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Show HN: Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Drift, Zendesk, FreshChat

417 points by pranavrajs 7y ago

pranavrajs 7y ago
Founder here, Chatwoot is a customer support tool for instant messaging channels which can help businesses provide exceptional customer support through their websites or social media channels. This was a product we started building in 2017. It failed due to a couple of obvious reasons. We built on Vue.js and Rails. It was in an inactive mode for around 1 and a half years. Recently we thought of putting it out instead of letting the code to rust. Our idea is to make it something like Gitlab/Mattermost where people can host their own version and we will provide a hosted version for people who don't want to self-host. After we open-sourced, we received contributions from 30 developers all around the world. We believe bots alone can't solve all the questions and there is no context. On the other hand, having agents alone for customer support won't scale as your business grows. We intend to build a bot+agent platform which is fully opensource and supports most of the social media channels, email and websites.
- joshmn 7y ago
  Congrats on the launch. As a fellow Ruby/Rails developer I love seeing great open-source Ruby/Rails apps in a world where everyone seems to be trending to what's "sexy" now instead of what's tired and true.
  - edoceo 7y ago
    Remember when folks called RoR "sexy" and CGI tried and true? Or swap any two nearly similar stacks. Stack don't matter, it's not the wand, it's the wizard and time makes fools of us all.
    - chimen 7y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZeZsZEEpno https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZeZsZEEpno These two actually made me hate the language/framework which is why I never gave it a shot.
      - scrollaway 7y ago
        What's that last jar supposed to represent?
        obituary_latte 7y ago
        Looks like gasoline/petrol which is sometimes used by people to huff (inhale) to get high.
    - yellowapple 7y ago
      The whole "serverless" trend feels (felt? Did the fad die out?) like coming full circle back to (Fast)CGI.
  - mushufasa 7y ago
    interesting spin on 'tried and true.' also works and made me smile.
    - frequentnapper 7y ago
      unless it was a typo.
  - nickserv 7y ago
    You'll never make everyone happy... For me the fact that it's RoR as opposed to, say Go or Elixir is a big turn off, because I know it will be slow and eat up lots of RAM. For me tried and true would be Java.
- ceohockey60 7y ago
  Nice project! Curious: has any organization started using Chatwoot to provide customer support?
  - pranavrajs 7y ago
    There are no other organizations which are using the project other than us. We use it on our homepage chatwoot.com and for our Facebook pages.
    - ron22 7y ago
      That will change soon. :) Awesome project!
      - sojanofficial 7y ago
        Chatwoot Co-founder here: Do let us know if you face any issues. Will be glad to help.
- judge2020 7y ago
  Would like to let you know the hamburger menu currently doesn't work on mobile (clicking it does nothing)
  - pranavrajs 7y ago
    Hey, thanks for letting me know. I will fix it soon :) Looks like I forgot to add the action on the hamburger button.
    - dlhavema 7y ago
      Related, the chat window that pops up on android is off screen about 15 to 20% but still workable. I am very familiar with Intercom, and this looks comparable at first glance. Nice start.
- jnathsf 7y ago
  Amazing to see your vision coming to life by open sourcing the code and getting so many contributors! No small feat. And great to see the project is being done in Rails. I’ve spent hours looking for a a good product in this space for our company so will definitely give this a try. Two questions - do you have a way to author FAQs and is email an accepted channel? Thanks and can’t wait to see Chatwoot grow.
  - pranavrajs 7y ago
    Thanks for the kind words. Please see my response below. > do you have a way to author FAQs Right now, we don't support it. We have FAQs and a documentation website in the pipeline. > is email an accepted channel? Honestly speaking, it is not completely done yet. Emails from support desk mail can be seen in the dashboard, but you cannot respond to it now from our dashboard. Hopefully, we would be able to complete it sooner.
    - scrollaway 7y ago
      Congratulations on the release. Wish you all the best with it, and will not hesitate to recommend it … but first, email 100% has to be supported. Should be as good as Intercom's user-facing email flow. Email and twitter DMs are IMO more important for people looking for a support channel than "live agent" chat boxes. Live agent boxes are often adblocked and can't ever be the sole point of contact for a company that cares about having a support channel.
      - sojanofficial 7y ago
