down procurement. No campus-wide mandate. Four separate colleges found the same solution on their own.
What your institution saves.
| Staff | osTicket Awesome | Zendesk Suite Team | Freshdesk Pro |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | From $149/yr | $6,600/yr | $5,880/yr |
| 25 | From $149/yr | $16,500/yr | $14,700/yr |
| 50 | From $149/yr | $33,000/yr | $29,400/yr |
| 100 | From $149/yr | $66,000/yr | $58,800/yr |
At 25 staff across all departments, the annual savings over Zendesk alone would fund the helpdesk for over a century.
Questions from education IT teams
Yes. See our educational discount page for details and eligibility.
Yes. The client portal is separate from the staff panel. Students, parents, and faculty submit tickets through the portal using their campus credentials (via LDAP or SSO) or as guests. They don’t need agent accounts.
Yes. osTicket Awesome can serve as the primary helpdesk or as a supplementary system for non-IT departments. Some institutions run IT on ServiceNow or Jira Service Management and use osTicket Awesome for housing, facilities, dining, and admissions at a fraction of the cost.
Yes. Each department gets its own queue, custom intake forms, help topics, SLA targets, and agent assignments. Agents see only the departments they’re assigned to.
osTicket Awesome’s responsive design works across desktop, tablet, and mobile. The client portal is built with semantic HTML. For institutions with specific WCAG requirements, full source code access means you can audit and modify as needed.
Yes. 30 days, no questions asked.