Zammad vs FreeScout

Zammad and FreeScout both turn a support email address into a shared queue that a team can work from, and both are AGPL-3.0. That is where the similarity stops. Zammad is a complete ticketing helpdesk on Ruby on Rails, with SLAs, time accounting, a knowledge base and half a dozen channels in the free build, and a stack of containers to run it. FreeScout is a lightweight Help Scout-style shared inbox on PHP and Laravel that runs on a small VPS or even shared hosting, and it sells most of the features beyond the inbox as individual modules. The choice is between a full helpdesk and a lean inbox you extend piece by piece.

Full helpdesk vs. shared inbox

Zammad's admin manual reads like a Zendesk feature list: groups, roles, organizations, overviews, macros, text modules, tags, triggers, schedulers, SLAs with business-hours calendars, time accounting, checklists, core workflows for conditional ticket forms, a public knowledge base, and reports. Channels are email (including Google and Microsoft 365 mailboxes), a web form, a chat widget, SMS via Twilio, Facebook, Telegram and WhatsApp, and phone through CTI integrations for Placetel, sipgate or a generic CTI. It also integrates with LDAP/Active Directory, PGP and S/MIME, and supports SAML and OpenID Connect login.

FreeScout describes itself as a "super lightweight" help desk and shared inbox, built "from scratch" and not using Help Scout or Zendesk materials. The free core does the inbox job: mailboxes fetched over IMAP or POP3 (with OAuth for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace), unlimited agents and mailboxes, assignments, internal notes, forwarding and merging, collision detection when two agents open the same conversation, auto replies, push notifications, phone conversations, a web installer and updater, and official Android and iOS apps. It is translated into 33 languages.

What is free and what you buy

Zammad has no paid edition. The whole repository is AGPL-3.0, and the project says the software "is and will stay open source". Zammad GmbH sells hosted Zammad and support packages for self-hosted installs, not features. Its AI features are optional and use a provider you configure, including a local Ollama.

FreeScout's core is AGPL-3.0 too, but many helpdesk basics are official modules sold separately. Its module store sells "lifetime licenses for a single FreeScout instance (lifetime updates included)", and says "all modules are open-source (AGPL-3.0 license)". Tags, saved replies, workflows, satisfaction ratings, time tracking, reports, teams, custom fields, a knowledge base, an end-user portal, live chat, two-factor authentication, LDAP, SAML SSO, and the WhatsApp, Telegram and Facebook integrations are all paid modules, listed at $4 to $18 each on the modules we looked up. The AI integration module is free. The one-off cost is small next to per-agent pricing, but a FreeScout set up like a Zammad install means buying a dozen modules.

So the free comparison is lopsided. Zammad's free build includes SLAs, time accounting, a knowledge base, chat and 2FA. FreeScout's free build is a very good shared inbox, and the rest is modules.

Footprint and setup

Zammad runs as a Docker Compose stack: the Rails server, scheduler, websocket server, nginx, PostgreSQL, Redis, Memcached, Elasticsearch, a backup service and a one-shot init job. You clone zammad-docker-compose at a release tag, set vm.max_map_count for Elasticsearch, and run docker compose up -d; a Getting Started wizard creates the first administrator. The Docker docs ask for "at least 4 GB of RAM". The hardware guide asks for 2 cores and 6 GB of RAM as a minimum, plus 4 GB if Elasticsearch shares the server. Elasticsearch is optional, but upstream calls it "strongly recommended" and says search is "very limited" without it.

FreeScout is a classic PHP application: Nginx, Apache or IIS, PHP 7.4 to 8.x, and MySQL, MariaDB or PostgreSQL. Its README says "there are no minimum system requirements (CPU / RAM)" and that it can run on shared hosting. Upstream's interactive installer for Ubuntu and Debian installs Nginx, MariaDB or MySQL, PHP, the latest FreeScout and an optional Let's Encrypt certificate, sets up the cron job, and then hands off to a web installer. The installation guide warns against PHP 8.1 because of XML/HTML parsing bugs. The Docker image the README links to is maintained outside the FreeScout project. Our 1 GB floor is an estimate for PHP-FPM, Nginx and MariaDB on one box, since upstream publishes none.

We rate Zammad 3 out of 5 to deploy and FreeScout 2 out of 5. FreeScout's installer does the web server, database, TLS and cron for you, but it is a traditional server you then patch with apt, while Zammad's parts all live in one compose project.

Which to choose

Choose Zammad if you need a real helpdesk (SLAs, time accounting, a knowledge base, chat, several messaging channels, LDAP or SAML) with no licence keys, and you can give it a VPS with 6 GB or more of RAM.

Choose FreeScout if your support is a few shared mailboxes, you want the Help Scout way of working, and a small VPS or existing PHP host is what you have. Budget for the modules you will need, starting with tags, saved replies and workflows, before comparing its cost with anything else.

Choosing between FreeScout and Zammad

Put the other way round, start with FreeScout when email is the only channel and the server is small. Move to Zammad once you need SLAs, reporting or channels beyond email, and would rather run a bigger stack than assemble them from modules.

Not the only two options

If most of your customers reach you through website chat and messaging apps rather than email, see Chatwoot vs Zammad: Chatwoot is an Intercom-style conversation inbox with an MIT core. All self-hosted helpdesks are on the category page.