Chatwoot
Open-source customer engagement for website chat and shared inboxes
open-core full guide featuredOverview
Chatwoot provides shared inboxes across chat, email, and social channels. Community and sales teams use it to coordinate inbound enquiries without a single person owning a personal inbox.
At a glance
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Categories | helpdesk-support, communication-chat, community-engagement |
| Deployment | self-hosted, managed-saas |
| License class | open-core (MIT) |
| Cost model | open-core-paid-features |
| Implementation difficulty | moderate |
| Maintenance burden | medium |
| Maturity | stable |
| Verification | partially-verified (2026-07-17) |
Cost reality
Self-host free core; Chatwoot cloud is paid. Check official pricing for seats/channels.
Pricing and free-tier limits change frequently; re-check official pricing before budget decisions.
Tasks reduced or augmented
Software does not replace community or ops staff. It may reduce or augment:
- Shared handling of website chat
- Reducing lost emails in personal inboxes
- Labeling sales vs support conversations
Human oversight still needed
- SLA expectations
- PII in chat transcripts
- Handoff rules after hours
Data held
-
conversations
-
contacts
-
agent notes
-
attachments
-
Personal data: yes
-
Payment data: no / not primary
Risks
| Area | Notes |
|---|---|
| Vendor lock-in | Evaluate export formats and API completeness before deep customization. |
| Security | Apply updates promptly; restrict admin access; enable TLS. |
| Compliance | Operator remains responsible for privacy and local regulatory obligations. |
| Licensing | MIT core with commercial cloud and enterprise features. |
| Operational | Plan backups, monitoring, and a restore drill before production use. |
Coworking fit
Roles: community-manager, sales-manager, operations-manager
Workflows: tour-to-close, member-onboarding, incident-response
Problems: improve-member-experience, grow-pipeline, reduce-manual-admin
Smallest useful experiment
Install Chatwoot, connect website widget on a staging page, and handle enquiries for one week with two agents.
Typical time to first value: 1–3 days
Links
Implementation guide
See the human-written implementation guide.
Verification
- Status:
partially-verified - Last reviewed:
2026-07-17 - Sources:
Seed entry compiled from official project sites and repositories. Re-verify pricing, license text, and feature claims before production decisions. Star counts and free-tier numeric limits intentionally omitted unless verified at review time.