Open source help desk and live chat software

Ticketing help desks, conversational inboxes and live chat

Every tool here records customer questions, gives each one an owner and a status, and helps a team answer consistently. They start from different places.

• Ticketing help desks are built around email and web forms. Requests land in queues or groups, SLAs set response deadlines, and customers follow their requests in a portal or by email. Zammad, osTicket, FreeScout, UVdesk, Frappe Helpdesk and django-helpdesk work this way. Znuny and Request Tracker belong here too and are also widely used as IT service desks.
• Conversational inboxes start from a chat widget on your website and messaging apps such as WhatsApp, and put those conversations next to email in one shared inbox. Chatwoot and Libredesk are the main examples; Zammad also has a chat widget and several messaging channels.
• Live chat platforms focus on real-time chat with visitors: who is on the site, proactive invitations, transfers between operators and chatbots. Live Helper Chat is the established open source option.

If most of your support arrives by email, start with a ticketing help desk. If customers expect to chat on your site or in WhatsApp, look at the inboxes first.

Support data and the GDPR

Support tickets hold names, email addresses and often order details or account problems, so data protection law applies to them. Under the EU General Data Protection Regulation, personal data may be kept only as long as needed for its purpose (Article 5(1)(e)), and customers can ask for a copy of their data or for its erasure (Articles 15 and 17). A help desk should therefore let you find all tickets for one person, delete them and set a retention policy.

When a vendor hosts your help desk, it processes that data for you. Article 28 requires a contract with such a processor and your authorization before it uses sub-processors, and Chapter V (from Article 44) restricts transfers to countries outside the EU. Hosted services therefore offer a choice of data region, often only on higher plans. Self-hosting keeps tickets on servers you choose, but security, backups and updates become your job. This is general information, not legal advice.

What to check before you choose

1. Channels. Email and a web form, a website chat widget, WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram, Telegram, SMS, phone. Check which ones the open source code includes and which need extensions or paid modules.
2. Workflow. SLAs with business hours, automation rules, canned replies or macros, assignment rules, custom fields and reports.
3. Self-service. A knowledge base and a portal where customers can see their requests.
4. Open-core boundaries. Chatwoot keeps Enterprise features in a proprietary directory, FreeScout sells AGPL-licensed modules, UVdesk sells add-ons and some Znuny add-ons need a support contract. Libredesk, Frappe Helpdesk, osTicket and Zammad have no paid feature tiers in their code.
5. Self-hosting effort. Libredesk is a single Go binary with PostgreSQL and Redis. osTicket, FreeScout and Live Helper Chat run on ordinary PHP and MySQL hosting. Zammad and Chatwoot are larger Ruby on Rails stacks, and Znuny and Request Tracker need a Perl environment.
6. Migration. Zammad has official migrators from Zendesk, Freshdesk, Kayako and OTRS, and Znuny is the upgrade path for OTRS Community Edition users. FreeScout offers a Help Scout migration module. For other moves, check the API and CSV import.
7. AI features. Several tools let you choose the model provider, including a local Ollama model: Zammad, Libredesk, Live Helper Chat and Znuny’s free LLM package.

Projects not listed

Some well-known projects do not appear in the list. Chaskiq adds the Commons Clause to the AGPL, and Typebot uses the Functional Source License. Both are source-available rather than open source. erxes adds a ban on competing SaaS hosting to its AGPL license. Peppermint has been archived, and Papercups, Helpy and Trudesk have had no commits for more than a year.