Stillpoint CRM vs SupportCandy

It is worth being specific rather than polite. SupportCandy has been around long enough to have handled the awkward cases: a ticket form you can shape with custom fields, agent replies from inside WordPress with no external service in the loop, guest tickets, private notes, attachments, and a permissions model that most small teams can configure without help. The free core is a real product, not a demo, and thousands of sites run on it without ever paying anything.

The add-on model also has an honest logic to it. If you need email piping but not SLA, you buy email piping. That keeps the entry price low and the install lean, and for a site with a modest support load it can work out cheaper than any bundled product — including ours.

So the fair recommendation is this: if you only need support tickets, SupportCandy is a reasonable choice and you should take it seriously. We would rather say that than pretend otherwise, because the rest of this page is only worth reading if this part is true.

A ticket system's data model is tickets plus requesters. That is the correct model for a ticket system, and it is why SupportCandy is simple to run. But it sets a ceiling on what any screen inside it can show, because the information that would make a support reply better lives in other plugins' tables.

Stillpoint's tickets are records in the same database as companies, contacts, deals, quotes, invoices, WooCommerce orders and projects. That single fact produces most of the practical difference. When an agent opens a ticket, the sidebar shows who the customer is, their lifetime spend, their RFM segment, the specific order the complaint is about with its line items, any open deals, any unpaid invoices, and whether a project is running for them. Nobody has to switch tabs, search WooCommerce by email, or ask a colleague whether this account matters.

It also changes what reporting can answer. Because tickets and order line items are joinable, you can ask for tickets per 100 units sold broken down by SKU, or which product generates the most support cost per pound of revenue, or whether VIP customers wait longer than new ones. Those are not queries SupportCandy has declined to implement — a plugin that does not hold order line items cannot answer them at all.

• Ticket sidebar shows lifetime value, RFM segment, open deals and unpaid invoices
• The specific WooCommerce order and its line items attach to the ticket
• Reporting can join tickets to products: tickets per 100 units sold, per SKU
• Support work can convert into a deal, a quote or a project without re-entering the customer

Every helpdesk claims email to ticket. The differences show up on the messy replies: a customer who forwards the thread from a different address, a mail client that rewrites the subject line, an autoresponder that bounces the same message twice.

Stillpoint matches an inbound reply through an ordered cascade — a signed token in the reply address, then standard References and In-Reply-To headers, then corroboration against the known participants on that thread — so a subject-line match alone never merges two customers' conversations. Duplicate delivery is stopped by a unique constraint in the database on the message identifier, not by an application check that can lose a race when two workers poll at once.

There is also a mailbox health dashboard: last successful poll, authentication state, and a retry queue for outbound mail that failed, so a broken mailbox surfaces as a warning rather than as a week of silence. The full mechanics are documented on the email-to-ticket page.

SLA add-ons commonly measure elapsed calendar time, which means a Friday afternoon ticket looks breached by Monday morning even though nobody was working. Stillpoint computes deadlines in business hours against your schedule and holiday calendar, and the clock pauses while a ticket waits on the customer.

The part that matters when a number is challenged is the history. Every start, pause, resume and target change is written to an append-only log, and the breach screen replays it segment by segment: this many minutes counted here, paused there, holiday excluded on that date. When a client disputes a report, you can show the arithmetic rather than assert the total.

This is the honest reason to wait, and hiding it would be worse than losing the sale. Stillpoint has no SupportCandy importer today. Your existing tickets would have to stay in SupportCandy — running alongside Stillpoint in read-only fashion for reference — or be moved by hand.

The reason we have not shipped one is that we will not claim an importer until it has been tested against real SupportCandy export data across multiple versions, including installs with several add-ons and custom fields in play. A half-working importer that silently drops attachments, private notes or requester identities is worse than no importer, because you only find out months later.

If you have a large ticket history that must be searchable in one place from day one, that is a legitimate reason to stay put for now. If you can draw a line — new tickets in Stillpoint, old ones archived in SupportCandy — the switch is straightforward, because inbound mail simply points at the new mailbox.

To put it as plainly as possible, SupportCandy is the better buy in these situations:

• Tickets are the entire requirement and you have no interest in CRM, invoicing or store data.
• You need to start at zero cost today and cannot justify an annual licence.
• You only want one capability — say email piping — and buying it alone is cheaper than any bundle.
• Your ticket history must be migrated in full and searchable immediately; our importer does not exist yet.

None of those are edge cases, and if one of them describes you we would rather you installed SupportCandy than bought Stillpoint and felt oversold.