        Chatwoot Co-Founder here: Thanks a lot for the support. Totally agree. email is currently our top priority item and the development is halfway through. We are also actively working on twitter DM as a channel. Stay posted for updates.
- vicnov 7y ago
  What were the reasons for failure? It would be great to learn more about your experience.
  - pranavrajs 7y ago
    There are a couple of things which I can tell, most important is that we were naive and we were not patient enough to see the project grow organically and reach the users and find its USP. We wanted instant gratification which is not always available in the startup world.
    - King-Aaron 7y ago
      A lot of first-time entrepreneurs need to listen to this comment.
- stanislavb 7y ago
  Good job. I hope it gets traction. I've scheduled it to be featured on the homepage of SaaSHub for next Monday.
  - sojanofficial 7y ago
    Chatwoot Co-Founder here: Just saw that its up on SaasHub. thanks a lot for featuring.
    - stanislavb 7y ago
      No worries. Just keep up the good work. I'd also suggest, asking some of your users to leave you a review on SH.
- cvg 7y ago
  Nice job! Have you done any load testing on it? Curious how much server to buy to run an instance with some usage.
  - sojanofficial 7y ago
    Chatwoot Co-founder here: We haven't done a full-scale load testing yet. But we were able to handle the HN traffic using Heroku's free tier.
- alexnewman 7y ago
  omg I love you. I probably wont switch til you have a hosted version where I can pay you, sorry. Maybe you can launch one on heroku for me as a beta user and I'll pay you?
  - sojanofficial 7y ago
    Chatwoot Co-founder here: Thanks a lot for the support. A hosted version will be up by end of this month. Meanwhile, you can deploy the repo easily to heroku. Will be happy to assist if you face any issues.
- gremlinsinc 7y ago
  A full demo or feature list would be nice. For comparison to other options out there.
  - sojanofficial 7y ago
    Chatwoot Co-Founder here: We are working on the feature comparison and roadmap pages. It will be up on the website in a day or two.
    - mritchie712 7y ago
      just record a 1 to 2 minute demo of you walking thru standard use cases. it will only take a couple hours and is well worth it.
- dominotw 7y ago
  > It failed due to a couple of obvious reasons. We built on Vue.js and Rails I read it with a comma instead of fullstop between the sentences :D
  - 8bithero 7y ago
    Haha! I did the exact same thing I was wondering what was wrong with either of those stacks
- izolate 7y ago
  > It failed due to a couple of obvious reasons. Would you mind elaborating? Would love to hear why. Seems like a good chat-focused alternative. Was the competition from Freskdesk too stiff (assuming you're based in Bangalore)? Anyway congrats on breathing new life into the project!
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
mkagenius 7y ago
Great work. While on the topic, I believe everything ranging from Uber to Google can be replaced by an open source alternatives. There will be some cons but overall lots of benefits.
- pranavrajs 7y ago
  I agree. I assume having a hosted version of tools like CRM or support desk would help in getting better at maintaining the privacy of the customers.
tarr11 7y ago
This is great. Intercom’s pricing is outrageous for small startups so I could this getting traction.
- burtonator 7y ago
  It's $50 per month for all their products in their new program... This isn't insane but is still pricey when you're in an MVP mode.
  - jawngee 7y ago
    What new program?
    - omarchowdhury 7y ago
      https://www.intercom.com/early-stage https://www.intercom.com/early-stage
mkohlmyr 7y ago
Having worked in this field for a while, you should look at tiered and tagged assignment. E.g. escalation tiers / priority assignment and assignment by browser language / geo up. From what I recall these were important as you look at supporting large organisations. Customisability (design) and pre-chat forms were also headline features.
- trynewideas 7y ago
  Email channels and pre-ticket forms are dealbreakers for being a Zendesk replacement. I can live without a lot of ZD's features (and be happier for it) but those two are table stakes for me. I could see this being a replacement for Intercom, but Intercom isn't a fit for us either. The stuff ZD and Intercom (and SFDC) are awful at, where there are opportunities for something else to swoop in: even partial Markdown support for incoming messages, integrations with third-party docs/KB sources, live queue dashboards/visualizations, toggling features based on different support plans, and facilitating handoffs for follow-the-sun support (multiple queues, defined regions/hours per queue, auto-reassigning active tickets across agents and queues, cleaner or richer ticket summarization options).
  - mkohlmyr 7y ago
