The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.
Finding the best suitable product to solve your needs can be challenging with the product landscape that exists today. What features do you need? How is it aligned with your requirements and workflows? How does the pricing meet our budget and how does that scale over time?
There are many different ticketing solutions integrated with Slack that focus on delivering everything from knowledge bases, automated answers and help desk functionality.
The two leading products that are Slack native and deeply integrated to users conversations (conversation based ticketing) is Halp and Suptask.
Halp
The product was originally named BubbleIQ and focused on mapping Zendesk tickets into Slack where users could manage them directly in their Slack channels. Halp provides their product on Slack and Microsoft Teams with a web interface for both administrational and common ticketing tasks.
Halp was acquired by Atlassian in 2019, going away from a smaller company and instead becoming a part of a larger cooperation.
Halp’s product is somewhat segregated as it’s not a one-to-one relationship with how the product user flows works in Slack compared to Microsoft Teams. Hence they have focused on the web interface that supports a set of product functions, covering up for feature gaps which primarily their product in Microsoft Teams has (which is primarily due to Microsoft Teams itself).
The business model that Halp has adopted comes from the traditional ticketing vendors, where you pay per agent e.g for each user that will remediate / respond to tickets. Running a ticketing system on Slack, this model can be a bit of a danger as every person that gets invited to a responder (triage) channel will be charged for.
Suptask
Suptask released its product in 2021 for Slack, with a vision to provide a Slack-native ticketing management system that allowed users to never have to leave Slack for any ticketing tasks. Suptask provides a web interface only for setting up and activating the product.
As Suptask has a Slack-native vision, it is not delivering its services on Microsoft Teams. Primarily because of Microsoft Teams not allowing for smooth user workflows as Slack does, hence preventing a great experience for users.
On a feature level, Suptask offers everything you need when it comes to ticketing management. Instead of forcing you in to a secondary web interface, Suptask have solved many of the common tasks you perform directly in Slack. Integrated search of tickets and a solid listview with an overview of all your tickets and filtering capabilities.
Suptask business model differs compared to Halp as it have focused on how modern ticketing systems works and how teams are cooperating. Suptask does not adopt the old traditional model with agents, you are free to use as many users as you want to respond and remediate tickets.
As for good alternatives to Halp, there aren’t that many except for Suptask. If you want a ticketing system purely on Slack I believe it is worth comparing them both to make sure it fits your need.
