Chatwoot
An open-source, omnichannel customer engagement platform — an Intercom alternative
- License
- MIT
- Deploy difficulty
- Medium
- GitHub stars
- 29.3k
- Last commit
- 2d ago
Latest
v4.13.0 7.3k forks
1188 open issues Synced 2026-05-17 What Chatwoot is#
Chatwoot is an open-source customer engagement platform similar in scope to Intercom or Zendesk. It covers shared inboxes, tickets, customer profiles, a help center and reporting. Since 2024 it ships a Captain agent module that lets you train a domain AI assistant on your own docs and embed it across any channel.
Where it fits#
Use Chatwoot as the customer-facing inbox and human-in-the-loop layer:
- Channel layer — aggregate web widget, email, IM into one inbox
- Co-pilot layer — AI drafts, humans review or send
- Orchestration layer — webhooks or Captain Workflows call out to Dify, n8n etc.
Key features#
- Multi-language, multi-team, multi-inbox
- Built-in multilingual Help Center
- Public API and webhooks for custom workflows
- Docker, Helm, Heroku, Render and single-host install scripts
Operational notes#
- Official docker-compose works on a 1 vCPU / 2 GB box for staging
- Email requires SMTP / IMAP — Postmark or SES recommended
- Captain accepts any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, including local models
Strengths
- Unified inbox for website, email, WeChat, WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook, Instagram and more
- Solid foundation — tickets, auto-assignment, SLAs, macros, reports
- Official Captain agent module pluggable into any inbox
- Free to self-host, active community, OSS and commercial stay in sync
Trade-offs
- Ruby on Rails stack — non-trivial for JS-first teams
- Built-in AI is conservative; complex flows still need Dify / LangChain
- Self-hosting needs Postgres, Redis and Sidekiq processes
Best for
- SMB teams already running multi-channel support, replacing Intercom / Zendesk
- Treating LLMs as a Copilot for human agents, not a full replacement