
Show HN: Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Drift, Zendesk, FreshChat - pranavrajs
https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot
======
pranavrajs
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
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
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
[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
What's that last jar supposed to represent?

~~~
obituary_latte
Looks like gasoline/petrol which is sometimes used by people to huff (inhale)
to get high.

------
brenden2
Here's a blocklist for all these super annoying chat widgets:
[https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bcye/Hello-
Goodbye/master/...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bcye/Hello-
Goodbye/master/filterlist.txt)

You can import this into uBlock origin so you never have to see these things
again.

~~~
randomb_1979
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
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
>>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.

~~~
codegladiator
> Freeloaders exist only because they are being subsidized by those who
> actually pay

Freeloaders exist because someone wanted to give something for free.

If someone put something online to be viewed freely and then expects some kind
of return on it is hypocritical in my opinion. Just trying to make freeloaders
look bad for their own lack of action to put it behind a paywall.

>>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

Freeloaders already paid for the internet connection.

------
artur_makly
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
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

------
mkohlmyr
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
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
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.

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

~~~
burtonator
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
What new program?

~~~
omarchowdhury
[https://www.intercom.com/early-stage](https://www.intercom.com/early-stage)

------
keybits
Another great open source helpdesk in this space is Zammad
[https://github.com/zammad/zammad](https://github.com/zammad/zammad)

~~~
ahofmann
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.

------
Techonomicon
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
Do you think that holds true for both sales and support?

------
nathan_f77
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
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.

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

~~~
losthobbies
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
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.

------
rushils
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
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 :)

------
cordite
This being only chat, what about email support?

~~~
sojanofficial
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)

------
dharma1
Very nice to have more open source choice. Is there a flow builder with GUI
included for bots?

~~~
webofnithin
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.

------
jonny383
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.

