If you’re looking for an open-source alternative to the big names like Intercom or Zendesk, you’ve probably stumbled across Chatwoot. It often comes up as a flexible, self-hostable option for teams that want more control. But what’s it really like to use?
This post is a complete Chatwoot overview, giving you an honest look at its features, pricing, and some of the key limitations you should know about, especially if you’re hoping to use modern AI. While its open-source flexibility is a huge plus, we’ll also dig into where it falls short and how you can fill those gaps to build a support setup that actually saves you time.
A Chatwoot overview: So, what is Chatwoot?
At its heart, Chatwoot is an open-source customer support tool that pulls all your conversations from different channels into one single dashboard. Think of it as a central command center for all your customer chats. Its biggest selling point is giving companies total control over their communication, offering both a cloud version and a self-hosted option for those who like to manage their own infrastructure.
This means you can handle messages from your website’s live chat, email, Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp, all from the same screen. It’s mostly built for startups and smaller businesses that have some technical folks on hand. The typical Chatwoot user is someone who values owning their data and the ability to customize things deeply, more so than having polished, advanced features right out of the box.
A deep dive into Chatwoot’s core features
Chatwoot has a lot going on under the hood. Let’s break down the three main parts you’ll be working with: the shared inbox, the automation tools, and the reporting suite.
The omnichannel shared inbox
The main event in Chatwoot is the shared inbox. This is where your team can see and respond to every single customer conversation, no matter where it came from. An email from one person sits right next to a WhatsApp message from another, giving you one clean, chronological feed.
It connects with all the channels you’d expect:
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Website live chat
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Email
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WhatsApp
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Facebook & Instagram
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Twitter
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SMS via Twilio
Inside the inbox, your team can use handy features like adding private notes to conversations for some internal context or assigning tickets to the right agent. It’s a decent system for getting organized. But here’s the thing: while a unified inbox is great, it doesn’t actually reduce the number of tickets your team has to deal with. For teams getting buried in high volume, the real goal is smart automation that can solve issues before they even hit an agent’s queue.
Chatbots and automation rules
Chatwoot does have some basic automation built-in. You can set up canned responses for frequently asked questions and create rules to automatically send conversations to the right teams based on where the message came from or what it says. It’s a good first step for simple routing.
However, when you want to build a real chatbot, Chatwoot leans on an integration with Google’s Dialogflow. And this is where it gets a bit tricky. Setting up Dialogflow is a heavy lift that requires developer time and a good amount of expertise in how conversational AI works. More importantly, it’s a rule-based system. It doesn’t learn from your business. It can’t read your past support tickets to see how your team solves problems, and it can’t pull answers from your internal knowledge bases.
This feels a world away from a platform like eesel AI, which is designed to be self-serve. Instead of spending weeks on a complicated setup, you can be up and running in minutes. eesel AI instantly learns from your past conversations and connects to all your knowledge sources (like a Confluence wiki or your team’s Google Docs) to give accurate, context-aware answers from the get-go.
Reporting and analytics
To help you see how you’re doing, Chatwoot comes with a standard set of reports. You can track things like conversation volume, agent performance, first response times, and how long it takes to resolve an issue. These dashboards give you a pretty good snapshot of your team’s daily activity.
The catch? These are all lagging indicators. They tell you what happened, but they don’t really tell you why. They can’t point out the specific gaps in your help articles that are causing the same questions to come in over and over, nor can they show you where your biggest opportunities for automation are.
This is where a more proactive approach to reporting can make a huge difference. For example, eesel AI has a simulation mode that analyzes thousands of your old tickets before you even turn it on. It gives you a clear forecast of the resolution rates you can expect and how much you could save, providing a data-driven plan for improving your support from day one.
Chatwoot setup and pricing
Figuring out how to deploy and pay for Chatwoot is a big part of deciding if it’s the right fit. The choice between hosting it yourself and using their cloud service has big implications for your budget, maintenance, and ability to grow.
Self-hosted vs. cloud options
Chatwoot gives you two main flavors to choose from:
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Self-Hosted: You download the open-source code and run it on your own servers. This gives you total control over your data and lets you customize just about anything. The flip side is that your team is on the hook for setup, maintenance, security, and all future updates. It’s a solid choice if you have developers with time to spare.
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Cloud: Chatwoot handles all the infrastructure for you. This is way easier to set up and manage, but you have less control over the environment, and your data is stored on their servers.
That "control" you get from self-hosting often comes with hidden costs, mainly in the form of developer hours and ongoing upkeep. Modern AI tools like eesel AI are built differently; they give you deep customization through an easy-to-use dashboard. You can define your AI’s personality, tell it what knowledge to use, and build custom actions, all without needing to write any code.
