Chatwoot
Open-source omnichannel customer support platform with AI agent (Captain) that unifies Telegram, WhatsApp, email, and 9+ channels in one inbox — self-hosted or cloud
Overview
Chatwoot is a modern open-source customer support platform that consolidates conversations from Telegram, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, email, and web chat into a single shared inbox. Founded in 2019 and backed by Y Combinator, it has grown to serve 15,000+ businesses. Its built-in AI agent, Captain, automates responses by learning from your help center content and past conversations. Chatwoot delivers messages to AI agent bots via outbound webhooks — bots receive events at a configured URL and post responses back via API, making it well-suited for teams building AI agents that handle customer messaging across multiple channels. Self-hosting gives full data control; the cloud option removes infrastructure overhead.
The Verdict
Who Should Use Chatwoot?
Best For
- Teams deploying AI agents across WhatsApp, Telegram, and email simultaneously
- Companies wanting open-source flexibility with self-hosting option
- Developers building webhook-driven agent bots that need a multi-channel inbox
- Support teams needing human-in-the-loop alongside AI agents
- Orgs requiring SOC 2 compliance and audit logs
Not Ideal For
- Passive agent message monitoring — bots must actively call the API to log messages
- Telegram-only setups (BotMux is simpler for this)
- Teams without engineering resources to wire up webhook receivers
- Pure observability use cases (no native LLM trace or token logging)
What's Great
- 9+ channels unified: Telegram, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, email, web chat, Line
- Open-source (MIT) with a large, active community
- Captain AI learns from your help center and past chats — no prompt engineering needed
- Real-time signed webhook callbacks for external systems
- Integrates with Dialogflow, Rasa, and Amazon Lex for existing NLP stacks
- SOC 2 Type II compliant on cloud plans
- Human handoff built in — agents can take over from bots mid-conversation
Watch Out For
- Not a passive message logger — bots must call Create Message API to log outbound responses
- WhatsApp requires third-party gateway (e.g., chatwoot-messenger-gateway via Wasender)
- Slack support is limited to notification webhooks, not a native Slack inbox
- Self-hosting requires DevOps resources (Docker/Kubernetes setup)
- Captain AI credits are capped per tier — high-volume agents need Enterprise
Pricing
View all features & details
Supported Channels
- Telegram (native)
- WhatsApp (via Business API / gateway)
- Facebook Messenger
- Instagram DMs
- Web live chat widget
- Line
- SMS (via integrations)
- Custom API channel
AI & Bot Integration
- Captain AI — automates responses from help center content
- Captain Copilot — smart suggestions for human agents
- Agent bot webhooks — deliver events to external bot URLs
- Dialogflow, Rasa, Amazon Lex integration
- Human handoff with seamless context transfer
Observability & Logging
- Full conversation history stored per channel
- Audit logs (Enterprise)
- Real-time webhook events for external systems
- Conversation reports and CSAT tracking
Deployment
- Cloud (chatwoot.com) — managed SaaS
- Self-hosted — Docker, Kubernetes, Heroku
- Open-source MIT license
- SOC 2 Type II (cloud plans)
How It Compares
| Feature | Chatwoot | BotMux | ChatBotKit | Intercom |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Telegram | Native | Native (primary) | Native | Limited |
| Via gateway | Not supported | Native | Native | |
| Slack | Notifications only | Via bridge | Native | Via integration |
| Passive monitoring | Webhook-active | Built-in | Audit logs | No |
| Self-hosted | Yes (MIT) | Yes (Apache 2) | No | No |
| Open-source | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| Human handoff | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Starting price | Free | Free | Free | $29/seat/mo |