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Chatwoot
p/chatwootDelightful customer relationships, at scale
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Michael Seibel

Chatwoot - Open-source alternative to Intercom & Zendesk

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Chatwoot is an open-source omnichannel communication platform built as an alternative to Intercom, Zendesk etc. Chatwoot helps you connect email, website live chat, social media handles, WhatsApp etc. and manage all your customer interactions from one place.

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Pranav Raj S
Maker
Thanks, @mwseibel for hunting us! Hello everyone 👋, We are building Chatwoot (https://www.chatwoot.com), an open-source customer communication platform built as an alternative to Intercom, Zendesk & Salesforce Service Cloud. We make it simple for businesses to connect with their customers. We started building Chatwoot as proprietary software in 2017, but the startup failed. Seeing the data privacy regulations and people taking an interest in self-hosted alternatives, we open-sourced the product in 2019, and we got a lot of love from the community. Right now, 1000+ websites are using Chatwoot. We have around 7k stars and more than 100 contributors in our repository (https://github.com/chatwoot/chat...). Currently, we support seven conversation channels, including website live chat, email, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, SMS and custom API channel. You can use the software in more than 25 regional languages. The key advantages of Chatwoot over traditional SaaS software include: 👉 Control over customer data: We help companies in regulated industries to talk to their customers without sharing data with third-party providers. 👉 No abrupt pricing changes: Chatwoot is built as an alternative to bloated customer experience software with insane pricing changes. 👉 Extensible & no vendor lock-in: Since the software is open-source, you can build custom workflows that suit your business on top of Chatwoot. We plan to build a complete customer experience suite for businesses to connect and engage with their customers. Check out our Github repository at https://github.com/chatwoot/chat... or signup at https://app.chatwoot.com. We'd appreciate it if you try Chatwoot and give us feedback.
Daryll Wong
@pranavrajs finally something open source. All the best!
Sojan Jose
Maker
@daryllman thanks a lot :)
Pranav Raj S
Maker
@daryllman Thanks Daryll!
John Faig
@mwseibel @pranavrajs Do you know anyone who has integrated an open source chatbot tool with your cool product?
Pranav Raj S
Maker
@mwseibel @john_faig Please take a look at https://www.chatwoot.com/feature... and see if it fits your use case. We are happy to provide a demo.
Navi
An essential element of every business on the internet is to communicate with customers via various channels. Kudos to entire Chatwoot team who are making this open source & democratising an industry! This is likely to have a much larger impact in the longer run. Open source continues to swallow enterprise. FTW.
Pranav Raj S
Maker
@o1lab Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Most of us are consumers of FOSS project/products. We have enjoyed the freedom of customizing open-source libraries to work with our use cases before. We want to give back to the community this time.
Anurag Singh
Congrats @pranavrajs - how did you all see uptake move after going open source? Could you share some insights on user acquisition through 2019/2020 and how it was impacted by going open source.
Pranav Raj S
Maker
@singhanurag We got a good initial start from our launch in Hacker News. There were a good set of developers who contributed to the project initially. Serious usage started after 4-5 releases after the initial release. We wrote a blog post about the journey, you can read it here. https://www.chatwoot.com/blog/wo...
Anurag Singh
@pranavrajs Nice. Another one - what license did you guys decide to go with in 2019 and did you change it at all post then?
Pranav Raj S
Maker
@singhanurag We went with MIT License and haven't changed since, but we would be launching an Enterprise edition by which EE features would be licensed under proprietary license and rest would be follow the same MIT License
Tony Sebastian
Happy to see chatwoot getting launched on Product Hunt. Good luck to the team!!
Pranav Raj S
Maker
@tonyzebastian Thanks for the support. 🙌
J Bibin Joseph
Wonderful guys ❤
Sojan Jose
Maker
@jbibin Thanks a lot 😃
Stephanie Obi
Chat for customer engagement has been something thats always worked for us. Good design and seems like a really good product. Good going Chatwoot team
Sojan Jose
Maker
@stephanieobi Thanks a lot 😃. Do give us a try and let us know if there is more feedback.
Siddharth Ramesh
The screenshot shows that email and few other inboxes are available but its not 😅 Please @pranavrajs @sojan_official enable it. Please! https://github.com/chatwoot/chat...
Pranav Raj S
Maker
@srameshrr Thanks for the feedback. @sojan_official is already working on the documentation, he is cleaning up the SMTP config as it seemed confusing when he started the documentation. It would be available in a week’s time. Thanks for the patience.
Haseeb
Congrats on the launch. 🥳 . Proud to see you on YC.
Pranav Raj S
Maker
@haseebeqx Thanks!
Tomer Aharon
Looks awesome guys! Good luck :)
Pranav Raj S
Maker
@tomer_aharon Thanks Tomer, for the support.
Gal Dubinski
Great job guys 🚀
Sojan Jose
Maker
@galdubinski Thanks a lot 😃
Vipul A M
Congrats @sojan_jose @pranavrajs and team!
Sojan Jose
Maker
Thanks a lot @vipulnsward !! 😍
Bobby Isac
Congrats on the launch team. Happy to see you in YC this time
Sojan Jose
Maker
@bobbyisac Thanks a lot 😃
Sandoche
Finally an open source one!! Well done.
Pranav Raj S
Maker
@sandochee Thanks! Please let us know if you need any help in setting it up.
Javier Sanchez Mejorada
You have done a great job building this, everything looks well put together. I am currently using Tawk.to and I would love to support you guys but I was just wondering considering Tawk.to is currently free why should I switch.
Sojan Jose
Maker
@javier_sanchez_mejorada1 Thanks a lot for the feedback :) tawk.to is a great chat solution. But if you are looking at an omni channel helpdesk system, you should give chatwoot a try.
Pranav Raj S
Maker
@javier_sanchez_mejorada1 If you have conversations spanning over days, tawk.to might not be a good choice. The difficulty of switching between multiple conversations on agent side is often shared as drawback from the people who use tawk.to. I'd like to know your thoughts on the same.
Lukyan Semyonov
I really liked the versatility of the platform
Sojan Jose
Maker
@lykasemenov Thanks a lot 😃
Alexey Mironov
I like
Sojan Jose
Maker
@alexmironoff09 Thanks a lot 😃 !!!
Matthew Wildrick Thomas
I have been following Chatwoot for a while and have been thinking about using it vs our in-house contact solution.
Pranav Raj S
Maker
@mattwthomas Let us know how we can help. Would you like a demo of the product?
Sudhir Bhatti
Great product and UX @pranavrajs! I am going to give it a shot. Just curious how do you compare Chatwoot to other products like @frontapp and @missiveapp Any areas to highlight?
Sojan Jose
Maker
@sudhir_bhatti thanks a lot. Do let us know your feedback :) In terms of features there is a lot of parity between Chatwoot and mentioned apps. But the open source aspect and ability to self host make Chatwoot even more powerful, since you can build custom workflows on top of Chatwoot, that is very tailor made for your business.
Maxime Desalle
Great work on the open-source part! This is especially important for platforms like this one where there is a lot of customer data involved.
Sojan Jose
Maker
@maxdesalle Thanks a lot :)
Ronald Walker
I am a big fan of the software the chatwoot team has built. The extensibility of the software is the killer feature IMO. I'm creating a feedback management system on the shoulders of chatwoot.
Pranav Raj S
Maker
@ronwalkerjr Thanks 🙌