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Launch HN: Chatwoot (YC W21) – Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Zendesk

396 points by pranav_rajs ↗ HN
Hello everyone,

We are a 3 founder team. Myself Pranav. Sojan and Nithin are my co-founders. We are building Chatwoot (https://www.chatwoot.com, https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot). With Chatwoot, businesses can connect channels like website live chat, email, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp etc and talk to the customers from one place.

Chatwoot is an open-source alternative to Intercom, Zendesk etc.

We help companies in regulated industries to manage customer data without sharing it with third-party providers. Since the software is open-source, it is easier to build custom workflows that suit your business on top of Chatwoot.

We started building Chatwoot as proprietary software in 2017, but the startup failed. Seeing the data privacy regulations and people taking interest in self-hosted alternatives, we open-sourced the product in 2019, we got a lot of love from the HN community. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559139).

Over the last year, we have been working with the community to build the software. Seeing the interest from the open-source world, we decided to quit our jobs and work full time on Chatwoot. We introduced support plans to validate the need for self-hosted solutions and it worked out well. We applied to YC and got into the W21 batch.

Right now, there are 1000+ companies using Chatwoot. We have around 7.2k stars and more than 100 contributors in our repository. The software can be used in more than 25+ regional languages.

Apart from the omnichannel support desk, we are adding more features like a self-service portal, marketing campaigns, customer segmentation, workflows etc.

We make money by charging a license fee of $99 per user per month for features like customisable dashboards, SLA Management, Agent scheduling software, IP blocklisting etc which are suited for large enterprises.

We will continue to work with the community to build Chatwoot. We would love to hear your experiences, thoughts and ideas!

111 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] thread
rancar2
Congrats on the launch! Is there any plan beyond agent-based chat on the roadmap? I like to start with a dialogue flow for the common use cases before passing the conversation off to human agents.
pranav_rajs
Yes, we already integrate with Rasa.ai and Dialogflow. You can start the conversation with DialogFlow and pass it off to the agent.

You can see a demo here https://www.chatwoot.com/features/chatbots and a setup guide with a sample code here https://github.com/chatwoot/dialogflow-agent-bot-demo

rancar2
Amazing! You have a customer at CareDash. Feel free to reach out to me if you want any feedback as we will start implementing this shortly. rcarlton@caredash.com
sixhobbits
Looks very cool! For me, the USP of Intercom was their data model. The tag-based system and the fact that everything could be easily exported to a flat CSV file made it super powerful.

Can you comment on whether Chatwoot is similar in this regard?

pranav_rajs
We allow tagging the conversations and contacts, filter them based on the tag. At the moment we don't have a CSV export, we are working on it. You can get the same information as JSON using our APIs.
mrwnmonm
I specifically use Zendesk to use their support ticket system. I am not interested in live chat. I also like their CRM. Right now, you don't provide those features, right?

I can only see live chat. Am I missing something?

pranav_rajs
You can integrate 7 channels with Chatwoot including Email. https://www.chatwoot.com/features/channels

We have a base version of CRM at the moment, we are building more on top of it.

scrollaway
This may be out of your depth but I'd love to see a provider that supports Discord.

eg. Tagging a bot in a #support channel for help, being able to reply from it, and being able to cross post announcements from such a bot alongside twitter/facebook.

pranav_rajs
I didn't completely understand the use case.

Do you wish to

1. Reply to the support messages from Discord

or

2. Manage discord community over some other tool?

The first one is an integration similar to what we have with Slack right now.

scrollaway
Congrats on the launch. One of my clients will become a customer of yours I'm pretty sure. :)
pranav_rajs
Let us know if you need any help in setting it up.
ignoramous
Congratulations! Love chatwoot, and have been recommending it to others too.

If I may, what's your take on Cloudflare's upcoming DurableObjects for Workers [0] and the possibilities that entails for chat-applications like these?

> ...license fee of $99 per user per month for features like customisable dashboards, SLA Management, Agent scheduling software, IP blocklisting etc which are suited for large enterprises.

I see a lot of F/OSS YC startups (like PostHog, SuperTokens, QuestDB, OpsTrace, SigNoz etc) following the buyer-based open-core model that GitLab pioneered [1]. I wanted to know if there are there any other models other than GitLab's that YC recommends to its startups?

