Here’s the Deal

Desk.com vs PHPBack

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When comparing Desk.com vs PHPBack, the Slant community recommends Desk.com for most people. In the question“What are the best user support & feedback services?” Desk.com is ranked 8th while PHPBack is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose Desk.com is:

Desk [Macros](https://support.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/1647778-overview-of-macros-video) provide a great support for canned responses. You can write canned responses for email and social media, and access them quickly either through a menu or by using shortcuts.

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Common Questions

What are the best user support & feedback services?

Pros

Pro
Great support for canned responses/macros

Desk Macros provide a great support for canned responses.

You can write canned responses for email and social media, and access them quickly either through a menu or by using shortcuts.

Pro
Very well designed interface

The UI speeds up your workflow thanks to how uncluttered and intuitive it is.
Everything is well laid out, easy to find, and the overall design is visually appealing.

Pro
Support for a wide range of mobile devices

iPhone
Android
BlackBerry
iPad
Android Tablets

Pro
Multi-language support

It has been already translated to Spanish and they are adding support for more languages.

Pro
Easy setup

PHPBack is very easy to setup, all you need is a server with PHP5 and MySQL installed.

Pro
Open Source

PHPBack is open source, uses GPLv3 license.

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Cons

Con
Integration with Salesforce requires manual work

You'd think it would be the best Salesforce integration ever since it's owned by Salesforce, but it's completely sub-par. You have to have customer service reps manually connect SF accounts to Desk Companies.

Con
API is awful

You can't properly paginate/sort API results so you can get into situations where you aren't getting all the data.

Con
LOTS of outages

Con
Small community

PHPBack is fairly young (first stable version was releases in July 2015). Currently the community is small, which may make it more difficult to find help/support.
However, the developer is active on the github page and generally responds quickly.