    Yeah agreed, KB integration was another big one, as well as shortcuts when you have agents who do 3-4 chats at the same time. In fact the ability to define agent capacity individually and by role to begin with is important. The ability to define different capacities for the same agent across different queues and how to aggregate that is also an advanced feature which is useful. E.g. I can take 3 in English or one in French and one in English. Or I can take 4 tier one tickets or 2 tier two tickets. Or I can do x tickets for customers on basic support but if I'm on with a customer who has priority... Etc Queueing and assignment logic gets tricky because requirements can be vastly different across organisations. Hence why there are companies at the high end charging enterprise money.
- sojanofficial 7y ago
  Co-Founder here: These are all great suggestions. We are reworking our roadmap based on the feedback from HN. Thanks a lot for these.
artur_makly 7y ago
Congrats on pivoting this to open. As an Intercom customer ( perhaps paying too much ), it would be very helpful to see a basic feature comparison table and ideally an in-progress roadmap so that I may assess the opportunity costs for a possible migration. And if not a matrix, at least a simple list of top-level features, which I could not find in the docs. For me, "Alternative", is a very loaded word that comes with an expectation of comparing the current scope of features offered by the aforementioned paid apps. Best of luck!
- sojanofficial 7y ago
  Chatwoot Co-Founder here: Thanks a lot for the support. Totally get your concern about "Alternative". In terms of the scope of features, we are still behind many of the current market offerings. But we will be making some steady progress over the new couple of months. Meanwhile, we are updating the website & repo with feature comparison and an in-progress roadmap. It should be up in a day or two
brenden2 7y ago
Here's a blocklist for all these super annoying chat widgets: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bcye/Hello-Goodbye/master/filterlist.txt https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bcye/Hello-Goodbye/master/... You can import this into uBlock origin so you never have to see these things again.
- randomb_1979 7y ago
  Too bad there is no way to make a blocklist to block all freeloaders from visiting websites. The person who actually owns anything at all (the website owner) is somehow expected to give everything for free to someone who doesn't own anything at all (the website visitor). Plus I have found that the same people who complain loudly on internet forums about chat widgets (and many similar marketing tools) don't stop using the website itself for the sake of their principles. Hilarious.
  - xnyan 7y ago
    I don’t understand what you are saying. There has always existed straightforward methods of preventing “freeloaders” as you call them from accessing your content. If you don’t believe me, go to wsj.com and report back. TV Broadcasters don’t get to force you to watch their ads, in fact skipping ads on broadcast tv is a big and legal market. Furthermore, today’s ad blocking detection can be very good at detention, so there you go - you have your script. When sites detect my adblocking and nag me, I am more than happy to leave their shitty website and never come back.
    - randomb_1979 7y ago
      >>I am more than happy to leave their shitty website and never come back. Unfortunately, if this is actually true, then you are the exception which proves the rule. That's precisely why I call these people "freeloaders". If they actually stopped visiting my website and wasting my site's resources based on such principles, I would be ecstatic to see them leave. >>TV Broadcasters don’t get to force you to watch their ads, in fact skipping ads on broadcast tv is a big and legal market. That's because you already paid for it, and the payment was what allowed the content to even get created. >>I don’t understand what you are saying. There has always existed straightforward methods of preventing “freeloaders” as you call them from accessing your content. If you don’t believe me, go to wsj.com and report back. That's an interesting example, considering the number of times you see non-paywalled links here on HN. Freeloaders exist only because they are being subsidized by those who actually pay. That's exactly why paywalled articles also have non-paywalled versions. If you don't believe me (that non-paywalled versions are subsidized by people who pay), just ask someone who produces the content and report back. Or better yet, ask the same person who produced the content how long they will keep producing content if no one paid for access. As the old saying goes, at some point, you run out of other people's money.
cordite 7y ago
This being only chat, what about email support?
- sojanofficial 7y ago
  Chatwoot Co-Founder here: We are still working on email support. The feature is halfway done. It should be ready by the end of this month. progressing here on : https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot/tree/epic-email-inbox https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot/tree/epic-email-inbox