Also, curious why for-profit F/OSS startups would leave up a "sponsor" button on their GitHub. :D

> We started building Chatwoot as proprietary software in 2017, but the startup failed.

Tangential: Was this the startup that failed [2]? If so, it would be interesting to read your views on it since it looks like except the co-founder that blogged about the failure, the rest of the original founding team is back building chatwoot?

Off-topic: If you are okay, can you reveal if you've raised funds from Indian Angles (many particularly active in the SaaS scene [3]) and what has been your experience so far? And a set of recommendations, if any, for other Indian F/OSS SaaS upstarts? May be you should blog about it?

Thanks.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24616169

[1] https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/commercial-open-sourc...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24988380

[3] https://saasboomi.com/indian-saas-tribe/

pabs3
The sponsor button means (slightly) more money for the company, is there a particular reason you suggest to disable it?
pranav_rajs
> If I may, what's your take on Cloudflare's upcoming DurableObjects for Workers [0] and the possibilities that entails for chat-applications like these?

It seems interesting. We have not had time yet to deep dive.

> I wanted to know if there are there any other models other than GitLab's that YC recommends to its startups?

We have not seen any trend emerging other than open-core so far.

> Also, curious why for-profit F/OSS startups would leave up a "sponsor" button on their GitHub. :D

Some one wants to support us without taking subscription plans is a great reason to have it.

> Tangential: Was this the startup that failed [2]? If so, it would be interesting to read your views on it since it looks like except the co-founder that blogged about the failure, the rest of the original founding team is back building chatwoot?

I think you might have misunderstood, op was mentioning another startup, not Chatwoot.

You can read our story here. https://www.chatwoot.com/blog/building-in-the-open

> Off-topic: If you are okay, can you reveal if you've raised funds from Indian Angles (many particularly active in the SaaS scene [3]) and what has been your experience so far? And a set of recommendations, if any, for other Indian F/OSS SaaS upstarts? May be you should blog about it?

We will definitely write about it soon.

steipete
MIT license. Easy to copy and host cheaper. Curious how long this will work before you change it.
pranav_rajs
We have a enterprise edition in works. We will launch it soon. Whatever is MIT now, will stay as MIT.
mariushn
Hope MIT core/features will continue to be improved, not abandoned. Adding new large features as enterprise only makes sense.
sojanofficial
The community edition remains a core part of our vision and is also the base on which the enterprise features are build. So rest assured that we will keep working on improving them.
etienne_ad
No phone support though? That’s why we have to use zendesk...
pranav_rajs
We have had requests for phone support. At the moment, our primary focus is on text based messaging. We will get to the phone/video part in the future.

We want to make the software simple and easy to use. Setting up Asterisk and using it with Chatwoot was too much to handle. So we deferred that work for now. We will come back to it later.

ankurpatel
Nice with Twilio a lot of use cases like callcenter are possible.
mehal
Product looks awesome! So for my understanding - to add email channel you have to forward an email to single monitored inbox, correct? What email protocols do you support?
sojanofficial
That is correct. Our email channel is an implementation build on top of Rails Action mail box.

It support ingresses for Mailgun, Mandrill, Postmark, and SendGrid. You can also handle inbound mails directly via the Exim, Postfix, and Qmail ingresses

ref: https://guides.rubyonrails.org/action_mailbox_basics.html

pabs3
Since you are an open core business, how do you plan to deal with the situation where the community contributes features that are already in the proprietary enterprise version?
deepstack
nice to hear you guys open sourcing this product! Also be interested how you resolve this issue.
pranav_rajs
This is a hard decision to make. It would be considered on the basis of a couple of things. If it is derivate of already existing code, we would suggest not to do that. If it is an original work, then we would consider those.

Having said that, we want to reduce such kind of conflicts happening in the community. So we would try to limit an entire module under EE License rather a part of it.

hanniabu
> So we would try to limit an entire module under EE License rather a part of it.

As someone not familiar with this license, can you expand a little more into what it offers?

