Open-source Freshdesk alternatives

Chatwoot is an open-source, self-hostable customer support platform that gathers all customer conversations into one inbox. It is presented as an alternative to Intercom, Zendesk and Salesforce Service Cloud, and aims to give businesses control over their customer data while managing conversations across channels.

The shared inbox takes in website live chat, email, SMS and messaging channels such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, Telegram and Line. An AI agent called Captain automates replies to common questions to reduce agent workload, and a built-in Help Center portal lets you publish articles and FAQs so customers can find answers themselves. Collaboration tools include private notes with mentions, labels, canned responses, auto-assignment based on availability, custom views and filters, a command bar and multi-language support.

Chatwoot is built with Ruby on Rails and Vue and can be run with Docker, with deployment guides on its help center. The repository license is listed as 'Other', so confirm which parts are open source. A hosted cloud version is also available for teams that prefer not to maintain their own server.

UVdesk Community Helpdesk, packaged in this repository as a project skeleton, is an open-source ticketing system for customer support. It turns incoming emails into support tickets that agents can work on, and it is built on Symfony and Backbone.js with a service-oriented, event-driven design meant to be easy to customize.

The standard distribution bundles several packages: a core framework with the APIs, an extension framework for third-party add-ons, an automation bundle for workflows and prepared responses, a mailbox component that converts emails to tickets, and a customizable support center portal. Repository topics also mention a knowledge base, e-commerce integrations and agent privileges.

It is released under the Open Software License 3.0 and can be self-hosted using a Docker runtime, a persistent Docker container or a Vagrant environment. The repository topics position it as an alternative to Zendesk, Freshdesk and osTicket, and the README links to a demo site.

Zammad is a browser-based helpdesk and customer support platform. Support teams use it to manage inquiries that arrive through email, chat, telephone and social media channels in a single ticket system, so conversations stay organized and the whole team can see what is happening.

The README stresses that the software is and will stay open source under the GNU AGPLv3. Ownership of the source code sits with the Zammad Foundation, an entity separate from commercial providers like Zammad GmbH, the company whose team does much of the development. The technology stack includes Ruby on Rails, GraphQL, TypeScript and Vue.

You can self-host Zammad on your own servers or buy hosting and support from the company behind it. It suits customer support, IT helpdesk and service teams that want an open-source ticketing system with multichannel support and control over where their data lives.

FreeScout is a compact open-source help desk and shared inbox written in PHP on the Laravel framework. It lets support teams handle customer emails and conversations together, with tickets, shared mailboxes and an omnichannel approach, while keeping data on their own servers rather than in a vendor's cloud.

The README presents it as a free self-hosted alternative to Zendesk and Help Scout, developed from scratch without using any copyrighted material from either product. Its table of contents points to a demo, a feature list, mobile apps and system requirements, and the tagline mentions AI-powered assistance. Repository topics also name osTicket as a comparison point.

FreeScout is licensed under AGPL-3.0. Some optional add-on modules are sold separately by the project. It suits small and medium businesses, agencies and nonprofits that want a capable help desk without per-agent subscription fees and with full control over their data.

Frappe Helpdesk is an open-source ticket management tool for customer support teams. It was built by the Frappe team after finding the support module in ERPNext too limited, and it aims to give support agents a clean interface and give customers a simple way to raise and follow issues. It is released under the AGPL-3.0 license.

It provides separate portal views for agents and customers, plus customizable SLAs, assignment rules that route tickets by priority, issue type, or workload, saved replies for common questions, and a knowledge base where customers can find help articles before opening a ticket. The interface is built with Vue on top of the Frappe Framework, which is written in Python and JavaScript.

You can install it on your own server as a Frappe app, or use Frappe Cloud, the project's managed hosting platform for Frappe applications. The topics tie it to tools such as Zendesk and Help Scout, so it is a fit for small and mid-sized teams looking for a self-hostable alternative that also integrates with existing Frappe or ERPNext systems.

Libredesk is an open-source customer support platform that you host yourself and run as one binary. It brings email, a live chat widget for your website, and WhatsApp conversations (connected through the Meta Cloud API) into a shared inbox, and positions itself as a lightweight alternative to Zendesk, Intercom, and Chatwoot. It is released under the AGPL-3.0 license.

