Comparison
Chalk vs 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.
What both do well
- Both are open source and free to self-host — osTicket under GPL2, Chalk under AGPL-3.0 — and in both cases the district owns the code, the database, and the backups outright, with no vendor able to switch it off.
- Both cover the help-desk fundamentals honestly: email-to-ticket, a self-service portal, knowledge base, SLAs, routing and filters, custom fields and forms, saved queues, and an API.
- Both let a district start without a purchase order, a demo call, or a sales cycle — download it and try it on a spare server this afternoon.
- osTicket's install base, community, and years of production hardening are far larger than Chalk's, and its ticketing configurability is deeper in places — we would rather say that than pretend otherwise.
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 osTicket
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Where Chalk pulls ahead
- This is not a price argument and we will not pretend it is. osTicket is free, self-hostable, and open source; so is Chalk's self-hosted build, which is free forever under AGPL-3.0. The difference is scope.
- osTicket is tickets. Chalk is tickets plus the device inventory, the 1:1 circulation desk, repairs and parts, SIS rostering, and a built-in identity provider — one database, so a ticket already knows the student, their building, and every device assigned to them.
- Chalk syncs your SIS directly — PowerSchool, Infinite Campus, Skyward, and OneRoster 1.1, plus Clever and ClassLink import — so students, staff, schools, and enrollments arrive from the system of record instead of being created ad hoc at first contact.
- ChromeOS from Google Admin, Windows from Intune, and iPads from Jamf, with write-back to Google — OU moves, disable, deprovision, annotated fields — behind a diff you preview and approve, with typed confirmation on destructive actions.
- Chalk is itself a SAML 2.0 and OIDC identity provider with a student portal, QR badges, and two-factor authentication, and provisions outward to Google, AD, and Entra. osTicket signs users in from Microsoft, Google, or Okta; it cannot be the login for your other vendors.
- One binary and one database file to run and back up, instead of a PHP runtime, a web server, and MySQL to patch independently — a meaningful difference when the person operating it is also the person fixing Chromebooks.
- Phone-camera scanning through the browser as a PWA for deployment, collection, and audits, plus purchase orders, warranty on the device and in the refresh runway, and funding sources as a managed list.
Common questions
We already run osTicket and it costs us nothing. Why would we change?
Not for the price — Chalk's self-hosted build is free forever under AGPL-3.0 too, so cost is not the argument. The question is what else you are running beside it. If osTicket is your ticket queue and your Chromebook inventory lives in a spreadsheet, your check-out records in a Google Form, your repair parts in someone's head, and your rostering in a nightly CSV, Chalk replaces all of those with one system that osTicket cannot become. If tickets are genuinely all you need, staying on osTicket is a perfectly good decision.
Can osTicket track our device fleet?
No. There is no asset or inventory model in osTicket at all — it is a ticketing system, and the documentation has no asset section. That means no serial numbers, no assignment to a named student, no warranty, no check-out with a due date, and no sync against Google Admin, Intune, or Jamf. In Chalk the device record and the ticket are the same database.
Does osTicket support SSO with Google or Entra?
Yes, through the official OAuth2 plugin, which covers Microsoft, Google, and Okta for both agents and end users, and also handles OAuth for system email accounts — worth having now that basic auth is gone from Microsoft and Google mail. SAML is not covered by an official plugin; the SAML option in circulation is a third-party community repository. Chalk consumes SSO and also issues it: it is a SAML 2.0 and OIDC identity provider in its own right.
What does it take to run osTicket?
An Apache or IIS web server, PHP 8.2–8.4, and MySQL 5.5 or greater — a standard LAMP stack you patch and upgrade yourself. That is well-trodden ground, but it is three moving parts rather than one, and PHP major-version upgrades are real projects. Chalk ships as a single binary with an embedded database, which is a different operational weight for a two-person department. If neither appeals, osTicket has a commercial cloud edition through SupportSystem and Chalk has a hosted version.
Is Chalk trying to replace osTicket?
Only where the scope genuinely differs. We think osTicket is a good piece of software and a legitimate answer for pure ticketing, and a district running it well is not making a mistake. What osTicket does not do is know that the person on the ticket is a seventh grader at the middle school holding a Chromebook that was checked out in August, is under warranty until next spring, and was bought with ESSER money. That is the whole reason Chalk exists.
How much does osTicket's hosted version cost?
The download page points to the commercial cloud edition at SupportSystem with a 30-day trial and no credit card, but publishes no pricing, so you have to ask them for a figure. We will not quote a number we cannot source. Chalk publishes its hosted price ladder, and self-hosting Chalk is free forever under AGPL-3.0 with every module included.
Sources
Claims about osTicket above are drawn from these pages, checked when this comparison was written. If something has changed, tell us and we will correct it.
- osTicket — download page: free open-source self-hosted edition and the SupportSystem cloud edition
- osTicket — features: custom forms, queues, filters, SLA, collision avoidance, tasks, advanced search
- osTicket source repository — GPL2 licence and stack requirements (PHP 8.2–8.4, MySQL 5.5+)
- osTicket documentation — OAuth2 guide for Microsoft, Google, and Okta sign-in
- osTicket documentation index — panels, features, plugins, developer docs (no asset or reporting section)
Trying Chalk beside osTicket?
Chalk installs to a populated inventory from your SIS and Google Admin in about 30 minutes. Self-host it free forever under AGPL-3.0, or let us run it — priced by fleet size, never per seat or per student.