With nearly 3,900 GitHub stars, over 1,800 forks, and continuous development since 2013 culminating in the v1.18.4 release in June 2026, osTicket remains one of the most deployed open-source help desk systems worldwide, trusted by organizations from small businesses to universities and government agencies. The PHP backend on Apache or IIS with MySQL stores every ticket, response, and attachment while the web interface provides separate agent and customer portal views with role-based access control across departments, teams, and individual agents. Customers submit tickets through web forms, email piping, or phone-entry by agents, and configurable ticket filters automatically route incoming requests to the correct department, assign agents or teams, set priority levels, apply SLA plans, and trigger canned responses based on matching criteria including custom field values. Agent collision avoidance locks tickets during response composition to prevent duplicate replies, while SLA plans with business hour schedules track due dates and escalate overdue tickets automatically. Custom forms and fields let organizations capture structured data specific to each help topic — from IT asset tags to billing account numbers — with configurable required and internal-only visibility. The advanced search system with saved queries and CSV export enables reporting across all ticket metadata and custom fields. The customer portal provides ticket tracking, profile management, and knowledge base access. OAuth2 plugin support enables modern email authentication with Microsoft 365 and Google. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. GPL-2.0 licensed.