Open-source Plain 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.

Morphic is an AI-powered search engine with a generative user interface. It answers questions with sources attached, and instead of returning plain markdown it renders richer inline components such as source-credited images, grids and headings built from a streamed specification.

It supports Quick and Adaptive search modes and lets you pick from several model providers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Ollama, as well as OpenAI-compatible endpoints. Search can run through Tavily, SearXNG, Brave or Exa. Chat history is stored in PostgreSQL, results can be shared through unique URLs, files can be uploaded, and Supabase Auth handles sign-in, with a guest mode for anonymous use.

Morphic is built with Next.js, React, TypeScript and Tailwind CSS under the Apache-2.0 licence. A Docker Compose setup starts PostgreSQL, Redis, SearXNG and the app together, so no separate search API key is required, although at least one AI provider key must be configured. It can also be deployed to Vercel.

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.