Techonomicon 7y ago
The least interesting part of intercom at this point is the chatbox itself. Intercom at this point is / is moving towards a tool to reach your customers / specific audiences sitting atop your eventing system to Target specific users at the right time (where a single one of those avenues may be through the chat widget). The realized the least interesting part of this all is the chatbox itself, what's more interesting is leveraging internal information towards a better customer experience (through chat or other messaging channels)
- jaxn 7y ago
  Do you think that holds true for both sales and support?
nathan_f77 7y ago
This is great! I'm using Intercom, but I know it's going to get very expensive over the next few years, so I will keep an eye on this project. I'm thinking about starting to run my own tools instead of relying on third-party software, e.g. * GitLab.com (free, ~$80/mo for CI) => Self-hosted GitLab * Sentry.io (free) => Self-hosted Sentry * Slack ($24/mo) => Mattermost * Google Analytics (free) => Matomo The main reason would be for GDPR, HIPAA compliance, SOC-2, and PCI certification. I also don't think I would save any money by running these on AWS. I would probably need a few m5.xlarge instances, and it would cost about $150/mo per instance. And then I have to monitor and upgrade all of the software, debug any problems, etc. So right now I don't have any big incentives to go down this road, but that might change once I'm ready to look into HIPAA compliance.
- justinclift 7y ago
  As a general thought, depending on your git hosting needs Gitea may be suitable instead of GitLab. It doesn't have anywhere near the same amount of integrations, but if you just need something with a decent web interface (github like) and using the same fork/branch/PR/merge model, it'll work. It's system requirements are much smaller than GitLab, and it's trivial to just leave running for months at a time with having to actively SysAdmin it. GitLab is more of an "enterprise" system with all the bells and whistles, requiring a correspondingly higher amount of resources and ongoing maintenance.
- masonhensley 7y ago
  Except for mattermost, I’ve run all those in a Kubernetes cluster. Good stuff. On the own you’re own data theme, I would also throw in metabase, mautic & zammad.
- NickBusey 7y ago
  Look into Zulip before you settle on Mattermost. I've used both, and vastly prefer Zulip's threaded model.
rushils 7y ago
This looks awesome, will watch for updates. I run a small nonprofit and we spend around 350/m on support services, would love to cut this cost!
- webofnithin 7y ago
  Nithin, Co-founder of chatwoot here. We're so happy that ChatWoot will help you and 1000 other people who are spending a ton on these tools :) Also Feedbacks like this motivates and drives us. Keep supporting :)
outime 7y ago
I’m glad to see open-source alternatives for this! Without judging how good or bad this technically is, I’m happy to see the devs made it visually appealing. Good job. My only complaint is the docs page. If I use Safari on iOS I can only see this [1] and nothing is clickable besides the menu, which offers a link to the same place. [1] https://imgur.com/aD1bJh3 https://imgur.com/aD1bJh3
- sojanofficial 7y ago
  Chatwoot Co-founder here: Thanks a lot for the support. A couple of our devs come with a design background as well, so aesthetics and UX is also something we take great pride in. Also thanks for bringing that bug up, we are working on fixing that.
jakaroo 7y ago
I love the super clean design of your main website. Is that based off a template or made from scratch using UI library?
- losthobbies 7y ago
  Yea it's really nice. I looked through the Github repo could couldn't figure out what library they used. Would love to know what css/ui they are using.
  - pranavrajs 7y ago
    Thanks :) We started off with a theme which is using Bootstrap and the illustrations are created by mixing humaaans.com characters with undraw.co illustrations. The font we used is paid font, so we couldn't make the repo open. Tech stack is React with Gatsby hosted on Netlify.
jonny383 7y ago
I was hooked until I saw `rake`, at which point I was triggered _big time_. I'm just imagining the memory consumption of this behemoth.
keybits 7y ago
Another great open source helpdesk in this space is Zammad https://github.com/zammad/zammad https://github.com/zammad/zammad
- ahofmann 7y ago
  We have been using Zammad for over a year and are extremely satisfied! The developers have programmed OTRS and know what they are doing. The only thing we missed was a tool that asks the user if he was satisfied after a completed support ticket. Thanks to Zammad's API, we were able to easily program this ourselves.
dharma1 7y ago
Very nice to have more open source choice. Is there a flow builder with GUI included for bots?
- webofnithin 7y ago
  Nithin co-founder here, Thanks a lot for the feedback :) At present we don't support bots, instead we have multiple agent based support solution.

