Chatwoot
Customer communication platform (alternative to Intercom and Zendesk).
High commit volume, frequent releases and growing activity.
Commit activity more than 84% of tracked projects; popularity more than 94%. How this is calculated.
Commits, last 11 months
| Stars | 37k |
|---|---|
| Latest release | v4.18.0 · 18 Sept 2026 |
| Repo updated | 25 Sept 2026 |
| Licence | ⊘ Proprietary |
| Built with | Ruby, Docker, K8S |
Is Chatwoot actively maintained?
Development is ongoing. The repository recorded 1272 commits over the same window, and the last three months alone account for 508 of them.
The most recent tagged release, v4.18.0, shipped within the last month — a current, installable version exists today.
Of the 46 projects we track in Communication - Custom Communication Systems, Chatwoot ranks #3 by health score — in the top quarter of its category.
What Chatwoot actually does
Chatwoot is a customer communication platform that acts as an alternative to proprietary services like Intercom and Zendesk. It centralises customer queries from various channels into a single shared inbox for support teams. The codebase is built with Ruby and distributed primarily for Docker and Kubernetes deployments.
Best fit: Teams looking for an open-source or self-hosted alternative to mainstream customer support helpdesks to maintain data control.
Worth knowing: The software is distributed under a proprietary licence rather than a standard open-source licence, which may restrict how you can commercialise or modify it. It also carries a high operational burden typical of a monolithic Ruby application with multiple background workers.
Deployment notes
You will typically need to provision persistent storage volumes, configure a separate relational database and Redis instance, and set up a reverse proxy to handle TLS termination.
Links
Chatwoot as a replacement for
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