The best Help Desk & Customer Support
Every option ranked — open-source, self-hostable, and commercial — by our transparent Sovereignty Score, with honest trade-offs so you choose what fits you, not us.
Shared-inbox and ticketing platforms that turn customer emails, chats, and social messages into tracked support tickets, with routing, macros, SLAs, and a public help center.
L5Applications — layer 5 of the AI stack- 1
Zammad
Top pickOpen sourceA full-featured, AGPL-licensed help desk with ticketing, a knowledge base, and multi-channel inboxes.
Free to self-host with unlimited agents; optional managed cloud plans start around €19/agent/month and Zammad also sells paid support contracts for self-hosted installs. · in our Freshdesk comparison →
What is Zammad? →90sovereignty - 2
FreeScout
Open sourceA lightweight, completely free, self-hosted shared mailbox modeled on Help Scout's simplicity.
Core is free forever, unlimited agents and mailboxes. Optional one-time modules (not subscriptions) cost $4-$15 each for extras like knowledge base, reports, or CRM fields. · in our Freshdesk comparison →
What is FreeScout? →86sovereignty - 3
Chatwoot
Open sourceAn open-core omnichannel inbox strongest at live chat, WhatsApp, and social messaging.
Community edition free to self-host, unlimited agents. Self-hosted paid tiers: Premium Support $19/agent/month (Captain AI, voice, branding, roles/permissions) and Enterprise $99/agent/month (adds SSO/SAML, SLA). Cloud-hosted plans start at $19/agent/month (Startups tier). · in our Freshdesk comparison →
What is Chatwoot? →84sovereignty - 4
UVdesk
Open sourceA Symfony-based open-source help desk with ticketing, a knowledge base, and e-commerce integrations.
Free to self-host (community edition). UVdesk also sells a separate hosted SaaS plan and paid marketplace add-ons. · in our Freshdesk comparison →
What is UVdesk? →79sovereignty
Is it free?
The free tier, its real limits and where you start paying — read from each vendor's own pricing page and dated.
Run these yourself
What each one actually needs — real RAM, honest running cost, and the setup time nobody quotes.
- Self-hosting Zammad 16 GB for a single-server install. The vendor's floor is 6 GB for Zammad plus 4 GB for Elasticsearch, and the usual VPS size above that is 16 GB. You can fit it on 8 GB by capping the Elasticsearch heap, which Zammad itself calls a less-than-ideal fix.
- Self-hosting FreeScout 1–2 GB. The vendor says the cheapest VPS works; 2 GB gives MySQL and the queue worker room as mailboxes and history grow.
- Self-hosting Chatwoot 4 GB plus 1 GB of swap is enough for a small team. Sidekiq alone can use more than 1 GB on a busy server, and 8 GB is the vendor's figure for 20,000 conversations a day.
- Self-hosting UVdesk 4 GB. That is the vendor's own floor, and there is no lighter documented setup.
Replacing a specific tool?
Head-to-head comparisons for each popular help desk & customer support product.
Straight head-to-heads
Two help desk & customer support tools, side by side — verified facts and a plain verdict.