Also another option for this is for you guys to maintain your own branch which would be used for the free hosted solutions so any enterprise feature PR's can be contained to the self-hosted option.

ac29
I think by EE license, they mean "Enterprise Edition" (aka commercial license, not sure if the code itself would be considered open, closed or "shared").
sojanofficial
That correct. The code can't considered open but rather source available.
itsthecourier
Great pivot, guys. We are leaving intercom to work with it :)
sojanofficial
happy to have you onboard. Feel free to reach out if you need any help :)
samblr
Intercom pricing[1] shows 5 seats for $119 - am I missing something in their pricing page ?

If not Chatwoot seems expensive at $99/user/month ?

[1] : https://www.intercom.com/pricing

pranav_rajs
Our community edition which is available with MIT license and is free for use should cover the starter plans in Intercom.

$99/user/month is targetted at large enterprises requiring enterprise support.

nicoburns
Is the community edition available in hosted form? Otherwise you may wish to consider aiming a paid hosted product at the lower end of the market too. We use Intercom in our product, and it's the one thing we explicitly don't want to self-host because it's what our customers use to contact us if our own services are ever down or broken.
johnsonap
Congrats! As a small bootstrapped startup I could see us switching from the company we currently use to something like this.
sojanofficial
Do let us know if you need any help in setting up Chatwoot.
hnarn
Thank you for licensing this under a proper open source license. Out of curiosity, how would you feel about a company selling this as a service? It's obviously legal per the license, but I'm wondering what your perspective is. If you encourage it, do you have any plans for how to ensure everybody are happy and turns a profit from it?

I have grown cynical over the years with these kinds of open source challengers as it seems to be a playbook these days to bait and switch, going from a) freely license a competitor to b) build a large user base to c) switch license to consolidate power over the software, make money and slowly kill it.

Of course what's once open source will always stay that way, but if you're large enough when you branch, your engineering resources alone might be enough to turn people off the OSS fork.

pranav_rajs
There are people who have built custom solutions on top of Chatwoot and selling it. There are people who are selling it in their country without changing the code and making profit out it. I'm happy to help those people out (not for free, would charge something obiviously). There are different markets where we might not be able to cater. Since the solution is flexible enough to build custom channels, I've seen people using it as "Whatsapp CRM for X country".

We are following the path Gitlab has taken. To sustain as a business, we will have some modules suited for large enterprises under an EE license, but it would not hinder the open-source part and the freedom that comes with it. If people want to build on Chatwoot, they will be free to do that.

fblp
I'm wondering if you've considered an additional option - "donation subscriptions". For people who are deriving a lot of value from a fork, and want to support you!
dr_faustus
We have been using Chatwoot for a couple of months. Launch HN is a bit of an understatement, its already a very polished, comprehensive product. Congratulations!
bberenberg
Is your hosted version multi tenant? Or are you running an individual tenant for every customer?
pranav_rajs
It is multi-tenant, just like other SaaS providers. We can provide managed-services based on request.
randomsearch
Love it. This (your commercial product) will go in an MVP I'm building. I've been using Intercom, which seems like the best option, but it's just so damn expensive for an MVP and that top tier price is not met by their medium tier product imo.

tbh I'd pay even for the first agent (perhaps a free trial would have sufficed), but the Hacker tier does make it a certainty I'll trial it.

Something most tool providers don't seem to get is that when I'm first building something I'm extremely price sensitive, but once I've got going I don't really care, like a tax if you take X% of my profit but you make my life easier and make it easier to grow that profit, who cares? That's fine compared to rinsing me when I'm not making any revenue (as with intercom). And if your product is any good, there's no way I'm going to switch once I get some traction, as the cost of any tool is ~ zero compared to the cost of employees.

pranav_rajs
> like a tax if you take X% of my profit

I have heard this analogy from other users of Intercom also. This is definitely an interesting take. But yeah, I got your point. Let us know if you need some help setting Chatwoot up.

dassmario
I tried to replace Zendesk (chat) with self-hosted Chatwoot for our SaaS in December 2020. Unfortunately I couldn't get email conversation continuity to work back then and the docs were lacking.

