Chatwoot

Chatwoot is an open-source, AI-powered customer support platform and a widely cited alternative to Intercom and Zendesk, offered both as a managed cloud service and as software you self-host. Its centerpiece is an omnichannel shared inbox: conversations from website live chat, email, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, LINE, SMS, TikTok, and voice arrive in one queue, and a customizable live-chat widget is styled to match each brand's colors, language, and design. The AI layer is Captain, Chatwoot's built-in assistant. Captain works as an autonomous agent that learns from a business's help center, chat history, and FAQs to answer routine customer questions around the clock and cut support volume. Inside agent conversations it acts as a copilot, drafting reply suggestions, pulling up past conversations and help articles, summarizing long threads, and auto-generating memory notes about each customer. It also translates messages so agents and customers can communicate in their own languages, and a content-gap feature flags questions the knowledge base does not yet answer. The Help Center delivers self-service with multiple branded portals per account, custom domains with auto-provisioned SSL certificates, support for every locale, and AI-powered natural-language search. On the operations side, Chatwoot includes teams, private notes, @mentions, labels, canned responses, a command bar, custom views and filters, business hours, auto-assignment, automation rules, pre-chat forms, and contact segments and attributes, plus conversation, agent, inbox, team, label, and CSAT reports. Campaigns push targeted messages over live chat, WhatsApp Cloud API, and SMS. Administrators get granular controls as plans rise: data retention from 30 days on the free tier up to three years on Enterprise, and on Enterprise specifically SSO or SAML, audit logs, SLAs, branding removal, and dedicated account management for larger subscriptions. Chatwoot is open source with more than 25,000 GitHub stars and over 400 contributors, so teams can self-host and own their data and compliance; the cloud edition runs on AWS in the United States and is SOC 2 Type II compliant. Backed by Y Combinator and Goat Capital, Chatwoot is used by more than 15,000 businesses, and its developer APIs support custom integrations, dashboard apps, and data export so customers are never locked in. Cloud pricing is per agent per month billed annually, from a free Hacker tier through Startups, Business, and Enterprise, with Captain AI credits included on paid plans and additional credits available at $20 per 1,000.