Chatwoot

What is Chatwoot?

Chatwoot is an open source customer support platform that pulls conversations from live chat, email, and social channels into a single shared inbox. Your team replies, assigns, and resolves messages from every channel in one place, so a customer gets one continuous thread instead of scattered conversations. It’s built on Ruby on Rails with a Vue.js front end and self-hosts with Docker.

What is Chatwoot best for?

Support and success teams that talk to customers across many channels — a website chat widget, email, WhatsApp, Instagram, and more — and want them all in one queue rather than jumping between apps. It suits companies that would rather self-host and own their customer data than pay per agent for a hosted suite like Intercom or Zendesk.

What can Chatwoot do?

• Route live chat, email, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, Line, and SMS into one shared inbox
• Assign conversations, @mention teammates, add private notes, and auto-assign work across teams
• Reply faster with canned/saved responses, labels, and keyboard shortcuts
• Deflect repeat questions with a built-in help center and knowledge base portal
• Automate answers with Captain, its built-in AI agent
• Store contact profiles, custom attributes, and segments, and run outbound campaigns
• Integrate with Slack, Shopify, Linear, Dialogflow, and Google Translate
• Track CSAT, agent performance, and conversation reports

Where does Chatwoot fall short?

• Some enterprise features are not free, even when you self-host. SSO/SAML, audit logs, SLA management, agent capacity and scheduling, and custom branding live in the /enterprise folder under a separate commercial license and need a paid subscription — the MIT community edition leaves them out.
• Captain, the AI agent, runs on metered credits. Heavy automation can outrun the monthly allowance, and extra credits cost about $20 per 1,000, so AI at scale is a recurring cost on top of hosting.
• It’s conversation-first, not IT ticketing. Chatwoot has no formal incident/problem/change workflows or asset (CMDB) management, so IT service desks that need rigid ITSM structure should look elsewhere.

Is Chatwoot free?

Yes — the Community Edition is MIT-licensed and free to self-host, so you only pay for your own server. Chatwoot’s managed cloud is a paid subscription ($19–$99 per agent/month, on top of a free two-agent Hacker tier), and a handful of enterprise-grade features require a paid plan even on self-hosted deployments.

What does Chatwoot replace?

Chatwoot is a self-hosted alternative to Intercom and Zendesk. It covers the same shared-inbox, live-chat, and help-center jobs those tools do, but you run it on your own infrastructure and keep customer conversations on servers you control instead of paying per agent.

FAQ

Is Chatwoot open source? Yes — the Community Edition is released under the MIT License. A separate /enterprise folder in the same repository is source-available under a commercial license, so those enterprise features fall outside the open source license.

Can I self-host Chatwoot for free? Yes. The MIT Community Edition is free to self-host with Docker on your own server; you only pay for infrastructure. Enterprise features like SSO and audit logs need a paid subscription.

Is Chatwoot a good Intercom or Zendesk alternative? For teams that want to own their data and skip per-agent SaaS pricing, yes — it matches the omnichannel inbox and live chat. It’s less polished for brand-new agents and lacks rigid IT-style ticketing.

What do I need to run Chatwoot? A server with Docker, plus PostgreSQL and Redis. It’s a Ruby on Rails app, so it wants real infrastructure rather than cheap shared hosting.