417 points by pranavrajs 7y ago

Founder here, Chatwoot is a customer support tool for instant messaging channels which can help businesses provide exceptional customer support through their websites or social media channels. This was a product we started building in 2017. It failed due to a couple of obvious reasons. We built on Vue.js and Rails. It was in an inactive mode for around 1 and a half years. Recently we thought of putting it out instead of letting the code to rust. Our idea is to make it something like Gitlab/Mattermost where people can host their own version and we will provide a hosted version for people who don't want to self-host. After we open-sourced, we received contributions from 30 developers all around the world. We believe bots alone can't solve all the questions and there is no context. On the other hand, having agents alone for customer support won't scale as your business grows. We intend to build a bot+agent platform which is fully opensource and supports most of the social media channels, email and websites.

joshmn 7y ago
Congrats on the launch. As a fellow Ruby/Rails developer I love seeing great open-source Ruby/Rails apps in a world where everyone seems to be trending to what's "sexy" now instead of what's tired and true.
- edoceo 7y ago
  Remember when folks called RoR "sexy" and CGI tried and true? Or swap any two nearly similar stacks. Stack don't matter, it's not the wand, it's the wizard and time makes fools of us all.
  - chimen 7y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZeZsZEEpno https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZeZsZEEpno These two actually made me hate the language/framework which is why I never gave it a shot.
    - scrollaway 7y ago
      What's that last jar supposed to represent?
      - obituary_latte 7y ago
        Looks like gasoline/petrol which is sometimes used by people to huff (inhale) to get high.
  - yellowapple 7y ago
    The whole "serverless" trend feels (felt? Did the fad die out?) like coming full circle back to (Fast)CGI.
- mushufasa 7y ago
  interesting spin on 'tried and true.' also works and made me smile.
  - frequentnapper 7y ago
    unless it was a typo.
- nickserv 7y ago
  You'll never make everyone happy... For me the fact that it's RoR as opposed to, say Go or Elixir is a big turn off, because I know it will be slow and eat up lots of RAM. For me tried and true would be Java.
ceohockey60 7y ago
Nice project! Curious: has any organization started using Chatwoot to provide customer support?
- pranavrajs 7y ago
  There are no other organizations which are using the project other than us. We use it on our homepage chatwoot.com and for our Facebook pages.
  - ron22 7y ago
    That will change soon. :) Awesome project!
    - sojanofficial 7y ago
      Chatwoot Co-founder here: Do let us know if you face any issues. Will be glad to help.
judge2020 7y ago
Would like to let you know the hamburger menu currently doesn't work on mobile (clicking it does nothing)
- pranavrajs 7y ago
  Hey, thanks for letting me know. I will fix it soon :) Looks like I forgot to add the action on the hamburger button.
  - dlhavema 7y ago
    Related, the chat window that pops up on android is off screen about 15 to 20% but still workable. I am very familiar with Intercom, and this looks comparable at first glance. Nice start.
jnathsf 7y ago
Amazing to see your vision coming to life by open sourcing the code and getting so many contributors! No small feat. And great to see the project is being done in Rails. I’ve spent hours looking for a a good product in this space for our company so will definitely give this a try. Two questions - do you have a way to author FAQs and is email an accepted channel? Thanks and can’t wait to see Chatwoot grow.
- pranavrajs 7y ago
