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Launch HN: Chatwoot (YC W21) – Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Zendesk

396 points by pranav_rajs 6y ago

Hello everyone, We are a 3 founder team. Myself Pranav. Sojan and Nithin are my co-founders. We are building Chatwoot (https://www.chatwoot.com https://www.chatwoot.com, https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot). With Chatwoot, businesses can connect channels like website live chat, email, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp etc and talk to the customers from one place. Chatwoot is an open-source alternative to Intercom, Zendesk etc. We help companies in regulated industries to manage customer data without sharing it with third-party providers. Since the software is open-source, it is easier to build custom workflows that suit your business on top of Chatwoot. We started building Chatwoot as proprietary software in 2017, but the startup failed. Seeing the data privacy regulations and people taking interest in self-hosted alternatives, we open-sourced the product in 2019, we got a lot of love from the HN community. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559139). Over the last year, we have been working with the community to build the software. Seeing the interest from the open-source world, we decided to quit our jobs and work full time on Chatwoot. We introduced support plans to validate the need for self-hosted solutions and it worked out well. We applied to YC and got into the W21 batch. Right now, there are 1000+ companies using Chatwoot. We have around 7.2k stars and more than 100 contributors in our repository. The software can be used in more than 25+ regional languages. Apart from the omnichannel support desk, we are adding more features like a self-service portal, marketing campaigns, customer segmentation, workflows etc. We make money by charging a license fee of $99 per user per month for features like customisable dashboards, SLA Management, Agent scheduling software, IP blocklisting etc which are suited for large enterprises. We will continue to work with the community to build Chatwoot. We would love to hear your experiences, thoughts and ideas!

