Show HN: Open-Source Intercom with Help Center | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Open-Source Intercom with Help Center

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101 pointspranav_rajs26 comments

We switched from Front to Chatwoot 3 months ago, self hosted on our infrastructure.There are some rough edges, and integrating Facebook and Instagram channels are a bit of work but it's globally working very well. And we save quite a buck every month in our scenario managing 5 brands and 4 channels per brand. Main issues are: mobile app can be improved and browser notifications are inconsistent. Wishlist: a desktop app.

Great feedback!

The FB/Instagram channels are a pain to manage (even for us) due to the app review cycle. This is a common problem in the community. Recently we have seen many rejections in Instagram API reviews without a specific reason. Some of the alternatives the Meta developer review team suggests are also not working. We are trying to make this flow better using a hosted app or something. Open to ideas here.

We are aware of the issues with the mobile app. It is getting a revamp now, hope most of the issues are resolved by it.

Apart from rent and salaries, customer chat is our single biggest expense (at very low volume usage, it not being our core business at all). Chatwoot is making it very awkward for the industry and I am glad they do.

What tool are you using?

from the sounds of "single biggest expense", I'd guess Intercom

I have done IT for small businesses. Every small shop I worked for had to use many different and incompatible assortment of software tools to set up the IT for the business: Windows system for a proprietary billing software, OpenBSD system for routing, proprietary intercom tech. I envied my friends who worked for proper software companies. They could build everything for Linux, dockerize everything and done!

Is there anything like Kali-Linux but for business tech? I would love it if I can find one Linux bistro for business tech that rules them all!

I'm lacking details from your wish of course, but if you need to run several, disparate different software....Could not one of the common linux distros like Ubuntu, Redhat/Fedora, SUSE, etc. suffice, and of course have a powerful enough machine to run virtual machines or maybe WINE? Obviously this depends on whether you were asking for client side or server side...And if on the client side, things - as you know very well - can get very tricky because you then have to deal with training and general acceptance.

When i used to have my IT side hustle company, whenever i supported software for small businesses, i often found that nuding them to web equivalent software made things alot easier. For example, some users get comfy with software faster when its within context of a web browser...Of course, this is different for every user/org and with different software, it depends. But it lessens your support away from conventuional desktop supporot. However, if the web softeware is managed hosted then its much easier, but if you have to manage the hosting, then you would need web management sort of skills. for me that was my forte, so it was easy for me.

As to your wish to find a linux distro for business tech, there are platforms like Odoo (see wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odoo)...but they're not lightweight, and back to my earlier point, you'd have to build up your skills administrering web apps, server, etc. I'm sure there are plenty of other options beyond Odoo. Try a couple of searches against odoo; the old google hack of "odoo vs..."

Good luck!

EDIT: Sorry, i meant to direct my comments aboive to @importgravity :-)

Most people see this as some sort of tax to provide better support, which should not be the case. We need better tools at reasonable and transparent pricing. Hope we succeed in that mission.

The title is a bit misleading, It's not fully open source.

There is an enterprise folder which you can't use without a subscription.

And its not clear which Features are OSS and which are source-available.

As for tips for the product, think about supporting the Matrix Protocol, which has many social media bridges, other than that it looks good.

Can someone familiar with chatwoot help answer what features are locked behind a subscription if any?

Help Center is available in Opensource edition. We have SSO, roles & permissions in the enterprise.

Is there a page we can see a table of features?

Found it here: https://www.chatwoot.com/pricing

@pranav_rajs I couldn't see some enterprise-grade features like audit logs or privacy vault. Would love to help for free. Open source & plug-n-play: www.boxyhq.com

We are following open core model. The idea is to build a sustainable way to provide more value in opensource. Bulk of the features are under MIT license.

> ...think about supporting the Matrix Protocol, which has many social media bridges...

I sure hope that many more chat/customer-messaging-adjacent platforms begin to adopt matrix protocol support underneath! So many services exist on top of email/smtp protocols, and that has allowed for such creativity...It boggles my mind that the same has not been done for chat (or at least chat for customer support) - it seems like we have so many competing, proprietary chat protocols for these types of use-cases! As a customer, i don't want to have my interactins trapped only in the provider's platform...Just like email, i want to keep a record of my interactions with customer support...and leveraging a shared, universal set of protocols would help in that regard. I'm an admitted matrix fanboy, so that's my preference, but even xmpp or seomthing like that should universally be adopted!

I love the website. I'm an intercom user but I'd love to move away from it. I don't use it for the chat, and use it more for onboarding emails, user views, and walkthroughs - does chatwoot plan to offer these in the future?

Chatwoot is currently suited for support use cases. We are working on the customer success workflows (onboarding, retention etc) now. Hope it gets there soon.

What do people here use to keep customer information in sync between their customer support crm, and their db for example?

What's the common solution to "Customer updated their name => Have to update their info on stripe, chatwoot, and six more places"? Other than "Update everything for every single api call"…

I’ve seen small businesses use something like Zapier. A better way would be to have a pub/sub system but that may be overkill given the complexity.

Customer Data Platforms (CDP) solve this problem. Segment.com is probably the one people here heard, Hull.io is another one

Careful with several of these that are considered tracking platforms, your "customer data" API calls may be blocked if you do it from an app and not from your back end.

Most people are updating it from a client side HTTP request when the page loads, most platforms (like Intercom) provide a signing mechanism to make this secure.

I've been using it for about two years now and it really made support easier. Sojan and the team do an amazing job with Chatwoot!

happy to have you onboard !!

I really like this type of business model, but I don't fully understand how it works. It looks like you offer a hosted version, makes sense, but what is the upsell in the self-hosted version?

I just started implementing Zoho’s SalesIQ which is very competitively priced compared to other commercial alternatives.

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