Launch HN: Chatwoot (YC W21) – Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Zendesk

Hello everyone,

We are a 3 founder team. Myself Pranav. Sojan and Nithin are my co-founders. We are building Chatwoot (https://www.chatwoot.com, https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot). With Chatwoot, businesses can connect channels like website live chat, email, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp etc and talk to the customers from one place.

Chatwoot is an open-source alternative to Intercom, Zendesk etc.

We help companies in regulated industries to manage customer data without sharing it with third-party providers. Since the software is open-source, it is easier to build custom workflows that suit your business on top of Chatwoot.

We started building Chatwoot as proprietary software in 2017, but the startup failed. Seeing the data privacy regulations and people taking interest in self-hosted alternatives, we open-sourced the product in 2019, we got a lot of love from the HN community. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559139).

Over the last year, we have been working with the community to build the software. Seeing the interest from the open-source world, we decided to quit our jobs and work full time on Chatwoot. We introduced support plans to validate the need for self-hosted solutions and it worked out well. We applied to YC and got into the W21 batch.

Right now, there are 1000+ companies using Chatwoot. We have around 7.2k stars and more than 100 contributors in our repository. The software can be used in more than 25+ regional languages.

Apart from the omnichannel support desk, we are adding more features like a self-service portal, marketing campaigns, customer segmentation, workflows etc.

We make money by charging a license fee of $99 per user per month for features like customisable dashboards, SLA Management, Agent scheduling software, IP blocklisting etc which are suited for large enterprises.

We will continue to work with the community to build Chatwoot. We would love to hear your experiences, thoughts and ideas!

Looks very cool! For me, the USP of Intercom was their data model. The tag-based system and the fact that everything could be easily exported to a flat CSV file made it super powerful.

Can you comment on whether Chatwoot is similar in this regard?

We allow tagging the conversations and contacts, filter them based on the tag. At the moment we don't have a CSV export, we are working on it. You can get the same information as JSON using our APIs.

Congrats on the launch. One of my clients will become a customer of yours I'm pretty sure. :)

You can integrate 7 channels with Chatwoot including Email. https://www.chatwoot.com/features/channels

We have a base version of CRM at the moment, we are building more on top of it.