Happy to see that this now seems to be resolved. Will give Chatwoot another go when our Zendesk license is due for renewal.

flylib
What would you say are the main things that distinguish you from Papercups (YC S20) https://papercups.io?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24133719

randtrain34
From first impressions it looks like papercups focuses on chat while Chatwoot is a more complete suite around customer communication?
pranav_rajs
We intend to build an entire suite for customer engagement while giving the flexibility to customize it to match the business needs.
pranav_rajs
Papercups is a nice product. It's good to have multiple players in the open-source space.

Here are some of the thoughts which comes to my mind that differentiates Chatwoot from Papercups:

1. Omnichannel inbox [0]: Chatwoot let's you connect 7 different channels including email, whatsapp etc so that you have all your customer conversations in one place.

2. API Channel for building custom channels: Some people see Chatwoot as an alternative to Twilio Flex (except voice) as they could build custom channel using our API Channel and have the flexibility to customize the software to the extend they need.

3. Integration with Chatbot providers: Chatwoot has a concept of agent bots which allows you to connect with the existing Chatbot providers like Rasa.ai and Dialogflow easily. [1]

4. Shared inbox with teams: You can create a group of users under specific team and collaborate over a ticket. [2]

5. Flexibility to manage more than one brand under the same account. If the company has more than one product, instead of creating multiple accounts, the same account allows you to create different inboxes and set different permission levels for the users.

6. Availability of mobile apps on iOS and Android which helps you to chat with your customers on the go.

[0] https://www.chatwoot.com/features/channels

[1] https://www.chatwoot.com/features/chatbots

[2] https://www.chatwoot.com/features/shared-inbox

cheeseblubber
Thanks for the mention:

Like Pranav said we think the space is good to have multiple players and we've had many friendly conversations where we have traded notes.

I think our vision is very similar in terms that we eventually want to focus on omni channel customer communication.

A few things that Chatwoot has that we don't at the moment are:

1. Omni channel through messenger and Twillio integration

2. A Mobile app to chat with your customers

3. Shared inbox for teams - for team management

What we have that differentiates us from Chatwoot:

1. We have a Reply from Slack + Reply from Mattermost integration where you never have to leave your workspaces (We believe your tools should conform to where you work and not force you to use a different tool)

2. Highly customizable [chat widget](https://github.com/papercups-io/chat-builder) with react and flutter components

3. We have a live screen sharing feature that lets you debug issues with your customers through the browser

Our goal is to build out omni channel communications too but at the moment we want to make our chat widget experience amazing and we believe that your chat widget should look like your website and not an ad for your tool.

*Note we do have apis and webhooks that you can integrate with dialogue flow and Rasa

purrpit
You guys are miles ahead, seriously.

Glad to see a fellow Indian startup taking this route (I was surprised to see it licensed as MIT tbh)

We are a successful Mumbai based startup who are in the process of integrating Chatwoot (beta release just went out today), it will replace Haptik.ai for which we had already paid in advance for a year but don't want to use it anymore just after 1 month.

Chatwoot isn't a piece of cake to set it up but definitely peanuts compared to the money some companies pay to other customer support solutions.

Moreover, we are in the process of hiring and dedicating a small team who will contribute changes to Chatwoot and raise PRs upstream.

Good luck to you guys, hope to connect with y'all on discord in coming weeks.

pranav_rajs
> Chatwoot isn't a piece of cake to set it up

We are working on make it simpler. :D You will hear from us in the upcoming releases.

> Moreover, we are in the process of hiring and dedicating a small team who will contribute changes to Chatwoot and raise PRs upstream.

That's great to know.

softawre
Cool product.

How do you expect you will be able to compete with the likes of the more advanced CX vendors out there? For example:

https://www.genesys.com/genesys-cloud

sojanofficial
With Chatwoot being opensource, you will be able to customise and deliver a very tailor made experience for your organisation. Thats one aspect to consider.
montroser
We've been using Chatwoot for a few months now and been pretty happy with it.

It's a Vue app that we have found easy to extend and and deep integrations with our product and support flow, without too much fuss. Nice work!

sojanofficial
Glad to hear you are happy with Chatwoot :) Do let us know if you need any help, anytime !!!
tin7in
Well done and I hope this pivot plays out well!