I've used RT recently, and found it to be a very good system for my needs.  Its biggest problem is complexity - it's designed to handle multiple helpdesks with varying seniority, and if your situation is very simple, much of RT is overkill.  In my situation, I was the only user (both as "client" and as "helpdesk") because I needed to keep track of a large number of outstanding tickets with varying priority in different queues.  Despite the complexity, I was very satisfied with it.  The one thing it didn't have, that I had to build myself, was decent status or activity reports.

About 6 years ago, I used Keystone from Stonekeep Consulting and was very happy with it then, but I reevaluated it last year and picked RT instead.  I don't think there was anything wrong with Keystone, but it isn't being as actively maintained as RT.

It appears that RT is "king of the hill" for trouble-ticketing, but it's definitely not meant to be a bug tracking system; for that you'd be most likely looking at Bugzilla.

Theodore mentioned Trac as well, which is under active development like RT, although in my opinion the UI just plain sucks.  I can't even quantify why, I just don't like it.

If you're doing software development, the SourceForge system is hard to beat; it includes virtually every component you'd want for facilitating development.  It's open-source, but also comes as a commercially supported package, and I believe is available as an appliance too.

-Adam Thompson

 athompso@athompso.net