Chatwoot is an open-source omni-channel customer support solution. Today marks a year since the initial commit for Chatwoot’s resurrection as an open-source project. It has been an amazing journey after we open-sourced the code base and the success in HackerNews(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559139). Thanks to the community.
Thanks :) We started off with a theme which is using Bootstrap and the illustrations are created by mixing humaaans.com characters with undraw.co illustrations. The font we used is paid font, so we couldn't make the repo open. Tech stack is React with Gatsby hosted on Netlify.
Chatwoot is a customer support tool for instant messaging channels which can help businesses provide exceptional customer support through their websites or social media channels.
This was a product we started building in 2017. It failed due to a couple of obvious reasons. We built on Vue.js and Rails. It was in an inactive mode for around 1 and a half years. Recently we thought of putting it out instead of letting the code to rust. Our idea is to make it something like Gitlab/Mattermost where people can host their own version and we will provide a hosted version for people who don't want to self-host.
After we open-sourced, we received contributions from 30 developers all around the world.
We believe bots alone can't solve all the questions and there is no context. On the other hand, having agents alone for customer support won't scale as your business grows. We intend to build a bot+agent platform which is fully opensource and supports most of the social media channels, email and websites.
Congrats on the launch. As a fellow Ruby/Rails developer I love seeing great open-source Ruby/Rails apps in a world where everyone seems to be trending to what's "sexy" now instead of what's tired and true.
You'll never make everyone happy... For me the fact that it's RoR as opposed to, say Go or Elixir is a big turn off, because I know it will be slow and eat up lots of RAM.
For me tried and true would be Java.
Would you mind elaborating? Would love to hear why. Seems like a good chat-focused alternative. Was the competition from Freskdesk too stiff (assuming you're based in Bangalore)?
Anyway congrats on breathing new life into the project!
Amazing to see your vision coming to life by open sourcing the code and getting so many contributors! No small feat. And great to see the project is being done in Rails. I’ve spent hours looking for a a good product in this space for our company so will definitely give this a try. Two questions - do you have a way to author FAQs and is email an accepted channel?
Thanks for the kind words. Please see my response below.
> do you have a way to author FAQs
Right now, we don't support it. We have FAQs and a documentation website in the pipeline.
> is email an accepted channel?
Honestly speaking, it is not completely done yet. Emails from support desk mail can be seen in the dashboard, but you cannot respond to it now from our dashboard. Hopefully, we would be able to complete it sooner.
Congratulations on the release. Wish you all the best with it, and will not hesitate to recommend it … but first, email 100% has to be supported. Should be as good as Intercom's user-facing email flow.
Email and twitter DMs are IMO more important for people looking for a support channel than "live agent" chat boxes. Live agent boxes are often adblocked and can't ever be the sole point of contact for a company that cares about having a support channel.
Chatwoot Co-Founder here:
Thanks a lot for the support.
Totally agree. email is currently our top priority item and the development is halfway through. We are also actively working on twitter DM as a channel.
There are a couple of things which I can tell, most important is that we were naive and we were not patient enough to see the project grow organically and reach the users and find its USP. We wanted instant gratification which is not always available in the startup world.
omg I love you. I probably wont switch til you have a hosted version where I can pay you, sorry. Maybe you can launch one on heroku for me as a beta user and I'll pay you?
Chatwoot Co-founder here:
Thanks a lot for the support. A hosted version will be up by end of this month. Meanwhile, you can deploy the repo easily to heroku. Will be happy to assist if you face any issues.
