head to head
Intercom vs Chatwoot
Chatwoot is the open source alternative to Intercom — customer messaging and support platform. Here is the honest comparison.
Yes — Chatwoot is a viable free replacement for Intercom. Chatwoot is open source under its own open-source terms, written in Ruby, with 36,913 GitHub stars, 8,958 forks and 1,377 open issues; it was last pushed 5 hours ago. Intercom costs from $39, while self-hosting Chatwoot carries no licence fee — the trade is your operational time instead of a subscription. 3 other open source Intercom alternatives are tracked here, led by Formbricks at 12,950 stars. Chatwoot ranks #1 of 4 tracked open source Intercom alternatives by stars. The tracked set, by adoption: Formbricks (12,950 stars), Typebot (10,332 stars), Tiledesk (15 stars). Replacement criteria on this page: 4 reasons to move to Chatwoot and 3 reasons to stay on Intercom.
choose Chatwoot if
- Your Intercom bill is growing with seats or usage
- You need your data in a format and server you control
- Your compliance posture requires auditing the code that touches sensitive data
- You have (or can rent) a server and basic Docker comfort
stick with Intercom if
- You need the polished onboarding and support SLAs of a commercial vendor
- Your team has zero capacity to operate software, even self-hosted-simple
- You depend on a Intercom integration ecosystem that the OSS alternatives have not replicated
Side by side
| Chatwoot (open source) | Intercom | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free (self-hosted) | $39-$139/seat/month |
| License | Custom / other | Proprietary |
| Source code | Public, auditable | Closed |
| Self-hosting | Yes — chatwoot/chatwoot | Cloud only |
| Data ownership | Your server, your format | Vendor's cloud |
| Community | ★ 37K · ⑂ 9.0K | — |
| Built with | Ruby | — |
Why people look for a Intercom alternative
About Chatwoot
Chatwoot is a Ruby based, open source, self hosted customer support platform that consolidates live chat, email, and social messaging into one omnichannel inbox, positioned as an open alternative to Intercom, Twilio, Zendesk, and Salesforce Service Cloud.
read the full Chatwoot overview →
Other open source alternatives to Intercom
last updated nightly · ranking method: github stars, live-tracked
Frequently asked questions
Is Chatwoot a good replacement for Intercom?
Chatwoot is an open source alternative to Intercom (Customer messaging and support platform). It is written in Ruby and licensed under its own terms, with 36,913 GitHub stars.
Is Chatwoot free compared to Intercom?
Yes. Chatwoot is open source — there is no licence fee, and you can self-host it. Intercom is typically a paid subscription, so the trade-off is licence cost against the operational work of running it yourself.
How do I migrate from Intercom to Chatwoot?
Migration effort depends on the data formats involved. Check Chatwoot's documentation for import options, and compare the feature table above to confirm the capabilities you depend on are covered before switching.