rancar2 6y ago
Congrats on the launch! Is there any plan beyond agent-based chat on the roadmap? I like to start with a dialogue flow for the common use cases before passing the conversation off to human agents.
- pranav_rajs 6y ago
  Yes, we already integrate with Rasa.ai and Dialogflow. You can start the conversation with DialogFlow and pass it off to the agent. You can see a demo here https://www.chatwoot.com/features/chatbots https://www.chatwoot.com/features/chatbots and a setup guide with a sample code here https://github.com/chatwoot/dialogflow-agent-bot-demo https://github.com/chatwoot/dialogflow-agent-bot-demo
  - rancar2 6y ago
    Amazing! You have a customer at CareDash. Feel free to reach out to me if you want any feedback as we will start implementing this shortly. rcarlton@caredash.com
    - pranav_rajs 6y ago
      Great! Just sent an email :)
sixhobbits 6y ago
Looks very cool! For me, the USP of Intercom was their data model. The tag-based system and the fact that everything could be easily exported to a flat CSV file made it super powerful. Can you comment on whether Chatwoot is similar in this regard?
- pranav_rajs 6y ago
  We allow tagging the conversations and contacts, filter them based on the tag. At the moment we don't have a CSV export, we are working on it. You can get the same information as JSON using our APIs.
mrwnmonm 6y ago
I specifically use Zendesk to use their support ticket system. I am not interested in live chat. I also like their CRM. Right now, you don't provide those features, right? I can only see live chat. Am I missing something?
- pranav_rajs 6y ago
  You can integrate 7 channels with Chatwoot including Email. https://www.chatwoot.com/features/channels https://www.chatwoot.com/features/channels We have a base version of CRM at the moment, we are building more on top of it.
  - scrollaway 6y ago
    This may be out of your depth but I'd love to see a provider that supports Discord. eg. Tagging a bot in a #support channel for help, being able to reply from it, and being able to cross post announcements from such a bot alongside twitter/facebook.
    - pranav_rajs 6y ago
      I didn't completely understand the use case. Do you wish to 1. Reply to the support messages from Discord or 2. Manage discord community over some other tool? The first one is an integration similar to what we have with Slack right now.
      - scrollaway 6y ago
        First one is definitely the primary use case.
        pranav_rajs 6y ago
        We are using Discord for managing our community. We have already thought about this. There was not enough requests to build the integration. Anyway I have created an issue at the repo, so that this can be tracked. https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot/issues/1941 https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot/issues/1941
scrollaway 6y ago
Congrats on the launch. One of my clients will become a customer of yours I'm pretty sure. :)
- pranav_rajs 6y ago
  Let us know if you need any help in setting it up.
ignoramous 6y ago
Congratulations! Love chatwoot, and have been recommending it to others too. If I may, what's your take on Cloudflare's upcoming DurableObjects for Workers [0] and the possibilities that entails for chat-applications like these? > ...license fee of $99 per user per month for features like customisable dashboards, SLA Management, Agent scheduling software, IP blocklisting etc which are suited for large enterprises. I see a lot of F/OSS YC startups (like PostHog, SuperTokens, QuestDB, OpsTrace, SigNoz etc) following the buyer-based open-core model that GitLab pioneered [1]. I wanted to know if there are there any other models other than GitLab's that YC recommends to its startups? Also, curious why for-profit F/OSS startups would leave up a "sponsor" button on their GitHub. :D > We started building Chatwoot as proprietary software in 2017, but the startup failed. Tangential: Was this the startup that failed [2]? If so, it would be interesting to read your views on it since it looks like except the co-founder that blogged about the failure, the rest of the original founding team is back building chatwoot? Off-topic: If you are okay, can you reveal if you've raised funds from Indian Angles (many particularly active in the SaaS scene [3]) and what has been your experience so far? And a set of recommendations, if any, for other Indian F/OSS SaaS upstarts? May be you should blog about it? Thanks. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24616169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24616169 [1] https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/commercial-open-source-business-strategies/ https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/commercial-open-sourc... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24988380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24988380 [3] https://saasboomi.com/indian-saas-tribe/ https://saasboomi.com/indian-saas-tribe/
- pabs3 6y ago
  The sponsor button means (slightly) more money for the company, is there a particular reason you suggest to disable it?
- pranav_rajs 6y ago
  > If I may, what's your take on Cloudflare's upcoming DurableObjects for Workers [0] and the possibilities that entails for chat-applications like these? It seems interesting. We have not had time yet to deep dive. > I wanted to know if there are there any other models other than GitLab's that YC recommends to its startups? We have not seen any trend emerging other than open-core so far. > Also, curious why for-profit F/OSS startups would leave up a "sponsor" button on their GitHub. :D Some one wants to support us without taking subscription plans is a great reason to have it. > Tangential: Was this the startup that failed [2]? If so, it would be interesting to read your views on it since it looks like except the co-founder that blogged about the failure, the rest of the original founding team is back building chatwoot? I think you might have misunderstood, op was mentioning another startup, not Chatwoot. You can read our story here. https://www.chatwoot.com/blog/building-in-the-open https://www.chatwoot.com/blog/building-in-the-open > Off-topic: If you are okay, can you reveal if you've raised funds from Indian Angles (many particularly active in the SaaS scene [3]) and what has been your experience so far? And a set of recommendations, if any, for other Indian F/OSS SaaS upstarts? May be you should blog about it? We will definitely write about it soon.
steipete 6y ago
MIT license. Easy to copy and host cheaper. Curious how long this will work before you change it.
- pranav_rajs 6y ago
  We have a enterprise edition in works. We will launch it soon. Whatever is MIT now, will stay as MIT.
  - steipete 6y ago
    screenshotting
    - pranav_rajs 6y ago
      Haha! for sure.
  - mariushn 6y ago
    Hope MIT core/features will continue to be improved, not abandoned. Adding new large features as enterprise only makes sense.
    - sojanofficial 6y ago
      The community edition remains a core part of our vision and is also the base on which the enterprise features are build. So rest assured that we will keep working on improving them.
- JanisL 6y ago
  I was wondering the exact same thing, I think the MIT license is a really bad choice here for reasons explained here: https://www.lesinskis.com/MIT-licence-community-hostile.html https://www.lesinskis.com/MIT-licence-community-hostile.html
avinassh 6y ago
Congrats on the launch! It looks really cool. The UI reminded me of DelightChat [0] [0] - https://www.delightchat.io/ https://www.delightchat.io/
- pranav_rajs 6y ago
  We know Preetam, they are a great team!
  - grwthckrmstr 6y ago
    Preetam here :) Congrats on the launch and traction Pranav!
etienne_ad 6y ago
No phone support though? That’s why we have to use zendesk...
- pranav_rajs 6y ago
  We have had requests for phone support. At the moment, our primary focus is on text based messaging. We will get to the phone/video part in the future. We want to make the software simple and easy to use. Setting up Asterisk and using it with Chatwoot was too much to handle. So we deferred that work for now. We will come back to it later.
  - ankurpatel 6y ago
    Nice with Twilio a lot of use cases like callcenter are possible.
  - mariushn 6y ago
    Good choice!
mehal 6y ago
Product looks awesome! So for my understanding - to add email channel you have to forward an email to single monitored inbox, correct? What email protocols do you support?
- sojanofficial 6y ago
  That is correct. Our email channel is an implementation build on top of Rails Action mail box. It support ingresses for Mailgun, Mandrill, Postmark, and SendGrid. You can also handle inbound mails directly via the Exim, Postfix, and Qmail ingresses ref: https://guides.rubyonrails.org/action_mailbox_basics.html https://guides.rubyonrails.org/action_mailbox_basics.html
  - mariushn 6y ago
    Please consider adding Sparkpost support too.
    - sojanofficial 6y ago
      We will definitely take a look if there is enough community interest. Feel free to raise issues on our Github if you have feature requests. https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot/issues https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot/issues
pabs3 6y ago
