Chatwoot

Chatwoot is an open source, self-hosted customer support platform built explicitly as an alternative to Intercom, Zendesk, and Salesforce Service Cloud. It centralizes conversations from live chat, email, and social channels into one inbox, and adds a help center portal so customers can self-serve before reaching an agent. The project is written primarily in Ruby and ships with official Heroku and DigitalOcean one-click deployments, and its own README states it is designed to give teams full control over their customer data rather than storing it with a third-party vendor.

Key features

• Omnichannel support desk: A single inbox centralizes conversations from website live chat, email, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, Telegram, Line, and SMS, so agents do not switch tools per channel.
• Captain AI agent: Chatwoot's built-in AI agent automates responses to common queries so human agents can focus on more complex conversations instead of repeating routine answers.
• Help center portal: Teams can publish help articles, FAQs, and guides so customers find answers on their own, reducing repetitive queries reaching the support team.
• Team collaboration tools: Private notes, @mentions, canned responses, keyboard shortcuts, a command bar, and labels support internal coordination on conversations without leaving the inbox.
• Automation and routing: Auto-assignment routes conversations based on agent availability and capacity, and business hours plus auto-responders manage customer response expectations outside working hours.
• Contact and campaign management: Contact profiles with interaction history, segments, custom attributes, pre-chat forms, and proactive campaigns support targeted outbound communication.
• Third-party integrations: Slack, Dialogflow, Shopify, Google Translate, and Linear integrations connect Chatwoot to tools support teams already use, including viewing Shopify orders directly inside a conversation and creating Linear tickets from a customer report without switching tabs.

Self-hosting and deployment

Chatwoot deploys via a one-click Heroku button, a DigitalOcean Kubernetes marketplace app, or Docker, with a documented list of environment variables required for full feature support; the README notes some features will break if the relevant variables aren't set. The project follows a git-flow branching model with develop as the base branch; stable releases are tagged v1.x.x on the master branch. Docker images are published to Docker Hub, and Helm charts are listed on Artifact Hub for Kubernetes deployments, giving self-hosters more than one supported path into production.

Reports and insights

Chatwoot includes conversation, agent, inbox, label, and team reports for operational visibility, plus CSAT reports to measure customer satisfaction, all downloadable for offline analysis outside the dashboard. A live view shows ongoing conversations in real time, which is useful for monitoring support load during peak hours without refreshing individual inboxes. Translation of the Chatwoot web and mobile apps is coordinated through Crowdin, with a published contributing guide for anyone who wants to add or improve a language.