Mojo Helpdesk vs osTicket

Mojo Helpdesk

A simple, inexpensive per-agent help desk with a real K-12 following, a light asset module with check-in/check-out, and a deliberate pitch that you can go live in days because it does not depend on your SIS.

Where Mojo Helpdesk is strong

• ● The lowest published per-agent entry price on most K-12 help-desk shortlists, with the numbers on the page rather than behind a demo request.
• ● An explicit 25% education and non-profit discount, published as a percentage you can actually compute against.
• ● A genuine asset module included with the help desk rather than sold as a separate product: laptops, tablets, servers, and software licenses, with repairs and incidents logged against each item.
• ● Check-in and check-out with return due dates and automated reminders, plus a live view of what is out and what is overdue — closer to a circulation desk than most generic ticketing tools get.
• ● Warranty and license contract expiry tracking with renewal reminders ahead of the date.
• ● Broad sign-in support for districts: Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, ClassLink, Active Directory, LDAP, and other SAML providers, with staff and department import from Google Workspace or Microsoft 365.

What to check before you buy

• Hosted SaaS only — no self-hosted or on-premises edition, so the software cannot be run on district infrastructure or inspected independently.

  Basis: Only cloud plans appear on the vendor's pricing page; no self-host or source distribution is published.

• Per-agent pricing with hard agent caps per plan. A district with a handful of technicians and tens of thousands of devices pays on the axis it has least of, and growing past 25 agents forces a tier change.

  Basis: Vendor pricing page states $14/$24/$34 per agent per month with 25-agent and 100-agent maximums on the lower two plans.

• The education discount is narrower than it first reads: 25% applies only to Business and Enterprise yearly subscriptions, not to the entry Team plan, and the vendor states discounts do not stack.

  Basis: Stated in those terms on Mojo Helpdesk's pricing page.

• No SIS or rostering connector. Mojo markets 'no SIS dependency' as a launch advantage, which is honest positioning but means students, enrollments, and mid-year transfers are not sourced from the system of record.

  Basis: Mojo's education page names Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, ClassLink, AD, LDAP, and SAML for sign-in and user import, and no SIS vendor connector; the K-12 pages present rapid launch without SIS as a benefit.

• The asset module is a light inventory with custody attached, not a 1:1 program: no parent-signed device agreement, no loaner pool as a managed concept, no lost or stolen lifecycle with police report, and no attestation campaign.

  Basis: Absent from Mojo's published asset management page, which covers tracking, check-out with due dates, and renewal reminders.

• No MDM ingest and no documented barcode or QR scanning. Device records are maintained inside Mojo rather than reconciled against Google Admin, Intune, or Jamf, and an August rollout or spring audit measured in thousands of devices has to be typed rather than scanned.

  Basis: No Google Admin, Intune, or Jamf device-sync connector is published on the vendor site, and no scanning capability appears on the asset management page.

• No student fee assessment, no family balances, no purchase orders, no parts stock consumed by repairs, and no funding-source tracking for ESSER, Title, or E-Rate money.

  Basis: None of these concepts appear in Mojo's published product documentation.

• It consumes SSO but is not an identity provider — it signs users in from Google, Microsoft, ClassLink, or a SAML source rather than issuing SAML or OIDC to your other vendors.

  Basis: SSO is described throughout as sign-in into Mojo from a district's existing provider.

How Chalk compares with Mojo Helpdesk →

osTicket

The open-source ticketing system a lot of school districts already quietly run — GPL2, free, self-hosted on a LAMP stack, and very good at tickets. The comparison with Chalk is about scope, not cost.