Since you are an open core business, how do you plan to deal with the situation where the community contributes features that are already in the proprietary enterprise version?
- deepstack 6y ago
  nice to hear you guys open sourcing this product! Also be interested how you resolve this issue.
- pranav_rajs 6y ago
  This is a hard decision to make. It would be considered on the basis of a couple of things. If it is derivate of already existing code, we would suggest not to do that. If it is an original work, then we would consider those. Having said that, we want to reduce such kind of conflicts happening in the community. So we would try to limit an entire module under EE License rather a part of it.
  - hanniabu 6y ago
    > So we would try to limit an entire module under EE License rather a part of it. As someone not familiar with this license, can you expand a little more into what it offers? Also another option for this is for you guys to maintain your own branch which would be used for the free hosted solutions so any enterprise feature PR's can be contained to the self-hosted option.
    - pranav_rajs 6y ago
      Handling separate closed fork is one of the solution. Historically, it is an overhead for the team managing the project. You can read about the experience shared by Metabase [0]. [0] https://www.metabase.com/blog/Opening-Metabase-Enterprise/index.html https://www.metabase.com/blog/Opening-Metabase-Enterprise/in...
    - ac29 6y ago
      I think by EE license, they mean "Enterprise Edition" (aka commercial license, not sure if the code itself would be considered open, closed or "shared").
itsthecourier 6y ago
Great pivot, guys. We are leaving intercom to work with it :)
- sojanofficial 6y ago
  happy to have you onboard. Feel free to reach out if you need any help :)
samblr 6y ago
Intercom pricing[1] shows 5 seats for $119 - am I missing something in their pricing page ? If not Chatwoot seems expensive at $99/user/month ? [1] : https://www.intercom.com/pricing https://www.intercom.com/pricing
- pranav_rajs 6y ago
  Our community edition which is available with MIT license and is free for use should cover the starter plans in Intercom. $99/user/month is targetted at large enterprises requiring enterprise support.
  - samblr 6y ago
    Makes sense.
  - nicoburns 6y ago
    Is the community edition available in hosted form? Otherwise you may wish to consider aiming a paid hosted product at the lower end of the market too. We use Intercom in our product, and it's the one thing we explicitly don't want to self-host because it's what our customers use to contact us if our own services are ever down or broken.
    - sojanofficial 6y ago
      We do have a hosted offering available on https://app.chatwoot.com/ https://app.chatwoot.com/
johnsonap 6y ago
Congrats! As a small bootstrapped startup I could see us switching from the company we currently use to something like this.
- sojanofficial 6y ago
  Do let us know if you need any help in setting up Chatwoot.
hnarn 6y ago
Thank you for licensing this under a proper open source license. Out of curiosity, how would you feel about a company selling this as a service? It's obviously legal per the license, but I'm wondering what your perspective is. If you encourage it, do you have any plans for how to ensure everybody are happy and turns a profit from it? I have grown cynical over the years with these kinds of open source challengers as it seems to be a playbook these days to bait and switch, going from a) freely license a competitor to b) build a large user base to c) switch license to consolidate power over the software, make money and slowly kill it. Of course what's once open source will always stay that way, but if you're large enough when you branch, your engineering resources alone might be enough to turn people off the OSS fork.
- pranav_rajs 6y ago
  There are people who have built custom solutions on top of Chatwoot and selling it. There are people who are selling it in their country without changing the code and making profit out it. I'm happy to help those people out (not for free, would charge something obiviously). There are different markets where we might not be able to cater. Since the solution is flexible enough to build custom channels, I've seen people using it as "Whatsapp CRM for X country". We are following the path Gitlab has taken. To sustain as a business, we will have some modules suited for large enterprises under an EE license, but it would not hinder the open-source part and the freedom that comes with it. If people want to build on Chatwoot, they will be free to do that.
  - samblr 6y ago
    Curious on on how ee license works - will it not stop somebody to take that source and run it for free ? or do parallel implementation on top of your free offerings.
    - pranav_rajs 6y ago
      We expect to follow Gitlab's path on this. There will be 2 repos. One with EE licensed code and the other one completely foss. eg: Gitlab[0] vs Gitlab FOSS [1] code [0] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab [1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss
dr_faustus 6y ago
We have been using Chatwoot for a couple of months. Launch HN is a bit of an understatement, its already a very polished, comprehensive product. Congratulations!
- sojanofficial 6y ago
  Thanks a lot !!!
bberenberg 6y ago
Is your hosted version multi tenant? Or are you running an individual tenant for every customer?
- pranav_rajs 6y ago
  It is multi-tenant, just like other SaaS providers. We can provide managed-services based on request.
randomsearch 6y ago
Love it. This (your commercial product) will go in an MVP I'm building. I've been using Intercom, which seems like the best option, but it's just so damn expensive for an MVP and that top tier price is not met by their medium tier product imo. tbh I'd pay even for the first agent (perhaps a free trial would have sufficed), but the Hacker tier does make it a certainty I'll trial it. Something most tool providers don't seem to get is that when I'm first building something I'm extremely price sensitive, but once I've got going I don't really care, like a tax if you take X% of my profit but you make my life easier and make it easier to grow that profit, who cares? That's fine compared to rinsing me when I'm not making any revenue (as with intercom). And if your product is any good, there's no way I'm going to switch once I get some traction, as the cost of any tool is ~ zero compared to the cost of employees.
- pranav_rajs 6y ago
  > like a tax if you take X% of my profit I have heard this analogy from other users of Intercom also. This is definitely an interesting take. But yeah, I got your point. Let us know if you need some help setting Chatwoot up.
dassmario 6y ago
I tried to replace Zendesk (chat) with self-hosted Chatwoot for our SaaS in December 2020. Unfortunately I couldn't get email conversation continuity to work back then and the docs were lacking. Happy to see that this now seems to be resolved. Will give Chatwoot another go when our Zendesk license is due for renewal.
- pranav_rajs 6y ago
  There was some issues with email continuity at that time. This is resolved and the docs for both continuity [0] and email channel [1] are updated. Let us know if you need some help setting it up, our team will be happy to take a call. [0] https://www.chatwoot.com/docs/conversation-continuity https://www.chatwoot.com/docs/conversation-continuity [1] https://www.chatwoot.com/docs/self-hosted/email-setup https://www.chatwoot.com/docs/self-hosted/email-setup
flylib 6y ago
What would you say are the main things that distinguish you from Papercups (YC S20) https://papercups.io https://papercups.io? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24133719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24133719
- randtrain34 6y ago
  From first impressions it looks like papercups focuses on chat while Chatwoot is a more complete suite around customer communication?
  - pranav_rajs 6y ago
    We intend to build an entire suite for customer engagement while giving the flexibility to customize it to match the business needs.
- pranav_rajs 6y ago
  Papercups is a nice product. It's good to have multiple players in the open-source space. Here are some of the thoughts which comes to my mind that differentiates Chatwoot from Papercups: 1. Omnichannel inbox [0]: Chatwoot let's you connect 7 different channels including email, whatsapp etc so that you have all your customer conversations in one place. 2. API Channel for building custom channels: Some people see Chatwoot as an alternative to Twilio Flex (except voice) as they could build custom channel using our API Channel and have the flexibility to customize the software to the extend they need. 3. Integration with Chatbot providers: Chatwoot has a concept of agent bots which allows you to connect with the existing Chatbot providers like Rasa.ai and Dialogflow easily. [1] 4. Shared inbox with teams: You can create a group of users under specific team and collaborate over a ticket. [2] 5. Flexibility to manage more than one brand under the same account. If the company has more than one product, instead of creating multiple accounts, the same account allows you to create different inboxes and set different permission levels for the users. 6. Availability of mobile apps on iOS and Android which helps you to chat with your customers on the go. [0] https://www.chatwoot.com/features/channels https://www.chatwoot.com/features/channels [1] https://www.chatwoot.com/features/chatbots https://www.chatwoot.com/features/chatbots [2] https://www.chatwoot.com/features/shared-inbox https://www.chatwoot.com/features/shared-inbox