  Thanks for the kind words. Please see my response below. > do you have a way to author FAQs Right now, we don't support it. We have FAQs and a documentation website in the pipeline. > is email an accepted channel? Honestly speaking, it is not completely done yet. Emails from support desk mail can be seen in the dashboard, but you cannot respond to it now from our dashboard. Hopefully, we would be able to complete it sooner.
  - scrollaway 7y ago
    Congratulations on the release. Wish you all the best with it, and will not hesitate to recommend it … but first, email 100% has to be supported. Should be as good as Intercom's user-facing email flow. Email and twitter DMs are IMO more important for people looking for a support channel than "live agent" chat boxes. Live agent boxes are often adblocked and can't ever be the sole point of contact for a company that cares about having a support channel.
    - sojanofficial 7y ago
      Chatwoot Co-Founder here: Thanks a lot for the support. Totally agree. email is currently our top priority item and the development is halfway through. We are also actively working on twitter DM as a channel. Stay posted for updates.
vicnov 7y ago
What were the reasons for failure? It would be great to learn more about your experience.
- pranavrajs 7y ago
  There are a couple of things which I can tell, most important is that we were naive and we were not patient enough to see the project grow organically and reach the users and find its USP. We wanted instant gratification which is not always available in the startup world.
  - King-Aaron 7y ago
    A lot of first-time entrepreneurs need to listen to this comment.
stanislavb 7y ago
Good job. I hope it gets traction. I've scheduled it to be featured on the homepage of SaaSHub for next Monday.
- sojanofficial 7y ago
  Chatwoot Co-Founder here: Just saw that its up on SaasHub. thanks a lot for featuring.
  - stanislavb 7y ago
    No worries. Just keep up the good work. I'd also suggest, asking some of your users to leave you a review on SH.
cvg 7y ago
Nice job! Have you done any load testing on it? Curious how much server to buy to run an instance with some usage.
- sojanofficial 7y ago
  Chatwoot Co-founder here: We haven't done a full-scale load testing yet. But we were able to handle the HN traffic using Heroku's free tier.
alexnewman 7y ago
omg I love you. I probably wont switch til you have a hosted version where I can pay you, sorry. Maybe you can launch one on heroku for me as a beta user and I'll pay you?
- sojanofficial 7y ago
  Chatwoot Co-founder here: Thanks a lot for the support. A hosted version will be up by end of this month. Meanwhile, you can deploy the repo easily to heroku. Will be happy to assist if you face any issues.
gremlinsinc 7y ago
A full demo or feature list would be nice. For comparison to other options out there.
- sojanofficial 7y ago
  Chatwoot Co-Founder here: We are working on the feature comparison and roadmap pages. It will be up on the website in a day or two.
  - mritchie712 7y ago
    just record a 1 to 2 minute demo of you walking thru standard use cases. it will only take a couple hours and is well worth it.
dominotw 7y ago
> It failed due to a couple of obvious reasons. We built on Vue.js and Rails I read it with a comma instead of fullstop between the sentences :D
- 8bithero 7y ago
  Haha! I did the exact same thing I was wondering what was wrong with either of those stacks
izolate 7y ago
> It failed due to a couple of obvious reasons. Would you mind elaborating? Would love to hear why. Seems like a good chat-focused alternative. Was the competition from Freskdesk too stiff (assuming you're based in Bangalore)? Anyway congrats on breathing new life into the project!
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