Where osTicket is strong

• ● Genuinely free and genuinely open source under GPL2 — no seat cap, no ticket cap, no trial clock, and the source is yours to read, patch, and keep running.
• ● One of the longest-running and most widely deployed ticketing systems anywhere, which means a large body of community documentation, forum answers, and people who have solved your problem already.
• ● A deep, well-worn ticketing core: custom fields and forms, custom columns and queues, ticket filters and routing, help topics, SLA plans, agent collision avoidance, assign/transfer/referral, auto-responders, internal tasks, and advanced search with CSV export.
• ● A customer portal and knowledge base for self-service, so end users can check status and find answers without opening a ticket.
• ● An official OAuth2 plugin covering Microsoft, Google, and Okta sign-in for both agents and end users, plus modern OAuth email authentication for system mailboxes — which matters now that basic auth is gone from Microsoft and Google mail.
• ● A working plugin surface and developer documentation: S3 attachment storage, audit logging, two-factor authentication, password policies, an API, and published database ERDs.

What to check before you buy

• No asset or inventory management at all. osTicket is a ticketing system — there is no device record, so a ticket cannot tell you which machine the student is holding, what its serial is, or whether it is under warranty.

  Basis: Asset and inventory management appear nowhere in osTicket's feature list or documentation index.

• No 1:1 device circulation: no check-out to a student with a due date, no overdue workflow, no parent-signed agreement, no loaner pool, and no lost or stolen lifecycle — and no native mobile app or barcode scanning to run a rollout or an audit with.

  Basis: There is no asset model in the product for these workflows to attach to, and the documentation has no mobile application section.

• No SIS or rostering integration — no OneRoster, Clever, ClassLink, PowerSchool, Infinite Campus, or Skyward — and no student, guardian, or enrollment concepts. Users are created by sign-in or import, not sourced from the system of record.

  Basis: No SIS connector exists in osTicket's plugin set or documentation.

• No ChromeOS, Google Admin, Intune, or Jamf ingest, so nothing reconciles anything against what the fleet actually reports.

  Basis: No MDM connector appears in the plugin listing or documentation.

• No repairs with parts stock, no student fee assessment or family balances, no purchase orders, no warranty tracking, and no funding-source reporting for ESSER, Title, or E-Rate money.

  Basis: All absent from the published feature list and documentation.

• SSO is consumed, not issued, and SAML is not covered by an official plugin — the supported providers are Microsoft, Google, and Okta over OAuth2, with SAML available only through an unofficial community plugin on GitHub.

  Basis: osTicket's OAuth2 documentation names Microsoft, Google, and Okta; the SAML plugin in circulation is a third-party repository, not a vendor-maintained one.

• Reporting is thin. There is a dashboard tab, but no reporting or analytics section in the documentation, so trend reporting past ticket exports usually means querying MySQL yourself.

  Basis: The documentation index has no dedicated reporting or analytics section.

• You operate a LAMP stack, not an application. PHP 8.2–8.4 plus MySQL plus a web server means patching three moving parts, and a PHP major-version bump is a real upgrade project rather than replacing one file.

  Basis: Requirements published on osTicket's download page and repository.

How Chalk compares with osTicket →

The third option: Chalk

If you are weighing Mojo Helpdesk against osTicket, Chalk belongs on the same shortlist. It is the open-source K-12 IT stack: device inventory that fills itself in from Google Admin, Intune, and Jamf against a roster synced from your SIS, a 1:1 circulation desk with agreements and fees, repairs with parts and costs, a help desk that already knows who is asking, and a built-in SAML/OIDC identity provider.

• ✓ Self-host it free forever under AGPL-3.0 — the entire feature set, one binary, your infrastructure — or use the hosted version, priced by fleet size with no per-seat or per-student fees and the price ladder published.
• ✓ Built only for K-12: students, buildings, custody, funding sources, and ChromeOS auto-update expiration are native concepts, not custom fields.
• ✓ Writes back to Google Admin as a reviewed diff — every OU move, disable, and deprovision previewed before it executes — and serves a OneRoster 1.1 API so other district systems can pull the roster from Chalk.
• ✓ Fees are assessed and tracked without touching payment cards, keeping the asset system out of your PCI scope.