Libredesk

What Libredesk does

Libredesk is a newer self-hosted support desk that brings email, a live chat widget for your website and WhatsApp into one shared inbox. WhatsApp connects through Meta’s Cloud API. Email inboxes connect with Google or Microsoft OAuth, or with plain IMAP and SMTP. Agents organize conversations with teams, tags, custom statuses and custom attributes, can snooze them, and find old ones through search.

Despite its small footprint, it covers what a support team expects from a commercial help desk. Automation rules and macros handle repetitive work, auto-assignment respects each agent’s capacity, and SLA targets show warnings before they are breached. CSAT surveys and analytics report on response times, resolution rates and agent activity. A multilingual help center publishes articles for customers. Access is controlled through roles with per-action permissions, OIDC single sign-on and activity logs.

AI features

The AI assistant and agent copilot are marked as beta and stay off until you add a provider. Libredesk works with any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, such as OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter, Groq, Azure, LiteLLM or a local Ollama model. It needs both a completion model and an embedding model. Image attachments are only sent to the model if you turn on image input. With a local model, conversation data does not need to leave your server.

Self-hosting Libredesk

Libredesk is written in Go with a Vue 3 front end and ships as a single binary. Its only dependencies are PostgreSQL and Redis. The recommended install uses Docker Compose, whose file runs PostgreSQL 17 and Redis 7 next to the app. You can also download a release binary for Linux, macOS, Windows or BSD, or build from source. Configuration lives in config.toml, and ./libredesk --install sets up the database.

The whole project is under AGPL-3.0. The website says every feature is included and there are no paid tiers, so SLAs, SSO and roles are available to everyone.

Hosted version

The developers do not offer a hosted version. The website points to a one-click deploy template on Railway, a third-party platform, for people who do not want to run a server themselves.

Limitations

Libredesk is a young project; its repository was created in 2024, so its ecosystem, integrations and documentation are smaller than those of Chatwoot or Zammad. It supports fewer channels: Facebook, Instagram and Telegram are not documented. The AI features are still in beta, and we found no official hosted service or commercial support offer.

Who it suits

Libredesk suits small and mid-sized teams that want email, live chat and WhatsApp in one place, with SLAs, SSO and automation, and that prefer a simple deployment with no license tiers. It is also a good fit for anyone who wants AI help from a local model.