Chatwoot

What Chatwoot does

Chatwoot is a customer support inbox for teams whose customers reach them through chat and messaging apps as much as by email. Conversations from a live chat widget on your website, email, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, Line, SMS and other channels arrive in one shared inbox. Agents can label them, leave private notes, mention colleagues and answer with canned responses. The project describes itself as an open source alternative to Intercom and Zendesk.

Around the inbox are a help center for publishing articles and FAQs, contact profiles with custom attributes and segments, pre-chat forms and proactive chat campaigns, auto-assignment, business hours and reports, including CSAT. Agents also have iOS and Android apps.

Open source and paid editions

Chatwoot is open core. The LICENSE file puts everything outside the enterprise/ directory under the MIT license, so the Community Edition is free to self-host and modify. Code inside enterprise/ is under a proprietary license. You may copy and change it for development and testing, but production use needs a paid subscription for the right number of seats.

According to Chatwoot’s self-hosted plans page, the Community Edition does not include Captain AI, voice calls, custom branding, agent capacity limits, custom roles and permissions, SSO/SAML or SLA policies. These come with the paid Premium and Enterprise licenses, which are bought per agent from the Super Admin panel. Captain uses OpenAI models.

Self-hosted installations send anonymized usage data to Chatwoot once a day by default: aggregate counts, the mix of inbox and conversation types, and enabled integrations. The documentation says no customer data is included. You can turn this off with DISABLE_TELEMETRY=true.

Self-hosting Chatwoot

Chatwoot is a Ruby on Rails application with Sidekiq workers and a Vue front end. PostgreSQL is the only supported database, and it also needs Redis 7 or later, an SMTP service and, preferably, S3-compatible storage for attachments. The documented deployment options include Docker Compose, an install script for Linux virtual machines, a Kubernetes Helm chart, Heroku, a DigitalOcean 1-Click app and the Chatwoot CTL tool. The documentation recommends at least 4 CPU cores and 4 GB of RAM, plus swap, for up to 10,000 conversations a day.

New versions come out around the first Monday of each month, with smaller releases for hotfixes and security fixes. Community support is offered on Discord and GitHub.

Hosted version

Chatwoot Cloud runs on AWS, and the vendor states SOC 2 Type II compliance. A free plan covers up to two agents with live chat only, a monthly conversation cap and 30 days of data retention. Paid per-agent plans add channels, longer retention, automation, Captain AI credits, SSO and audit logs depending on the tier.

Limitations

Because of the proprietary enterprise/ directory, not all of the repository is open source, and several features that larger support teams expect, such as SLA policies, SSO and custom roles, need a paid license even when you run Chatwoot yourself. Telemetry is on by default. The Rails, Sidekiq, PostgreSQL and Redis stack needs a reasonably sized server.

Who it suits

Chatwoot suits businesses that support customers through website chat, WhatsApp and social messaging and want those channels in one inbox, either self-hosted or in the cloud. It is the most direct open source replacement for Intercom’s chat and inbox. Teams that need SLAs or SSO should budget for a license or look at fully open alternatives such as Zammad or Libredesk.