purrpit 6y ago
You guys are miles ahead, seriously. Glad to see a fellow Indian startup taking this route (I was surprised to see it licensed as MIT tbh) We are a successful Mumbai based startup who are in the process of integrating Chatwoot (beta release just went out today), it will replace Haptik.ai for which we had already paid in advance for a year but don't want to use it anymore just after 1 month. Chatwoot isn't a piece of cake to set it up but definitely peanuts compared to the money some companies pay to other customer support solutions. Moreover, we are in the process of hiring and dedicating a small team who will contribute changes to Chatwoot and raise PRs upstream. Good luck to you guys, hope to connect with y'all on discord in coming weeks.
- pranav_rajs 6y ago
  > Chatwoot isn't a piece of cake to set it up We are working on make it simpler. :D You will hear from us in the upcoming releases. > Moreover, we are in the process of hiring and dedicating a small team who will contribute changes to Chatwoot and raise PRs upstream. That's great to know.
lonesword 6y ago
Congrats on the launch :)
- sojanofficial 6y ago
  thanks a lot :)
treve 6y ago
Another open source alternative: https://github.com/minimalchat/client https://github.com/minimalchat/client
- pranav_rajs 6y ago
  Nice to know!
softawre 6y ago
Cool product. How do you expect you will be able to compete with the likes of the more advanced CX vendors out there? For example: https://www.genesys.com/genesys-cloud https://www.genesys.com/genesys-cloud
- sojanofficial 6y ago
  With Chatwoot being opensource, you will be able to customise and deliver a very tailor made experience for your organisation. Thats one aspect to consider.
montroser 6y ago
We've been using Chatwoot for a few months now and been pretty happy with it. It's a Vue app that we have found easy to extend and and deep integrations with our product and support flow, without too much fuss. Nice work!
- sojanofficial 6y ago
  Glad to hear you are happy with Chatwoot :) Do let us know if you need any help, anytime !!!
tin7in 6y ago
Well done and I hope this pivot plays out well!
- webofnithin 6y ago
  Thanks a lot !!!
ngokevin 6y ago
Oh, wow. I used Chatwoot in the past, happily surprised you went through YC! I did have trouble self-hosting once, I think I had to enable task queues in my Heroku or something. I might've eventually switched over to the hosted option which was much easier. I would use Chatwoot again on my current startup (https://learncoupling.com https://learncoupling.com). Is there Discord/SMS or Zapier integration?
- sojanofficial 6y ago
  We have sms channel available via Twilio. Discord / Zapier are integrations are there on our roadmap.
tnolet 6y ago
We use Intercom for support and sales, but also for email (drip style), mass emails like product updates and in-app notifications. Any plans for that?
- sojanofficial 6y ago
  Right now Chatwoot is suited primarily for support and sales use cases where its one on one conversations with the customer. But we do have our eyes on marketing use cases(campaigns) in our future roadmap.
igammarays 6y ago
You know what I don't get about website live chat buttons like Intercom? The fact that you need to stay on the website to continue the conversation. Why not just provide a link to open a conversation in existing channels, like email, Twitter, Telegram, WhatsApp, etc.? That way the customer can choose whichever channel they already have or prefer, and the conversation continues seamlessly after they've left your website. Yes, I know Intercom offers the option to seamlessly switch to email, but at that point you could just build a simple 1990's email contact form in a fancy JS popup and it's effectively the same thing. I understand Intercom made a billion dollar company out of their chat widget because businesses want to look savvy, but that doesn't mean it's actually a good experience for users. As a startup founder myself, I care more about a seamless experience for my customers than for me.
- sojanofficial 6y ago
  What we have seen is some customers prefer chat buttons especially when they prefer not to give out their personal information. In Chatwoot the channels like email, twitter, Whatsapp etc are also considered primary conversation channels. So its helpful even when your primary support channel isn't chat.
- shawticus 6y ago
  Given the way you see the world, I'd say you odds of being successful in this industry are probably higher than most.
- mfkp 6y ago
  There are companies that do this. Example: https://www.messagebird.com/en/ https://www.messagebird.com/en/
- mosdl 6y ago
  Intercom made its valuation because they are used to track engagement/etc, the chat widget is just the trojan horse.
- discobean 6y ago
  We used to use kayako.com which switches from online to email chat, but they've since updated their pricing and screwed us around a bit so we've left them. Now we've switched to chatra.io, and this does the same and the price seems fair.
relaunched 6y ago
I'm starting to feel some sorta way about open-core model as more of a marketing mechanism for lead gen. I can't put my finger on it and I'm not saying it's bad. It just kind of feels like it's like a free-trial that appeals to engineers, that helps jumpstart your marketing funnel top-end. I'd love to hear Richard Stallman rant about this...he'd probably find a way to articulate, more elegantly, what I'm feeling.
- sojanofficial 6y ago
  In our case, open-sourcing Chatwoot was pretty accidental. You could read the story behind how we ended up doing that over here https://www.chatwoot.com/blog/woot-journals-one-year-since-open-sourcing-chatwoot https://www.chatwoot.com/blog/woot-journals-one-year-since-o...
- wyc 6y ago
  I like to think of open source as solving a real problem for people and saving them a lot of time for free, otherwise they wouldn't use it. This often does have the effect of creating demand for complementary services that solve even more problems and save even more time, or even opening up whole new markets like Docker did with LXC. Anyone considering the addition of open source to their stack should also consider the downsides such as cost of fork and technological lock-in in addition to the benefits, and based on the rapid adoption of open source over the past decade I'd say it's a pretty good trade-off in a lot of cases.
ron22 6y ago
YC backs another open source alternative to intercom with papercups: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24133719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24133719 That was backed last year. Isn't there some conflict from the investor when the companies are so similar?
- vardaro 6y ago
  I’m guessing it’s a hedge in case one fails
- areichert 6y ago
  Alex from Papercups here :) My guess is partially what vardaro mentioned (to hedge their bets), and partially because the space is really, really "wide" (not sure if that's the right word) in the sense that products like this could go in a million different directions... for example: email marketing, CRM, session reply, chatbots, etc. etc. That's to say, even though Papercups and Chatwoot seem pretty similar at the moment, I wouldn't be surprised if that changes quite a bit in a year or so! (Also it's no secret that YC invests in a ton of similar companies :P e.g. our batch alone had at least three video conferencing companies iirc.)
  - valtism 6y ago
    Hey Alex, we use and love Papercups. Very nice to use and a refreshingly simple experience.
doctoboggan 6y ago
This looks really useful. I sell custom 3D printed jewelry mostly on Etsy but I’ve been hoping to move to my own website. A large number of my customers like to chat with me on Etsy before buying so I’m hoping if I install this I can replicate that on my own website.
f430 6y ago
thx. really didnt like paying hundreds of dollars for something so trivial. let me know how to donate please
- sojanofficial 6y ago
  You could sponsor us on https://github.com/sponsors/chatwoot https://github.com/sponsors/chatwoot
random3 6y ago
Does Chatwoot try to replace Front as well?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- muhsin-k 6y ago
  Yes. Chatwoot can be a viable alternative to frontapp. You can read more about channels - https://www.chatwoot.com/features/channels https://www.chatwoot.com/features/channels
realquadrant 6y ago
@pranav_rajs I work with a bunch of open source projects via a foundation and wanted been working on a side project to help build ecosystems around complimentary open source technologies for both users and contributors. Would be interested in chatting more around how you’ve been growing? I am offering free use of webinar, events, and cross-community tools to open source projects to try out my ideas.
qecez 6y ago
Just signed up to give it a shot and emails aren't coming through :(
barefeg 6y ago
Any plans for a customer journey builder?

