Show HN: Papercups – Open-source alternative to Intercom

I'd be really interested to hear more regarding people's experiences with remote YC batches. Please share if possible.

Thanks Satam! We're always happy to chat :)

Yes.

https://chatlio.com/

Creates a short-lived channel per chat. It works well in terms of sharing responsibilities with a team and allowing people to jump in easily.

I did feel a bit of unease with having customers in the same place as our "private" conversations.

Yup! To be honest, a lot of the smaller teams using Papercups with our Slack integration rarely need to interact with the admin dashboard if they don't want to. (But it turns out that having a dashboard to manage unresolved questions, add private notes/labels/tags to customers/conversations, etc. is still pretty helpful)

Shameless plug: My project, Cactus Comments[1] does something similar, although for commenting, instead of support chat.

We ship a web-embeddable Matrix client. The users' browser connects directly with a Matrix server of their choice (or a default one).

[1]: https://cactus.chat

For a chat solution I can’t think of a better option. BEAM is ideal for that type of workload.

We use https so its encrypted at transit. We host with heroku and fly.io. So we use their encryption policy for our cloud solution.

We have papercups-eu.io which is hosted in Frankfurt and is encrypted at rest.

For those who are more privacy contentious we have a self hosted solution. Where we collect logs and anonymized data to make our product better and debugging purposes.

Funny thing is, Chatwoot did their HN launch just 2 days ago [1], so I’m curious to see a head-to-head comparison between Papercups and Chatwoot, two nice-looking chat products that happen to be open source.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26501527

We're pretty similar to Chatwoot in some ways - Kam described some differences here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26503697

To reiterate some of the differences, or why people might choose us at the moment:

- A lot of our users really like our Slack integration. For small teams, this means they don't even really have to use our dashboard if they don't want to, because they can do everything from Slack. [0]

- We offer a live screen sharing feature [1]

- We're working on a library to offer complete customization of the chat UI on your website [2]

[0] (We need to set up a better recent demo video of our Slack integration, but if you skim our changelog you'll probably get the gist: https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups/blob/master/CHANGE...)

[1] https://storytime.papercups.io/

[2] https://github.com/papercups-io/chat-builder

Part of the demo is running on the page, I believe. It's the chat widget in the lower-right corner, you can talk to the team directly!

Interestingly, the features page goes straight to github. With a list of features... followed by screenshots. So I found it!

https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups/wiki/Features

Yeah I agree, we're planning on updating the landing page to include a lot more screenshots/videos/demos :)

In the meantime, here are some screenshots from our GitHub wiki: https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups/wiki/Features

And our demo page: https://app.papercups.io/demo

We just updated it! Thanks for the advice!

submit a pull request?

Thanks Collin! Glad you're enjoying it so far :)

We have API docs [0] and webhook events [1] so it's possible to integrate with something like Dialogflow for chat automation :)

[0] https://docs.papercups.io/api-endpoints

[1] https://docs.papercups.io/webhook-events

Haha sorry to disappoint :P

It's on our roadmap!

One downside of Discord is that we use threads in Slack to manage conversations, and I don't think Discord has great support for threading. But I know some solutions have worked around this by spinning up a new channel for every new conversation... still need to figure out the ideal UX.