mkagenius 7y ago

Great work. While on the topic, I believe everything ranging from Uber to Google can be replaced by an open source alternatives. There will be some cons but overall lots of benefits.

pranavrajs 7y ago
I agree. I assume having a hosted version of tools like CRM or support desk would help in getting better at maintaining the privacy of the customers.

tarr11 7y ago

This is great. Intercom’s pricing is outrageous for small startups so I could this getting traction.

burtonator 7y ago
It's $50 per month for all their products in their new program... This isn't insane but is still pricey when you're in an MVP mode.
- jawngee 7y ago
  What new program?
  - omarchowdhury 7y ago
    https://www.intercom.com/early-stage https://www.intercom.com/early-stage

mkohlmyr 7y ago

Having worked in this field for a while, you should look at tiered and tagged assignment. E.g. escalation tiers / priority assignment and assignment by browser language / geo up. From what I recall these were important as you look at supporting large organisations. Customisability (design) and pre-chat forms were also headline features.

trynewideas 7y ago
Email channels and pre-ticket forms are dealbreakers for being a Zendesk replacement. I can live without a lot of ZD's features (and be happier for it) but those two are table stakes for me. I could see this being a replacement for Intercom, but Intercom isn't a fit for us either. The stuff ZD and Intercom (and SFDC) are awful at, where there are opportunities for something else to swoop in: even partial Markdown support for incoming messages, integrations with third-party docs/KB sources, live queue dashboards/visualizations, toggling features based on different support plans, and facilitating handoffs for follow-the-sun support (multiple queues, defined regions/hours per queue, auto-reassigning active tickets across agents and queues, cleaner or richer ticket summarization options).
- mkohlmyr 7y ago
  Yeah agreed, KB integration was another big one, as well as shortcuts when you have agents who do 3-4 chats at the same time. In fact the ability to define agent capacity individually and by role to begin with is important. The ability to define different capacities for the same agent across different queues and how to aggregate that is also an advanced feature which is useful. E.g. I can take 3 in English or one in French and one in English. Or I can take 4 tier one tickets or 2 tier two tickets. Or I can do x tickets for customers on basic support but if I'm on with a customer who has priority... Etc Queueing and assignment logic gets tricky because requirements can be vastly different across organisations. Hence why there are companies at the high end charging enterprise money.
sojanofficial 7y ago
Co-Founder here: These are all great suggestions. We are reworking our roadmap based on the feedback from HN. Thanks a lot for these.

artur_makly 7y ago

Congrats on pivoting this to open. As an Intercom customer ( perhaps paying too much ), it would be very helpful to see a basic feature comparison table and ideally an in-progress roadmap so that I may assess the opportunity costs for a possible migration. And if not a matrix, at least a simple list of top-level features, which I could not find in the docs. For me, "Alternative", is a very loaded word that comes with an expectation of comparing the current scope of features offered by the aforementioned paid apps. Best of luck!

sojanofficial 7y ago
Chatwoot Co-Founder here: Thanks a lot for the support. Totally get your concern about "Alternative". In terms of the scope of features, we are still behind many of the current market offerings. But we will be making some steady progress over the new couple of months. Meanwhile, we are updating the website & repo with feature comparison and an in-progress roadmap. It should be up in a day or two

brenden2 7y ago

Here's a blocklist for all these super annoying chat widgets: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bcye/Hello-Goodbye/master/filterlist.txt https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bcye/Hello-Goodbye/master/... You can import this into uBlock origin so you never have to see these things again.

randomb_1979 7y ago
Too bad there is no way to make a blocklist to block all freeloaders from visiting websites. The person who actually owns anything at all (the website owner) is somehow expected to give everything for free to someone who doesn't own anything at all (the website visitor). Plus I have found that the same people who complain loudly on internet forums about chat widgets (and many similar marketing tools) don't stop using the website itself for the sake of their principles. Hilarious.
- xnyan 7y ago
  I don’t understand what you are saying. There has always existed straightforward methods of preventing “freeloaders” as you call them from accessing your content. If you don’t believe me, go to wsj.com and report back. TV Broadcasters don’t get to force you to watch their ads, in fact skipping ads on broadcast tv is a big and legal market. Furthermore, today’s ad blocking detection can be very good at detention, so there you go - you have your script. When sites detect my adblocking and nag me, I am more than happy to leave their shitty website and never come back.
  - randomb_1979 7y ago
    >>I am more than happy to leave their shitty website and never come back. Unfortunately, if this is actually true, then you are the exception which proves the rule. That's precisely why I call these people "freeloaders". If they actually stopped visiting my website and wasting my site's resources based on such principles, I would be ecstatic to see them leave. >>TV Broadcasters don’t get to force you to watch their ads, in fact skipping ads on broadcast tv is a big and legal market. That's because you already paid for it, and the payment was what allowed the content to even get created. >>I don’t understand what you are saying. There has always existed straightforward methods of preventing “freeloaders” as you call them from accessing your content. If you don’t believe me, go to wsj.com and report back. That's an interesting example, considering the number of times you see non-paywalled links here on HN. Freeloaders exist only because they are being subsidized by those who actually pay. That's exactly why paywalled articles also have non-paywalled versions. If you don't believe me (that non-paywalled versions are subsidized by people who pay), just ask someone who produces the content and report back. Or better yet, ask the same person who produced the content how long they will keep producing content if no one paid for access. As the old saying goes, at some point, you run out of other people's money.

cordite 7y ago

This being only chat, what about email support?

sojanofficial 7y ago
Chatwoot Co-Founder here: We are still working on email support. The feature is halfway done. It should be ready by the end of this month. progressing here on : https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot/tree/epic-email-inbox https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot/tree/epic-email-inbox