396 points by pranav_rajs 6y ago

rancar2 6y ago

Congrats on the launch! Is there any plan beyond agent-based chat on the roadmap? I like to start with a dialogue flow for the common use cases before passing the conversation off to human agents.

pranav_rajs 6y ago
Yes, we already integrate with Rasa.ai and Dialogflow. You can start the conversation with DialogFlow and pass it off to the agent. You can see a demo here https://www.chatwoot.com/features/chatbots https://www.chatwoot.com/features/chatbots and a setup guide with a sample code here https://github.com/chatwoot/dialogflow-agent-bot-demo https://github.com/chatwoot/dialogflow-agent-bot-demo
- rancar2 6y ago
  Amazing! You have a customer at CareDash. Feel free to reach out to me if you want any feedback as we will start implementing this shortly. rcarlton@caredash.com
  - pranav_rajs 6y ago
    Great! Just sent an email :)

sixhobbits 6y ago

Looks very cool! For me, the USP of Intercom was their data model. The tag-based system and the fact that everything could be easily exported to a flat CSV file made it super powerful. Can you comment on whether Chatwoot is similar in this regard?

pranav_rajs 6y ago
We allow tagging the conversations and contacts, filter them based on the tag. At the moment we don't have a CSV export, we are working on it. You can get the same information as JSON using our APIs.

mrwnmonm 6y ago

I specifically use Zendesk to use their support ticket system. I am not interested in live chat. I also like their CRM. Right now, you don't provide those features, right? I can only see live chat. Am I missing something?

pranav_rajs 6y ago
You can integrate 7 channels with Chatwoot including Email. https://www.chatwoot.com/features/channels https://www.chatwoot.com/features/channels We have a base version of CRM at the moment, we are building more on top of it.
- scrollaway 6y ago
  This may be out of your depth but I'd love to see a provider that supports Discord. eg. Tagging a bot in a #support channel for help, being able to reply from it, and being able to cross post announcements from such a bot alongside twitter/facebook.
  - pranav_rajs 6y ago
    I didn't completely understand the use case. Do you wish to 1. Reply to the support messages from Discord or 2. Manage discord community over some other tool? The first one is an integration similar to what we have with Slack right now.
    - scrollaway 6y ago
      First one is definitely the primary use case.
      - pranav_rajs 6y ago
        We are using Discord for managing our community. We have already thought about this. There was not enough requests to build the integration. Anyway I have created an issue at the repo, so that this can be tracked. https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot/issues/1941 https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot/issues/1941

scrollaway 6y ago

Congrats on the launch. One of my clients will become a customer of yours I'm pretty sure. :)

pranav_rajs 6y ago
Let us know if you need any help in setting it up.

ignoramous 6y ago

Congratulations! Love chatwoot, and have been recommending it to others too. If I may, what's your take on Cloudflare's upcoming DurableObjects for Workers [0] and the possibilities that entails for chat-applications like these? > ...license fee of $99 per user per month for features like customisable dashboards, SLA Management, Agent scheduling software, IP blocklisting etc which are suited for large enterprises. I see a lot of F/OSS YC startups (like PostHog, SuperTokens, QuestDB, OpsTrace, SigNoz etc) following the buyer-based open-core model that GitLab pioneered [1]. I wanted to know if there are there any other models other than GitLab's that YC recommends to its startups? Also, curious why for-profit F/OSS startups would leave up a "sponsor" button on their GitHub. :D > We started building Chatwoot as proprietary software in 2017, but the startup failed. Tangential: Was this the startup that failed [2]? If so, it would be interesting to read your views on it since it looks like except the co-founder that blogged about the failure, the rest of the original founding team is back building chatwoot? Off-topic: If you are okay, can you reveal if you've raised funds from Indian Angles (many particularly active in the SaaS scene [3]) and what has been your experience so far? And a set of recommendations, if any, for other Indian F/OSS SaaS upstarts? May be you should blog about it? Thanks. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24616169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24616169 [1] https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/commercial-open-source-business-strategies/ https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/commercial-open-sourc... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24988380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24988380 [3] https://saasboomi.com/indian-saas-tribe/ https://saasboomi.com/indian-saas-tribe/

pabs3 6y ago
The sponsor button means (slightly) more money for the company, is there a particular reason you suggest to disable it?
pranav_rajs 6y ago
> If I may, what's your take on Cloudflare's upcoming DurableObjects for Workers [0] and the possibilities that entails for chat-applications like these? It seems interesting. We have not had time yet to deep dive. > I wanted to know if there are there any other models other than GitLab's that YC recommends to its startups? We have not seen any trend emerging other than open-core so far. > Also, curious why for-profit F/OSS startups would leave up a "sponsor" button on their GitHub. :D Some one wants to support us without taking subscription plans is a great reason to have it. > Tangential: Was this the startup that failed [2]? If so, it would be interesting to read your views on it since it looks like except the co-founder that blogged about the failure, the rest of the original founding team is back building chatwoot? I think you might have misunderstood, op was mentioning another startup, not Chatwoot. You can read our story here. https://www.chatwoot.com/blog/building-in-the-open https://www.chatwoot.com/blog/building-in-the-open > Off-topic: If you are okay, can you reveal if you've raised funds from Indian Angles (many particularly active in the SaaS scene [3]) and what has been your experience so far? And a set of recommendations, if any, for other Indian F/OSS SaaS upstarts? May be you should blog about it? We will definitely write about it soon.

