Zammad vs Chatwoot
Both are alternatives to Freshdesk. Here's how they stack up — verified facts, no spin.
Zammad
TOP PICKA full-featured, AGPL-licensed help desk with ticketing, a knowledge base, and multi-channel inboxes.
Zammad is a mature, actively-developed open-source help desk covering email, chat, and social ticketing, SLAs, a customer-facing knowledge base, and text modules/macros — the closest like-for-like replacement for Freshdesk's core ticketing product. It's built in Ruby on Rails with an Elasticsearch-backed search index and ships an official Docker Compose stack, so a self-hosted install is a well-trodden path rather than a science project.
Chatwoot
An open-core omnichannel inbox strongest at live chat, WhatsApp, and social messaging.
Chatwoot unifies live chat, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, SMS, and email into one team inbox, with a Captain AI layer for FAQ-driven auto-replies on paid tiers. Chatwoot ships as an 'open core' project: the community edition (the whole visible codebase outside one folder) is MIT-licensed and free to self-host with no seat limit, while a smaller set of enterprise features (SSO/SAML, agent capacity management, custom branding, SLA policies) live in a separate 'enterprise/' directory under Chatwoot's own proprietary license and require a paid subscription even when self-hosted.
Side by side
| Zammad | Chatwoot | |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty Score | 90 | 84 |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hostable | Yes | Yes |
| Local-first | Yes | Yes |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT (core); enterprise/ directory is a separate proprietary license, verified directly against chatwoot/chatwoot's own LICENSE file |
| Pricing | 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. | 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). |
Zammad is Macrostack's recommended Freshdesk alternative, so it's our pick here.
Zammad
Strengths
- +Full AGPL-3.0 open-source core — no enterprise-only feature split
- +No per-agent limit when self-hosted; unlimited tickets and mailboxes, so team growth never triggers a new bill tier
- +Mature product: multi-channel (email, chat, Twitter/Facebook, telephony via CTI), SLAs, and a real knowledge base out of the box
- +Official Docker Compose and package installers make self-hosting straightforward
Trade-offs
- −Elasticsearch is a required dependency for full-text search, adding real memory/operational overhead versus a lighter stack
- −No built-in generative AI agent as of this writing — nothing directly equivalent to Freddy AI Copilot's inline reply drafting
- −Smaller third-party app marketplace than Freshdesk's connector catalog
Chatwoot
Strengths
- +MIT-licensed core is genuinely open source, not source-available — you can audit, fork, and modify it freely
- +Best-in-class channel coverage for chat-first support: WhatsApp, Instagram DM, Telegram, SMS, and live chat widget out of the box, broader than Freshdesk's native channel set on lower tiers
- +Very active project (multiple releases a month) with a large community and strong docs
- +Self-hosting the community edition is completely free with no agent-count restriction
Trade-offs
- −SSO/SAML, SLA policies, and agent capacity management sit behind a paid license even when self-hosted — not a full feature set for free
- −Captain AI (the auto-resolution layer, Chatwoot's rough equivalent of Freddy AI Agent) is a paid add-on, not part of the free community edition
- −Less oriented toward classic long-form ticket workflows than Freshdesk or Zammad; strongest for chat-style support
More Freshdesk head-to-heads
Facts verified 2026-07-11. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.