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

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

#51

Post by pranav_rajs »

randomsearch wrote: post #45

Love it. This (your commercial product) will go in an MVP I'm building. I've been using Intercom, which seems like the best option, but it's just so damn expensive for an MVP and that top tier price is not met by their medium tier product imo. tbh I'd pay even for the first agent (perhaps a free trial would have sufficed), but the Hacker tier does make it a certainty I'll trial it. Something most tool providers don't…

> like a tax if you take X% of my profit

I have heard this analogy from other users of Intercom also. This is definitely an interesting take. But yeah, I got your point. Let us know if you need some help setting Chatwoot up.

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

#52

Post by randtrain34 »

flylib wrote: post #50

What would you say are the main things that distinguish you from Papercups (YC S20) https://papercups.io ? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24133719

From first impressions it looks like papercups focuses on chat while Chatwoot is a more complete suite around customer communication?

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

#53

Post by purrpit »

You guys are miles ahead, seriously.

Glad to see a fellow Indian startup taking this route (I was surprised to see it licensed as MIT tbh)

We are a successful Mumbai based startup who are in the process of integrating Chatwoot (beta release just went out today), it will replace Haptik.ai for which we had already paid in advance for a year but don't want to use it anymore just after 1 month.

Chatwoot isn't a piece of cake to set it up but definitely peanuts compared to the money some companies pay to other customer support solutions.

Moreover, we are in the process of hiring and dedicating a small team who will contribute changes to Chatwoot and raise PRs upstream.

Good luck to you guys, hope to connect with y'all on discord in coming weeks.

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

#54

Post by pranav_rajs »

flylib wrote: post #50

What would you say are the main things that distinguish you from Papercups (YC S20) https://papercups.io ? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24133719

Papercups is a nice product. It's good to have multiple players in the open-source space.

Here are some of the thoughts which comes to my mind that differentiates Chatwoot from Papercups:

1. Omnichannel inbox [0]: Chatwoot let's you connect 7 different channels including email, whatsapp etc so that you have all your customer conversations in one place.

2. API Channel for building custom channels: Some people see Chatwoot as an alternative to Twilio Flex (except voice) as they could build custom channel using our API Channel and have the flexibility to customize the software to the extend they need.

3. Integration with Chatbot providers: Chatwoot has a concept of agent bots which allows you to connect with the existing Chatbot providers like Rasa.ai and Dialogflow easily. [1]

4. Shared inbox with teams: You can create a group of users under specific team and collaborate over a ticket. [2]

5. Flexibility to manage more than one brand under the same account. If the company has more than one product, instead of creating multiple accounts, the same account allows you to create different inboxes and set different permission levels for the users.

6. Availability of mobile apps on iOS and Android which helps you to chat with your customers on the go.

[0] https://www.chatwoot.com/features/channels

[1] https://www.chatwoot.com/features/chatbots

[2] https://www.chatwoot.com/features/shared-inbox

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

#55

Post by pranav_rajs »

randtrain34 wrote: post #52
flylib wrote: post #50

What would you say are the main things that distinguish you from Papercups (YC S20) https://papercups.io ? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24133719

From first impressions it looks like papercups focuses on chat while Chatwoot is a more complete suite around customer communication?

We intend to build an entire suite for customer engagement while giving the flexibility to customize it to match the business needs.

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

#56

Post by samblr »

pranav_rajs wrote: post #46
hnarn wrote: post #40

Thank you for licensing this under a proper open source license. Out of curiosity, how would you feel about a company selling this as a service? It's obviously legal per the license, but I'm wondering what your perspective is. If you encourage it, do you have any plans for how to ensure everybody are happy and turns a profit from it? I have grown cynical over the years with these kinds of open source challengers as i…

There are people who have built custom solutions on top of Chatwoot and selling it. There are people who are selling it in their country without changing the code and making profit out it. I'm happy to help those people out (not for free, would charge something obiviously). There are different markets where we might not be able to cater. Since the solution is flexible enough to build custom channels, I've seen people…

Curious on on how ee license works - will it not stop somebody to take that source and run it for free ? or do parallel implementation on top of your free offerings.

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

#57

Post by pranav_rajs »

samblr wrote: post #56
pranav_rajs wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are people who have built custom solutions on top of Chatwoot and selling it. There are people who are selling it in their country without changing the code and making profit out it. I'm happy to help those people out (not for free, would charge something obiviously). There are different markets where we might not be able to cater. Since the solution is flexible enough to build custom channels, I've seen people…

Curious on on how ee license works - will it not stop somebody to take that source and run it for free ? or do parallel implementation on top of your free offerings.

We expect to follow Gitlab's path on this. There will be 2 repos. One with EE licensed code and the other one completely foss.

eg: Gitlab[0] vs Gitlab FOSS [1] code

[0] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab

[1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss

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

#58

Post by pranav_rajs »

purrpit wrote: post #53

You guys are miles ahead, seriously. Glad to see a fellow Indian startup taking this route (I was surprised to see it licensed as MIT tbh) We are a successful Mumbai based startup who are in the process of integrating Chatwoot (beta release just went out today), it will replace Haptik.ai for which we had already paid in advance for a year but don't want to use it anymore just after 1 month. Chatwoot isn't a piece of…

> Chatwoot isn't a piece of cake to set it up

We are working on make it simpler. :D You will hear from us in the upcoming releases.

> Moreover, we are in the process of hiring and dedicating a small team who will contribute changes to Chatwoot and raise PRs upstream.

That's great to know.

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

#59

Post by cheeseblubber »

flylib wrote: post #50

What would you say are the main things that distinguish you from Papercups (YC S20) https://papercups.io ? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24133719

Thanks for the mention:

Like Pranav said we think the space is good to have multiple players and we've had many friendly conversations where we have traded notes.

I think our vision is very similar in terms that we eventually want to focus on omni channel customer communication.

A few things that Chatwoot has that we don't at the moment are:

1. Omni channel through messenger and Twillio integration

2. A Mobile app to chat with your customers

3. Shared inbox for teams - for team management

What we have that differentiates us from Chatwoot:

1. We have a Reply from Slack + Reply from Mattermost integration where you never have to leave your workspaces (We believe your tools should conform to where you work and not force you to use a different tool)

2. Highly customizable [chat widget](https://github.com/papercups-io/chat-builder) with react and flutter components

3. We have a live screen sharing feature that lets you debug issues with your customers through the browser

Our goal is to build out omni channel communications too but at the moment we want to make our chat widget experience amazing and we believe that your chat widget should look like your website and not an ad for your tool.

*Note we do have apis and webhooks that you can integrate with dialogue flow and Rasa

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