steipete 6y ago

MIT license. Easy to copy and host cheaper. Curious how long this will work before you change it.

pranav_rajs 6y ago
We have a enterprise edition in works. We will launch it soon. Whatever is MIT now, will stay as MIT.
- steipete 6y ago
  screenshotting
  - pranav_rajs 6y ago
    Haha! for sure.
- mariushn 6y ago
  Hope MIT core/features will continue to be improved, not abandoned. Adding new large features as enterprise only makes sense.
  - sojanofficial 6y ago
    The community edition remains a core part of our vision and is also the base on which the enterprise features are build. So rest assured that we will keep working on improving them.
JanisL 6y ago
I was wondering the exact same thing, I think the MIT license is a really bad choice here for reasons explained here: https://www.lesinskis.com/MIT-licence-community-hostile.html https://www.lesinskis.com/MIT-licence-community-hostile.html

avinassh 6y ago

Congrats on the launch! It looks really cool. The UI reminded me of DelightChat [0] [0] - https://www.delightchat.io/ https://www.delightchat.io/

pranav_rajs 6y ago
We know Preetam, they are a great team!
- grwthckrmstr 6y ago
  Preetam here :) Congrats on the launch and traction Pranav!

etienne_ad 6y ago

No phone support though? That’s why we have to use zendesk...

pranav_rajs 6y ago
We have had requests for phone support. At the moment, our primary focus is on text based messaging. We will get to the phone/video part in the future. We want to make the software simple and easy to use. Setting up Asterisk and using it with Chatwoot was too much to handle. So we deferred that work for now. We will come back to it later.
- ankurpatel 6y ago
  Nice with Twilio a lot of use cases like callcenter are possible.
- mariushn 6y ago
  Good choice!

mehal 6y ago

Product looks awesome! So for my understanding - to add email channel you have to forward an email to single monitored inbox, correct? What email protocols do you support?

sojanofficial 6y ago
That is correct. Our email channel is an implementation build on top of Rails Action mail box. It support ingresses for Mailgun, Mandrill, Postmark, and SendGrid. You can also handle inbound mails directly via the Exim, Postfix, and Qmail ingresses ref: https://guides.rubyonrails.org/action_mailbox_basics.html https://guides.rubyonrails.org/action_mailbox_basics.html
- mariushn 6y ago
  Please consider adding Sparkpost support too.
  - sojanofficial 6y ago
    We will definitely take a look if there is enough community interest. Feel free to raise issues on our Github if you have feature requests. https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot/issues https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot/issues

pabs3 6y ago

Since you are an open core business, how do you plan to deal with the situation where the community contributes features that are already in the proprietary enterprise version?

deepstack 6y ago
nice to hear you guys open sourcing this product! Also be interested how you resolve this issue.
pranav_rajs 6y ago
This is a hard decision to make. It would be considered on the basis of a couple of things. If it is derivate of already existing code, we would suggest not to do that. If it is an original work, then we would consider those. Having said that, we want to reduce such kind of conflicts happening in the community. So we would try to limit an entire module under EE License rather a part of it.
- hanniabu 6y ago
  > So we would try to limit an entire module under EE License rather a part of it. As someone not familiar with this license, can you expand a little more into what it offers? Also another option for this is for you guys to maintain your own branch which would be used for the free hosted solutions so any enterprise feature PR's can be contained to the self-hosted option.
  - pranav_rajs 6y ago
    Handling separate closed fork is one of the solution. Historically, it is an overhead for the team managing the project. You can read about the experience shared by Metabase [0]. [0] https://www.metabase.com/blog/Opening-Metabase-Enterprise/index.html https://www.metabase.com/blog/Opening-Metabase-Enterprise/in...
  - ac29 6y ago
    I think by EE license, they mean "Enterprise Edition" (aka commercial license, not sure if the code itself would be considered open, closed or "shared").

itsthecourier 6y ago

Great pivot, guys. We are leaving intercom to work with it :)

sojanofficial 6y ago
happy to have you onboard. Feel free to reach out if you need any help :)

samblr 6y ago

Intercom pricing[1] shows 5 seats for $119 - am I missing something in their pricing page ? If not Chatwoot seems expensive at $99/user/month ? [1] : https://www.intercom.com/pricing https://www.intercom.com/pricing

pranav_rajs 6y ago
Our community edition which is available with MIT license and is free for use should cover the starter plans in Intercom. $99/user/month is targetted at large enterprises requiring enterprise support.
- samblr 6y ago
  Makes sense.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  Is the community edition available in hosted form? Otherwise you may wish to consider aiming a paid hosted product at the lower end of the market too. We use Intercom in our product, and it's the one thing we explicitly don't want to self-host because it's what our customers use to contact us if our own services are ever down or broken.
  - sojanofficial 6y ago
    We do have a hosted offering available on https://app.chatwoot.com/ https://app.chatwoot.com/

johnsonap 6y ago

Congrats! As a small bootstrapped startup I could see us switching from the company we currently use to something like this.

sojanofficial 6y ago
Do let us know if you need any help in setting up Chatwoot.

hnarn 6y ago

Thank you for licensing this under a proper open source license. Out of curiosity, how would you feel about a company selling this as a service? It's obviously legal per the license, but I'm wondering what your perspective is. If you encourage it, do you have any plans for how to ensure everybody are happy and turns a profit from it? I have grown cynical over the years with these kinds of open source challengers as it seems to be a playbook these days to bait and switch, going from a) freely license a competitor to b) build a large user base to c) switch license to consolidate power over the software, make money and slowly kill it. Of course what's once open source will always stay that way, but if you're large enough when you branch, your engineering resources alone might be enough to turn people off the OSS fork.

