Chatwoot vs Element

Both are self-hosted communication - custom communication systems projects. This page compares how well each one is actually maintained — the part you cannot see from a feature list.

Chatwoot and Element are closely matched on maintenance health (92 vs 91). Neither is the safer bet on activity alone, so choose on features, licence and the stack you already run.
ChatwootElement
Health score 92/100 91/100
Commits (11 mo) 1272 2574
Commits (last 3 mo) 508 783
Stars 37k 14k
Latest release 18 Sept 2026 23 Sept 2026
Licence ⊘ Proprietary Apache-2.0
Built with Ruby, Docker, K8S Nodejs
Typical RAM 2 GB 1 GB

Chatwoot

Customer communication platform (alternative to Intercom and Zendesk).

92/100
Thriving

High commit volume, frequent releases and growing activity.

Maintenance 33/40
Releases 25/25
Community 19/20
Momentum 15/15

Commit activity more than 84% of tracked projects; popularity more than 94%. How this is calculated.

Commits, last 11 months

2025-10: 66 commits 2025-11: 83 commits 2025-12: 64 commits 2026-01: 90 commits 2026-02: 98 commits 2026-03: 124 commits 2026-04: 117 commits 2026-05: 122 commits 2026-06: 143 commits 2026-07: 175 commits 2026-08: 190 commits

Element

Fully-featured Matrix client for Web, iOS & Android.

91/100
Thriving

High commit volume, frequent releases and growing activity.

Maintenance 37/40
Releases 25/25
Community 17/20
Momentum 12/15

Commit activity more than 93% of tracked projects; popularity more than 83%. How this is calculated.

Commits, last 11 months

2025-10: 148 commits 2025-11: 140 commits 2025-12: 151 commits 2026-01: 236 commits 2026-02: 312 commits 2026-03: 294 commits 2026-04: 286 commits 2026-05: 224 commits 2026-06: 288 commits 2026-07: 270 commits 2026-08: 225 commits

How to read this

Everything above is measured, not opinion: commit counts and release dates come from the public repositories, and the health score ranks each project against all 1352 projects we track. Read the full method.

What this comparison deliberately does not do is tell you which has the better feature set. Maintenance health tells you which project will still be receiving security fixes in two years. Decide that first, then compare features on the projects that survive the filter.

See every option in this category: self-hosted communication - custom communication systems.