Techonomicon 7y ago

The least interesting part of intercom at this point is the chatbox itself. Intercom at this point is / is moving towards a tool to reach your customers / specific audiences sitting atop your eventing system to Target specific users at the right time (where a single one of those avenues may be through the chat widget). The realized the least interesting part of this all is the chatbox itself, what's more interesting is leveraging internal information towards a better customer experience (through chat or other messaging channels)

jaxn 7y ago
Do you think that holds true for both sales and support?

nathan_f77 7y ago

This is great! I'm using Intercom, but I know it's going to get very expensive over the next few years, so I will keep an eye on this project. I'm thinking about starting to run my own tools instead of relying on third-party software, e.g. * GitLab.com (free, ~$80/mo for CI) => Self-hosted GitLab * Sentry.io (free) => Self-hosted Sentry * Slack ($24/mo) => Mattermost * Google Analytics (free) => Matomo The main reason would be for GDPR, HIPAA compliance, SOC-2, and PCI certification. I also don't think I would save any money by running these on AWS. I would probably need a few m5.xlarge instances, and it would cost about $150/mo per instance. And then I have to monitor and upgrade all of the software, debug any problems, etc. So right now I don't have any big incentives to go down this road, but that might change once I'm ready to look into HIPAA compliance.

justinclift 7y ago
As a general thought, depending on your git hosting needs Gitea may be suitable instead of GitLab. It doesn't have anywhere near the same amount of integrations, but if you just need something with a decent web interface (github like) and using the same fork/branch/PR/merge model, it'll work. It's system requirements are much smaller than GitLab, and it's trivial to just leave running for months at a time with having to actively SysAdmin it. GitLab is more of an "enterprise" system with all the bells and whistles, requiring a correspondingly higher amount of resources and ongoing maintenance.
masonhensley 7y ago
Except for mattermost, I’ve run all those in a Kubernetes cluster. Good stuff. On the own you’re own data theme, I would also throw in metabase, mautic & zammad.
NickBusey 7y ago
Look into Zulip before you settle on Mattermost. I've used both, and vastly prefer Zulip's threaded model.

rushils 7y ago

This looks awesome, will watch for updates. I run a small nonprofit and we spend around 350/m on support services, would love to cut this cost!

webofnithin 7y ago
Nithin, Co-founder of chatwoot here. We're so happy that ChatWoot will help you and 1000 other people who are spending a ton on these tools :) Also Feedbacks like this motivates and drives us. Keep supporting :)

outime 7y ago

I’m glad to see open-source alternatives for this! Without judging how good or bad this technically is, I’m happy to see the devs made it visually appealing. Good job. My only complaint is the docs page. If I use Safari on iOS I can only see this [1] and nothing is clickable besides the menu, which offers a link to the same place. [1] https://imgur.com/aD1bJh3 https://imgur.com/aD1bJh3

sojanofficial 7y ago
Chatwoot Co-founder here: Thanks a lot for the support. A couple of our devs come with a design background as well, so aesthetics and UX is also something we take great pride in. Also thanks for bringing that bug up, we are working on fixing that.

jakaroo 7y ago

I love the super clean design of your main website. Is that based off a template or made from scratch using UI library?

losthobbies 7y ago
Yea it's really nice. I looked through the Github repo could couldn't figure out what library they used. Would love to know what css/ui they are using.
- pranavrajs 7y ago
  Thanks :) We started off with a theme which is using Bootstrap and the illustrations are created by mixing humaaans.com characters with undraw.co illustrations. The font we used is paid font, so we couldn't make the repo open. Tech stack is React with Gatsby hosted on Netlify.

jonny383 7y ago

I was hooked until I saw `rake`, at which point I was triggered _big time_. I'm just imagining the memory consumption of this behemoth.

keybits 7y ago

Another great open source helpdesk in this space is Zammad https://github.com/zammad/zammad https://github.com/zammad/zammad

ahofmann 7y ago
We have been using Zammad for over a year and are extremely satisfied! The developers have programmed OTRS and know what they are doing. The only thing we missed was a tool that asks the user if he was satisfied after a completed support ticket. Thanks to Zammad's API, we were able to easily program this ourselves.

dharma1 7y ago

Very nice to have more open source choice. Is there a flow builder with GUI included for bots?

webofnithin 7y ago
Nithin co-founder here, Thanks a lot for the feedback :) At present we don't support bots, instead we have multiple agent based support solution.