Customer support
Zendesk alternatives
2 open-source projects that already do this job. Free to use - not free to run, which is what the numbers on the right are for.
The projects
chatwoot/chatwoot★35,565 GitHub starslicence unclearOpen-source omnichannel customer support platform with chat, email, and agent workspace for handling tickets and conversations.Open on GitHub ↗zammad/zammad★5,832 GitHub starsAGPL-3.0 licenceWeb-based open source helpdesk allowing ticket management, automation, and agent interfaces for customer support workflows.Open on GitHub ↗
What you give up either way
- Proprietary training signal from Zendesk’s large installed base and interaction corpus
- Marketplace of 1,800+ prebuilt apps and deep third-party integrations
- Scale, reliability and operations for voice and omnichannel contact center at enterprise scale
- Enterprise-grade governance, sandboxing and advanced security features
- Prebuilt agentic AI features (self-improving AI agents, auto-triage, generative voice) out of the box
An open-source project doing the core job proves a replacement is possible. It does not prove it matches Zendesk, and it does not prove anyone has run it for a month. How we decide.