CRM & Support

Open source CRM and support tools split into two overlapping jobs: keeping track of contacts, deals, and companies (CRM), and handling incoming customer questions across channels (help desk). Twenty and Erxes are CRM-first: Twenty is a modern, Salesforce-style CRM with a spreadsheet-like UI for managing contacts, companies, and pipelines, built with a GraphQL API for custom integrations. Erxes bundles CRM with marketing and support features in one platform, aimed at teams that want a single system covering the full customer lifecycle rather than separate tools stitched together.

Chatwoot, Zammad, and FreeScout are help desk platforms, but they differ in scope. Chatwoot centers on live chat and omnichannel messaging: a website widget plus integrations for email, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram, all routed into one shared inbox for a support team. Zammad is a ticketing system closer to Zendesk, with SLAs, ticket escalation rules, a knowledge base, and multi-channel intake (email, chat, phone, social), suited to larger support teams with defined workflows. FreeScout is deliberately lightweight: an email-based help desk built to feel like Help Scout, with shared mailboxes, saved replies, and a plugin system, aimed at small teams that mainly need shared email inboxes rather than full ticketing infrastructure.

Choosing between them depends on channel mix and team size. A team whose support volume comes mostly through a website chat widget and social DMs is better served by Chatwoot's live-chat-first design. A team running structured ticket queues with SLAs and escalation policies needs Zammad's ticketing model. A small team trying to get out of a shared inbox will find FreeScout closer to what they already do, with less setup. On the CRM side, Twenty suits teams that want a clean, modern sales pipeline tool and are comfortable building integrations against its API, while Erxes suits teams that want CRM, marketing automation, and support combined under one login rather than three separate systems.

All five are self-hostable, which matters for support and CRM data specifically: customer conversations and contact records are sensitive, and self-hosting keeps that data off a third-party vendor's servers while avoiding per-seat or per-conversation pricing that scales with support volume.