Teams can organize conversations with tags, custom statuses and attributes, snoozing, and search. Automations tag, assign, and route conversations by rules, macros apply saved replies and actions in a single step, and auto-assignment distributes work by agent capacity. SLA management warns about conversations at risk of missing targets, and CSAT ratings and analytics track response times and resolution rates.

A multilingual help center publishes a searchable knowledge base, an AI assistant can answer chat questions from it and hand off to an agent, and an agent copilot drafts replies and summarizes threads. Roles with per-action permissions, OIDC single sign-on, activity logs, an API, and webhooks cover administration. It is written in Go and Vue and suits small and mid-sized support teams.

Faveo Helpdesk is a helpdesk and ticketing system that helps businesses manage customer support. Built on the Laravel framework, it lets support teams receive, track and answer customer queries in one place, and the vendor positions it around retaining customers by handling their requests carefully.

The project is offered in several flavors. The Community Edition is free and open source, a Freelancer edition is free and includes enterprise features for two agents, an Enterprise Edition adds advanced features and integrations, and a separate Service Desk product covers IT asset management. Documentation covers the user manual, API, event list and plugin creation. The maintainers also say they take on customization requests.

Running Faveo requires PHP 8.1 or newer, MySQL 8.0 or MariaDB 10.6, a web server such as Apache, IIS or Nginx and several PHP extensions including IMAP. The repository is licensed under OSL-3.0. It suits small and mid-sized organizations that want a self-hosted ticketing system with an upgrade path to paid features.

osTicket is an open-source support ticketing system. It gathers customer requests that arrive by email, phone or web forms into one multi-user web interface, so agents can manage, organize and archive requests and replies in a single place. The project describes it as a lightweight, simple alternative to costlier and more complex customer support systems.

The workflow is straightforward: users create tickets through the website, by email or by phone, incoming tickets are saved and assigned to agents, and agents help users resolve their issues. The project states that the software is completely free.

osTicket is written in PHP and licensed under GPL-2.0. It needs an Apache or Microsoft IIS web server, PHP 8.2 to 8.4 with the mysqli extension, and MySQL 5.5 or later, plus several recommended PHP extensions. Installation can be done by cloning the public repository and deploying it to the web root with the included manage script, which also makes tracking updates easier.

Znuny is a free, open-source web-based ticketing system for customer service, help desks and IT service management. It is a continuation of the ((OTRS)) Community Edition at version 6.0.30, which reached end of life at the end of December 2020, with the main goal of providing a maintained, stable version of the well-known ticket system and improving it with new features.

A second goal is to rebuild connections with the community. Technically it is written in Perl and JavaScript and designed to be highly tailorable. It runs on Linux, preferably Debian or Red Hat, with Perl 5.16 or newer, an Apache 2 web server with mod_perl2 recommended, and MySQL 8, MariaDB 10.3, PostgreSQL 12 or Oracle 19c databases. The project also lists unsupported old browser versions.

Znuny is distributed under the GPL v3 and its source is public on GitHub, with documentation, a community forum and a Discord server. The project is mainly funded by Znuny GmbH in Berlin, which offers commercial services such as professional support and consulting.

Trudesk is an open-source help desk and ticketing solution intended to keep support work organized and simple. Teams use it to log, track and resolve issues and tasks from one place. This repository holds the Community Edition, while a more comprehensive cloud-hosted version is offered separately as Trudesk Cloud.

It is built with Node.js and MongoDB and can run on any cloud provider, in Docker, on bare metal or even on a Raspberry Pi. The README gives a one-line installer for Ubuntu and lists requirements of Node.js 16 or later and MongoDB 5.0 or later, with Elasticsearch 8 optional for search. Online documentation covers setup and usage.

The README's license text is Apache 2.0, though repository metadata labels it Other, so confirm in the license file. The project invites contributions such as bug reports, features, refactoring and documentation, and thanks sponsors and BrowserStack. It suits small support teams and IT departments that want to run their own ticketing system.