FreeScout

FreeScout is a lightweight, open source help desk and shared inbox built with PHP and the Laravel framework. Its README title calls it a free, self-hosted Zendesk and Help Scout alternative, built from scratch without using any copyrighted Help Scout or Zendesk materials. It's aimed at teams that want a shared support inbox without a per-agent SaaS subscription or their support data living on a third party's servers. Beyond the core application, FreeScout offers official and community modules, an API for building integrations, a Zapier connector, and a Make (Integromat) integration for connecting to other tools. Updates and news are announced through an email newsletter, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Telegram, and RSS, so operators running a self-hosted instance have several ways to track new releases and modules. A cloud-hosted option also exists for teams that want FreeScout's feature set without running their own PHP/MySQL server.

Key features

• No per-user or per-ticket limits: No caps on the number of users, tickets, or mailboxes on a self-hosted instance.
• Mobile-friendly and native apps: The web UI is fully mobile-friendly, and dedicated Android and iOS apps support the same functionality for agents and admins.
• Deep email integration: Reliable email-to-ticket integration, including support for modern Microsoft Exchange authentication.
• Collaboration tooling: Collision detection warns agents when two people open the same conversation, alongside starred conversations, internal notes, and following conversations.
• Automatic refresh and push notifications: The conversation list refreshes automatically, and push notifications alert agents to new activity without a manual page reload.
• Extensible via modules: Official and community modules add functionality beyond the core, plus integrations like Zapier and Make.
• Multilingual: Translated into more than two dozen languages, from Chinese and Japanese to Turkish and Ukrainian.

Self-hosting and deployment

FreeScout is a pure PHP/MySQL application with no stated minimum CPU or RAM requirements, so it runs on shared hosting as well as dedicated servers, using Nginx, Apache, or IIS with PHP 7.1 through 8.x and MySQL, MariaDB, or PostgreSQL. Beyond a manual install, it's available as a Docker image, through one-click installers like Softaculous and Fantastico on common control panels (cPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin), as a Cloudron app, and via an interactive bash script for Ubuntu.

Getting started

The project provides a web-based installer and updater, so setup is a guided process rather than manual database migrations; the Installation Guide on the project wiki covers the manual path, and a live demo is available at demo.freescout.net to try FreeScout before installing it. For teams migrating from another help desk, a dedicated migration tool supports importing from other providers. FreeScout also ships mobile apps for Android and iOS covering the same functionality as the web app for both agents and administrators, plus a third-party macOS menu bar app for quick access to conversations.