Open source alternatives to Zendesk

What Zendesk does

Zendesk is a hosted customer service platform. The Support plans cover email-based ticketing with triggers, automations, macros and views. The Zendesk Suite plans add messaging and live chat across web, mobile and social channels, a help center, voice support, AI agents and reporting, all in one agent workspace with skills-based and omnichannel routing. AI agents, Copilot and other AI features sit on top of the ticketing core.

Why people look for an alternative

• Tiered per-agent pricing. Features are spread across Support and Suite plans and their Team, Professional and Enterprise tiers. Use of AI agents beyond the included allowance is billed per automated resolution, and Copilot features are an add-on on lower plans. A 14-day trial is offered, but there is no free plan.
• Data location depends on the plan. You can choose where data is hosted (United States, EEA, UK, Japan or Australia) only with the Data Center Location add-on. It is free on Suite Professional and higher, but it has to be activated. Without it, Zendesk makes no commitment about where service data is hosted and may move accounts between regions.
• Getting data out. The built-in JSON, CSV and XML exports are not available on Team plans and stay disabled until Zendesk turns them on. The REST API works on every plan, but a full migration through it takes development work.

What to compare in an alternative

1. Ticketing depth. Triggers, macros, SLAs with business hours, custom fields, views and reports.
2. Channels. Email, a web form, a chat widget, messaging apps and phone integration.
3. Self-service. A knowledge base and a customer portal.
4. Migration. An importer from Zendesk saves a lot of work. Otherwise plan an export through the Zendesk API.
5. Running it. Server requirements, upgrades and backups, or a hosted service from the developers if you do not want to self-host.

Which one to choose

Zammad is the most complete replacement. It has email, chat, web form, messaging and telephony channels, SLAs, triggers, a knowledge base and an official Zendesk migrator, and the developers run a hosted service. Chatwoot fits teams whose support has moved to chat and messaging apps. FreeScout and osTicket run on ordinary PHP hosting: FreeScout copies the shared-inbox style and sells most extras as modules, while osTicket has no feature tiers. UVdesk is a Symfony-based option with a portal and knowledge base. Frappe Helpdesk suits teams that already use ERPNext. Libredesk is the lightest to run. Znuny and Request Tracker are mature, highly configurable systems for process-heavy and IT support.