pranav_rajs 6y ago
There are people who have built custom solutions on top of Chatwoot and selling it. There are people who are selling it in their country without changing the code and making profit out it. I'm happy to help those people out (not for free, would charge something obiviously). There are different markets where we might not be able to cater. Since the solution is flexible enough to build custom channels, I've seen people using it as "Whatsapp CRM for X country". We are following the path Gitlab has taken. To sustain as a business, we will have some modules suited for large enterprises under an EE license, but it would not hinder the open-source part and the freedom that comes with it. If people want to build on Chatwoot, they will be free to do that.
- samblr 6y ago
  Curious on on how ee license works - will it not stop somebody to take that source and run it for free ? or do parallel implementation on top of your free offerings.
  - pranav_rajs 6y ago
    We expect to follow Gitlab's path on this. There will be 2 repos. One with EE licensed code and the other one completely foss. eg: Gitlab[0] vs Gitlab FOSS [1] code [0] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab [1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss

dr_faustus 6y ago

We have been using Chatwoot for a couple of months. Launch HN is a bit of an understatement, its already a very polished, comprehensive product. Congratulations!

sojanofficial 6y ago
Thanks a lot !!!

bberenberg 6y ago

Is your hosted version multi tenant? Or are you running an individual tenant for every customer?

pranav_rajs 6y ago
It is multi-tenant, just like other SaaS providers. We can provide managed-services based on request.

randomsearch 6y ago

Love it. This (your commercial product) will go in an MVP I'm building. I've been using Intercom, which seems like the best option, but it's just so damn expensive for an MVP and that top tier price is not met by their medium tier product imo. tbh I'd pay even for the first agent (perhaps a free trial would have sufficed), but the Hacker tier does make it a certainty I'll trial it. Something most tool providers don't seem to get is that when I'm first building something I'm extremely price sensitive, but once I've got going I don't really care, like a tax if you take X% of my profit but you make my life easier and make it easier to grow that profit, who cares? That's fine compared to rinsing me when I'm not making any revenue (as with intercom). And if your product is any good, there's no way I'm going to switch once I get some traction, as the cost of any tool is ~ zero compared to the cost of employees.

pranav_rajs 6y ago
> like a tax if you take X% of my profit I have heard this analogy from other users of Intercom also. This is definitely an interesting take. But yeah, I got your point. Let us know if you need some help setting Chatwoot up.

dassmario 6y ago

I tried to replace Zendesk (chat) with self-hosted Chatwoot for our SaaS in December 2020. Unfortunately I couldn't get email conversation continuity to work back then and the docs were lacking. Happy to see that this now seems to be resolved. Will give Chatwoot another go when our Zendesk license is due for renewal.

pranav_rajs 6y ago
There was some issues with email continuity at that time. This is resolved and the docs for both continuity [0] and email channel [1] are updated. Let us know if you need some help setting it up, our team will be happy to take a call. [0] https://www.chatwoot.com/docs/conversation-continuity https://www.chatwoot.com/docs/conversation-continuity [1] https://www.chatwoot.com/docs/self-hosted/email-setup https://www.chatwoot.com/docs/self-hosted/email-setup

flylib 6y ago

What would you say are the main things that distinguish you from Papercups (YC S20) https://papercups.io https://papercups.io? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24133719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24133719

randtrain34 6y ago
From first impressions it looks like papercups focuses on chat while Chatwoot is a more complete suite around customer communication?
- pranav_rajs 6y ago
  We intend to build an entire suite for customer engagement while giving the flexibility to customize it to match the business needs.
pranav_rajs 6y ago
Papercups is a nice product. It's good to have multiple players in the open-source space. Here are some of the thoughts which comes to my mind that differentiates Chatwoot from Papercups: 1. Omnichannel inbox [0]: Chatwoot let's you connect 7 different channels including email, whatsapp etc so that you have all your customer conversations in one place. 2. API Channel for building custom channels: Some people see Chatwoot as an alternative to Twilio Flex (except voice) as they could build custom channel using our API Channel and have the flexibility to customize the software to the extend they need. 3. Integration with Chatbot providers: Chatwoot has a concept of agent bots which allows you to connect with the existing Chatbot providers like Rasa.ai and Dialogflow easily. [1] 4. Shared inbox with teams: You can create a group of users under specific team and collaborate over a ticket. [2] 5. Flexibility to manage more than one brand under the same account. If the company has more than one product, instead of creating multiple accounts, the same account allows you to create different inboxes and set different permission levels for the users. 6. Availability of mobile apps on iOS and Android which helps you to chat with your customers on the go. [0] https://www.chatwoot.com/features/channels https://www.chatwoot.com/features/channels [1] https://www.chatwoot.com/features/chatbots https://www.chatwoot.com/features/chatbots [2] https://www.chatwoot.com/features/shared-inbox https://www.chatwoot.com/features/shared-inbox

purrpit 6y ago

You guys are miles ahead, seriously. Glad to see a fellow Indian startup taking this route (I was surprised to see it licensed as MIT tbh) We are a successful Mumbai based startup who are in the process of integrating Chatwoot (beta release just went out today), it will replace Haptik.ai for which we had already paid in advance for a year but don't want to use it anymore just after 1 month. Chatwoot isn't a piece of cake to set it up but definitely peanuts compared to the money some companies pay to other customer support solutions. Moreover, we are in the process of hiring and dedicating a small team who will contribute changes to Chatwoot and raise PRs upstream. Good luck to you guys, hope to connect with y'all on discord in coming weeks.

pranav_rajs 6y ago
> Chatwoot isn't a piece of cake to set it up We are working on make it simpler. :D You will hear from us in the upcoming releases. > Moreover, we are in the process of hiring and dedicating a small team who will contribute changes to Chatwoot and raise PRs upstream. That's great to know.

lonesword 6y ago

Congrats on the launch :)

sojanofficial 6y ago
thanks a lot :)

treve 6y ago

Another open source alternative: https://github.com/minimalchat/client https://github.com/minimalchat/client

pranav_rajs 6y ago
Nice to know!

softawre 6y ago

Cool product. How do you expect you will be able to compete with the likes of the more advanced CX vendors out there? For example: https://www.genesys.com/genesys-cloud https://www.genesys.com/genesys-cloud

sojanofficial 6y ago
With Chatwoot being opensource, you will be able to customise and deliver a very tailor made experience for your organisation. Thats one aspect to consider.

