Zammad
Top pickA full-featured, AGPL-licensed help desk with ticketing, a knowledge base, and multi-channel inboxes.
90
sovereigntyZammad 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.
OPEN SOURCEAGPL-3.0SELF-HOSTLOCAL-FIRST
LicenseAGPL-3.0
PricingFree 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.
Open sourceYes
Self-hostableYes
Local-first dataYes
What it does well
- +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
Where it falls short
- −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
Zammad as an alternative to
Where Zammad shows up in our comparisons, and how it ranked.
Zammad head-to-head
Straight comparisons against the tools people weigh it against.