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Show HN: Papercups – Open-source alternative to Intercom
- trungdq88 6y agoWhy don’t you show screenshots of your demo in the landing page instead of those meaningless illustrations?
- sgrove 6y agoPart of the demo is running on the page, I believe. It's the chat widget in the lower-right corner, you can talk to the team directly!
- voiper1 6y agoInterestingly, the features page goes straight to github. With a list of features... followed by screenshots. So I found it! https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups/wiki/Features https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups/wiki/Features
- areichert 6y agoYeah I agree, we're planning on updating the landing page to include a lot more screenshots/videos/demos :) In the meantime, here are some screenshots from our GitHub wiki: https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups/wiki/Features https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups/wiki/Features And our demo page: https://app.papercups.io/demo https://app.papercups.io/demo
- cheeseblubber 6y agoWe just updated it! Thanks for the advice!
- Satam 6y agoWow, cool to see this here! Just recently reached out to Kam, founder of Papercups, on LinkedIn as I had read his article about them going through YC. I wanted to know more about people's experiences with remote YC batches, and Kam responded very quickly and set up a call with no hesitation. If you're looking for great chat solutions made by great people, check this out :)
- throwinawaysoon 6y agobeen using chatwoot, which is opensource too. is this better?
- ayewo 6y agoFunny thing is, Chatwoot did their HN launch just 2 days ago [1], so I’m curious to see a head-to-head comparison between Papercups and Chatwoot, two nice-looking chat products that happen to be open source. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26501527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26501527
- areichert 6y agoWe're pretty similar to Chatwoot in some ways - Kam described some differences here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26503697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26503697 To reiterate some of the differences, or why people might choose us at the moment: - A lot of our users really like our Slack integration. For small teams, this means they don't even really have to use our dashboard if they don't want to, because they can do everything from Slack. [0] - We offer a live screen sharing feature [1] - We're working on a library to offer complete customization of the chat UI on your website [2] [0] (We need to set up a better recent demo video of our Slack integration, but if you skim our changelog you'll probably get the gist: https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups/blob/master/CHANGE...) [1] https://storytime.papercups.io/ https://storytime.papercups.io/ [2] https://github.com/papercups-io/chat-builder https://github.com/papercups-io/chat-builder
- butz 6y agoThis makes me wonder if website chat could be implemented by connecting user directly to Slack or other messaging service of your choice and skipping the "admin panel" part?
- Griffinsauce 6y agoYes. https://chatlio.com/ https://chatlio.com/ Creates a short-lived channel per chat. It works well in terms of sharing responsibilities with a team and allowing people to jump in easily. I did feel a bit of unease with having customers in the same place as our "private" conversations.
- areichert 6y agoYup! To be honest, a lot of the smaller teams using Papercups with our Slack integration rarely need to interact with the admin dashboard if they don't want to. (But it turns out that having a dashboard to manage unresolved questions, add private notes/labels/tags to customers/conversations, etc. is still pretty helpful)
- bashbjorn 6y agoShameless plug: My project, Cactus Comments[1] does something similar, although for commenting, instead of support chat. We ship a web-embeddable Matrix client. The users' browser connects directly with a Matrix server of their choice (or a default one). [1]: https://cactus.chat https://cactus.chat
- stevenicr 6y agoThis is very close to what I had found a need for today - now if only I had a (self-hosted)-wordpress-user-accounts bridge for the login - and auto-prune to delete all messages after X number of hours - a new project could happen quickly with this.
- anthony_barker 6y agoWhy not matrix connectivity?
- riffic 6y agosubmit a pull request?
- gurleen_s 6y agoDammit, I thought this was actual audio intercom. Looks great though, going to keep this in my back pocket.
- areichert 6y agoHaha sorry to disappoint :P
- cowllin 6y agoSwitched to Papercups from Drift a few months ago. Really like how dead-simple it is and the fact that we can reply and resolve customer threads right in Slack.
- areichert 6y agoThanks Collin! Glad you're enjoying it so far :)
- AbuAssar 6y agoI’m curious about why did they chose elixir to build papercups
- brightball 6y agoFor a chat solution I can’t think of a better option. BEAM is ideal for that type of workload.
- areichert 6y agoYup! We talked about it a bit here: https://serokell.io/blog/elixir-in-production-papercups https://serokell.io/blog/elixir-in-production-papercups
- barefeg 6y agoIt’s only the chat interface right? It doesn’t have any of the bot builder stuff nor the customer journey no-code tool
- areichert 6y agoWe have API docs [0] and webhook events [1] so it's possible to integrate with something like Dialogflow for chat automation :) [0] https://docs.papercups.io/api-endpoints https://docs.papercups.io/api-endpoints [1] https://docs.papercups.io/webhook-events https://docs.papercups.io/webhook-events
- rexreed 6y agoAny plans for Discord support? We might be odd in that we've switched away from Slack to Discord.
- areichert 6y agoIt's on our roadmap! One downside of Discord is that we use threads in Slack to manage conversations, and I don't think Discord has great support for threading. But I know some solutions have worked around this by spinning up a new channel for every new conversation... still need to figure out the ideal UX.
- FractalHQ 6y agoChannels are easy to automate this way- look at the Typescript discord by Microsoft where they spin up channels per support request.
- ykevinator 6y agoYou're not, slack is bad. Google chat is surprisingly good but light on integrations. We tried discord but it's a little too childish. The push to talk is amazing for engineering teams though.
- daveed 6y agoFor what it's worth, I've been using Papercups for my projects for a few months and it's been super easy. Love it.
- stevenicr 6y agoquestions I had when looking at home and features page.. Is it encrypted? in transit? data at rest? I see 'enterprise option' for self clouding - guessing this means data is sent to third parties - is that hosted in the USA? Really like the screensharing bit - is this share either screen? (site admins and or site visitor?) - is that encrypted? Is that (or any info) stored? (by site owner or and third parties ie papercups.co
- cheeseblubber 6y agoWe use https so its encrypted at transit. We host with heroku and fly.io. So we use their encryption policy for our cloud solution. We have papercups-eu.io which is hosted in Frankfurt and is encrypted at rest. For those who are more privacy contentious we have a self hosted solution. Where we collect logs and anonymized data to make our product better and debugging purposes.
- ChrisArchitect 6y agoha, laughed at the "Welcome to Hooli"/Gavin Silicon Valley reference on the landing page screenshot