montroser 6y ago

We've been using Chatwoot for a few months now and been pretty happy with it. It's a Vue app that we have found easy to extend and and deep integrations with our product and support flow, without too much fuss. Nice work!

sojanofficial 6y ago
Glad to hear you are happy with Chatwoot :) Do let us know if you need any help, anytime !!!

tin7in 6y ago

Well done and I hope this pivot plays out well!

webofnithin 6y ago
Thanks a lot !!!

ngokevin 6y ago

Oh, wow. I used Chatwoot in the past, happily surprised you went through YC! I did have trouble self-hosting once, I think I had to enable task queues in my Heroku or something. I might've eventually switched over to the hosted option which was much easier. I would use Chatwoot again on my current startup (https://learncoupling.com https://learncoupling.com). Is there Discord/SMS or Zapier integration?

sojanofficial 6y ago
We have sms channel available via Twilio. Discord / Zapier are integrations are there on our roadmap.

tnolet 6y ago

We use Intercom for support and sales, but also for email (drip style), mass emails like product updates and in-app notifications. Any plans for that?

sojanofficial 6y ago
Right now Chatwoot is suited primarily for support and sales use cases where its one on one conversations with the customer. But we do have our eyes on marketing use cases(campaigns) in our future roadmap.

igammarays 6y ago

You know what I don't get about website live chat buttons like Intercom? The fact that you need to stay on the website to continue the conversation. Why not just provide a link to open a conversation in existing channels, like email, Twitter, Telegram, WhatsApp, etc.? That way the customer can choose whichever channel they already have or prefer, and the conversation continues seamlessly after they've left your website. Yes, I know Intercom offers the option to seamlessly switch to email, but at that point you could just build a simple 1990's email contact form in a fancy JS popup and it's effectively the same thing. I understand Intercom made a billion dollar company out of their chat widget because businesses want to look savvy, but that doesn't mean it's actually a good experience for users. As a startup founder myself, I care more about a seamless experience for my customers than for me.

sojanofficial 6y ago
What we have seen is some customers prefer chat buttons especially when they prefer not to give out their personal information. In Chatwoot the channels like email, twitter, Whatsapp etc are also considered primary conversation channels. So its helpful even when your primary support channel isn't chat.
shawticus 6y ago
Given the way you see the world, I'd say you odds of being successful in this industry are probably higher than most.
mfkp 6y ago
There are companies that do this. Example: https://www.messagebird.com/en/ https://www.messagebird.com/en/
mosdl 6y ago
Intercom made its valuation because they are used to track engagement/etc, the chat widget is just the trojan horse.
discobean 6y ago
We used to use kayako.com which switches from online to email chat, but they've since updated their pricing and screwed us around a bit so we've left them. Now we've switched to chatra.io, and this does the same and the price seems fair.

relaunched 6y ago

I'm starting to feel some sorta way about open-core model as more of a marketing mechanism for lead gen. I can't put my finger on it and I'm not saying it's bad. It just kind of feels like it's like a free-trial that appeals to engineers, that helps jumpstart your marketing funnel top-end. I'd love to hear Richard Stallman rant about this...he'd probably find a way to articulate, more elegantly, what I'm feeling.

sojanofficial 6y ago
In our case, open-sourcing Chatwoot was pretty accidental. You could read the story behind how we ended up doing that over here https://www.chatwoot.com/blog/woot-journals-one-year-since-open-sourcing-chatwoot https://www.chatwoot.com/blog/woot-journals-one-year-since-o...
wyc 6y ago
I like to think of open source as solving a real problem for people and saving them a lot of time for free, otherwise they wouldn't use it. This often does have the effect of creating demand for complementary services that solve even more problems and save even more time, or even opening up whole new markets like Docker did with LXC. Anyone considering the addition of open source to their stack should also consider the downsides such as cost of fork and technological lock-in in addition to the benefits, and based on the rapid adoption of open source over the past decade I'd say it's a pretty good trade-off in a lot of cases.

ron22 6y ago

YC backs another open source alternative to intercom with papercups: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24133719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24133719 That was backed last year. Isn't there some conflict from the investor when the companies are so similar?

vardaro 6y ago
I’m guessing it’s a hedge in case one fails
areichert 6y ago
Alex from Papercups here :) My guess is partially what vardaro mentioned (to hedge their bets), and partially because the space is really, really "wide" (not sure if that's the right word) in the sense that products like this could go in a million different directions... for example: email marketing, CRM, session reply, chatbots, etc. etc. That's to say, even though Papercups and Chatwoot seem pretty similar at the moment, I wouldn't be surprised if that changes quite a bit in a year or so! (Also it's no secret that YC invests in a ton of similar companies :P e.g. our batch alone had at least three video conferencing companies iirc.)
- valtism 6y ago
  Hey Alex, we use and love Papercups. Very nice to use and a refreshingly simple experience.

doctoboggan 6y ago

This looks really useful. I sell custom 3D printed jewelry mostly on Etsy but I’ve been hoping to move to my own website. A large number of my customers like to chat with me on Etsy before buying so I’m hoping if I install this I can replicate that on my own website.

f430 6y ago

thx. really didnt like paying hundreds of dollars for something so trivial. let me know how to donate please

sojanofficial 6y ago
You could sponsor us on https://github.com/sponsors/chatwoot https://github.com/sponsors/chatwoot

random3 6y ago

Does Chatwoot try to replace Front as well?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
muhsin-k 6y ago
Yes. Chatwoot can be a viable alternative to frontapp. You can read more about channels - https://www.chatwoot.com/features/channels https://www.chatwoot.com/features/channels

realquadrant 6y ago

@pranav_rajs I work with a bunch of open source projects via a foundation and wanted been working on a side project to help build ecosystems around complimentary open source technologies for both users and contributors. Would be interested in chatting more around how you’ve been growing? I am offering free use of webinar, events, and cross-community tools to open source projects to try out my ideas.

qecez 6y ago

Just signed up to give it a shot and emails aren't coming through :(

barefeg 6y ago

Any plans for a customer journey builder?