Open source alternatives to Help Scout

By GitHub stars it is Chatwoot, with 39,818 stars and a commit on 13 Nov. Choose Chatwoot when you want a shared email and chat inbox on your own server instead of a hosted help desk billed per user. Next come Zammad (6,113 stars) and FreeScout (4,664 stars).

Yes. The code of all 5 is public under MIT or AGPL 3.0, so you can use them with no licence fee. Running one yourself costs the server and your time to look after it, and some makers also sell a hosted plan.

Start from the job you use Help Scout for. Choose Cossistant when you want open source code you can run and change yourself. Choose Frappe Helpdesk when you want unlimited agents and tickets on your own server instead of paying for each user every month.

4 of the 5: Chatwoot, Zammad, FreeScout and Frappe Helpdesk. Each tool's page says what it needs to run.

4 of the 5 we track had a commit in the last 30 days, among them Chatwoot, Zammad, FreeScout and Frappe Helpdesk. The quietest is Cossistant, last changed on 18 Sep. A recent commit shows the project is kept up, not that it will stay that way.

AGPL 3.0 (4), MIT (1). MIT, BSD and Apache let you change and reuse the code freely. GPL and AGPL ask you to share your changes under the same licence when you give the software to others, and AGPL also counts letting people use it over a network.

The hosting. Help Scout's maker runs the servers for you; with an open source tool the updates, backups, security fixes and support are yours, unless you take the maker's hosted plan. Features differ too, so check what each one imports and exports before you move your data.