Chatwoot vs Zammad

Chatwoot and Zammad are the two self-hosted helpdesks most often put forward as a way off Zendesk or Intercom. Both are Ruby on Rails applications on PostgreSQL, both take email and messaging channels into one agent interface, and both publish an official Docker Compose stack. They are still built around different units of work. Chatwoot is built around the conversation: a shared inbox where a website chat, a WhatsApp thread and an email land side by side and agents reply in real time. Zammad is built around the ticket: something with a number, a group, an owner, a state, an SLA clock and time booked against it. Decide which one your support actually runs on, then look at the licence and the free feature set, because that is where the two differ most.

Conversation inbox vs. ticket desk

Chatwoot calls itself "an open-source alternative to Intercom, Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud". Its README puts the omnichannel inbox first: "live chat on your website, email, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, Telegram, Line, SMS etc." The channel models in the source also include TikTok and a generic API channel for anything else. Around the inbox you get private notes and @mentions, labels, canned responses, auto-assignment, business hours, campaigns, pre-chat forms, a help center portal, and conversation, agent, inbox, team and CSAT reports. The website widget is the core of the product, and it is the part Intercom users will recognise.

Zammad describes itself as a "web-based, open-source helpdesk and customer support platform" for "email, chat, telephone and social media". Its admin documentation lists the channels as web form, email (including Google and Microsoft 365 mailboxes), chat, SMS via Twilio, Facebook, Telegram and WhatsApp. Phone comes through CTI integrations: a generic CTI, Placetel and sipgate. The rest of the admin manual is ticket machinery: groups, roles, overviews, macros, text modules, triggers, schedulers, SLAs with calendars, time accounting, checklists, core workflows (conditional ticket forms), a knowledge base, and LDAP/Active Directory, PGP and S/MIME integrations.

If your support is mostly live chat and messaging apps, with agents answering within minutes, Chatwoot's model fits. If it is mostly email, with escalations, due dates, and a manager who needs to see which tickets breached an SLA, Zammad's model fits.

What the free edition keeps

Chatwoot is open core. Its LICENSE puts everything outside the enterprise/ directory under the MIT (Expat) licence. The enterprise/ directory has its own licence: the code "may only be used in production" with a valid Chatwoot Enterprise License "for the correct number of user seats". Chatwoot's self-hosted pricing page lists what the free Community Edition leaves out: Captain AI, voice calls, custom branding, agent capacity, roles and permissions, SSO/SAML, SLA policies and priority support. Premium Support, at $19 per agent per month, adds all of those except SSO and SLA policies; the Enterprise Edition, at $99 per agent per month, adds those two. The source matches the page: sla, captain_integration, custom_roles, audit_logs and disable_branding are flagged premium: true in config/features.yml. Upstream says Captain "connects to OpenAI's GPT models". The docs also publish -ce image tags (for example v4.18.0-ce) for the "foss version" without the enterprise code.

Zammad has no paid edition. The repository is AGPL-3.0, and the docker-compose README says the software "is and will stay open source", owned by the Zammad Foundation and developed by Zammad GmbH. SLAs, time accounting, the knowledge base, core workflows, LDAP, and SAML and OpenID Connect login all ship in the self-hosted build. Zammad GmbH's self-hosted packages are support contracts, not feature unlocks. Its AI features are optional and take a provider you configure: OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure AI, Mistral, any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, a local Ollama, or Zammad's own hosted AI.

This is the clearest split between the two. The things a Zendesk admin expects as standard (SLA timers, custom roles, SSO) are free in Zammad and paid in Chatwoot.

Footprint and setup

Chatwoot's production compose file runs four services: rails, sidekiq, pgvector/pgvector:pg16 and Redis. Setup is two wgets (the .env template and the compose file), editing secrets and the Postgres and Redis passwords, running rails db:chatwoot_prepare, and docker compose up -d. The compose file points at chatwoot/chatwoot:latest, so pin a version tag yourself. Rails binds to 127.0.0.1:3000 only, so you add the reverse proxy and TLS. The first visit runs an onboarding screen that creates the super admin. Upstream's requirements page calls 4 GB of RAM "the required minimum", good for up to 10,000 conversations a day, recommends 4 CPU cores, and asks for at least 1 GB of swap so upgrades don't run out of memory. It also warns that Sidekiq "can use 1GB+ of memory" on a busy server.

Zammad's stack is bigger. zammad-docker-compose starts the Rails server, a scheduler, a websocket server, nginx, PostgreSQL, Redis, Memcached, Elasticsearch, a backup service and a one-shot init job. You clone the repository at a release tag and run docker compose up -d; nginx listens on port 8080, and a Getting Started wizard creates the first administrator. Elasticsearch needs vm.max_map_count=262144 on the host. Upstream calls it optional but "strongly recommended": without it search is "very limited", and searching the content of email attachments is one of the things it provides. The Docker install page asks for "at least 4 GB of RAM to run the containers". The hardware guide is stricter: a minimum of 2 cores and 6 GB of RAM, plus 4 GB if Elasticsearch runs on the same server, and 6 cores and 6 GB (+6 GB for Elasticsearch) as a starting point for up to 40 agents. For HTTPS, the stack ships scenario files for Nginx Proxy Manager and Cloudflare Tunnel.

We rate both 3 out of 5 to deploy. Neither is hard to start; both need a reverse proxy, a backup plan for PostgreSQL and attachments, and a server bigger than the cheapest VPS tier. Size Zammad above its Docker floor if you keep Elasticsearch on the same box.

Which to choose

Choose Chatwoot if your customers reach you on your website and in messaging apps, you want an Intercom-style chat widget and help center, and the MIT core covers you, or you are prepared to pay per agent for SLAs, custom roles, SSO and Captain AI.

Choose Zammad if you are replacing a Zendesk-style ticket desk: email first, SLAs, time accounting, LDAP or SAML sign-in, and a knowledge base, with nothing held back behind a licence key. Budget more RAM for it.

Choosing between Zammad and Chatwoot

Put the other way round, start with Zammad when tickets and process are the job, and it all has to be free. Move to Chatwoot when real-time chat across WhatsApp, Instagram and your website matters more than SLA reporting.

Not the only two options

If your support is one or two shared email inboxes and you want something far lighter, see Zammad vs FreeScout: FreeScout is a Help Scout-style inbox that runs on plain PHP and MySQL. The other self-hosted helpdesks are listed on the category page.