Chatwoot pricing tiers
Chatwoot’s pricing is pretty easy to follow, based on a per-agent, per-month fee. While that sounds simple, it can get pricey as your support team gets bigger. Every new person you hire adds another recurring cost, which can feel like you’re being penalized for growing your team.
| Plan | Monthly Price (per agent) | Key Features | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hacker | $0 (Self-hosted only) | Community support, basic features | Developers and hobbyists |
| Startup | $19 | 2,000 conversations/mo, 2 inboxes | Small startups and teams |
| Business | $39 | 5,000 conversations/mo, 5 inboxes, agent scheduling | Growing businesses |
| Enterprise | Custom | Unlimited conversations, custom branding, SLA | Large-scale deployments |
This model is quite different from eesel AI’s transparent pricing, which is based on AI interactions, not how many agents you have. This means you aren’t charged more for adding team members to collaborate. Your costs grow based on the value you’re getting from automation, which makes budgeting a lot more predictable.
Where Chatwoot falls short (and what to do about it)
While Chatwoot gives you a solid base for omnichannel communication, its built-in features can struggle with the demands of modern, AI-powered customer support. Here are the three biggest limitations to keep in mind.
Limited native AI and knowledge management
This is probably the most significant hurdle you’ll find in this Chatwoot overview. Its AI isn’t a core part of the platform; it’s an add-on that depends on Dialogflow. This means it can’t learn from your team’s most valuable asset: all your past support conversations. The unique details of your brand voice, common workarounds, and clever solutions your team has come up with are completely invisible to it.
On top of that, Chatwoot can’t connect to your internal knowledge sources. That goldmine of information sitting in Notion, Confluence, or your team’s Google Docs is stuck in a silo, unable to help solve customer problems automatically.
eesel AI was built from the ground up to fix this. It brings together all of your knowledge,past tickets, help centers, internal wikis, and over 100 other sources,to create an AI agent that gets your business from day one. It can even spot successfully resolved tickets and automatically draft new articles for your knowledge base, helping you plug information gaps before they cause more tickets.
The challenge of complex, custom workflows
These days, customers don’t just want answers; they want action. They expect you to be able to look up their order status, process a refund, or check on their subscription details right then and there.
With Chatwoot, any action beyond simple routing requires custom development. If you want a bot to pull order information from Shopify or create a bug report in Jira, you’ll need a developer to build it using Chatwoot’s API and webhooks. This can be a major roadblock for non-technical support managers who just want to build and tweak workflows themselves.
This is where eesel AI’s customizable AI Agent really shines. It gives support teams the power to build complex, custom actions on their own. Using a simple, no-code prompt editor, you can teach the AI to make API calls to your other systems, update ticket fields, tag conversations, or escalate to a human,no coding degree required.
| Feature | Chatwoot (Native/Basic Integration) | eesel AI |
|---|---|---|
| Knowledge Sources | Help Center only | Past tickets, Help Center, Confluence, Google Docs & 100+ more |
| Setup Time | Days to weeks (with developers) | Go live in minutes |
| Custom Actions | Requires coding (API/Webhooks) | No-code prompt editor |
| Performance Testing | None | Powerful simulation on historical tickets |
| Pricing Model | Per agent (penalizes team growth) | Per interaction (scales with value) |
The verdict: move beyond a simple inbox with intelligent automation
So, what’s the final verdict in this Chatwoot overview? It’s a capable, flexible tool for teams that need a unified inbox and have the technical skills to manage and customize it. Its open-source roots give you a level of control that many other platforms can’t offer.
This product walkthrough provides a visual tour of Chatwoot’s interface and core features.
But in 2025, a simple inbox often isn’t enough. To deliver great support efficiently as you grow, teams need a dedicated AI layer that automates resolutions, gives agents instant answers, and offers insights you can actually use. Think of it this way: a unified inbox helps you manage the flood of conversations, but an intelligent automation platform can reduce that flood to a trickle.
The real power of a tool like Chatwoot is unlocked when it’s paired with a purpose-built AI-powered customer support platform that works with the tools you already love.
Don’t just manage conversations,resolve them instantly. See how eesel AI can integrate with your favorite tools to automate your frontline support and empower your team. Sign up for a free trial and see it for yourself.
Chatwoot is an open-source customer support tool centralizing conversations from various channels into one dashboard. It’s ideal for startups and smaller businesses with technical staff who prioritize data ownership and deep customization.
Its core features include an omnichannel shared inbox for various communication channels, basic automation rules for routing and canned responses, and standard reporting tools for tracking team performance.
Chatwoot’s AI depends on integration with Google’s Dialogflow, a rule-based system requiring significant developer expertise. It doesn’t natively learn from past support tickets or connect to internal knowledge bases, making it less adaptive.
The self-hosted option gives you full control but requires your team to manage setup, maintenance, and updates. The cloud option is easier to manage, with Chatwoot handling infrastructure, but offers less control over data and environment.
Primary limitations include its limited native AI capabilities and reliance on complex integrations like Dialogflow, which requires developer time. Building custom, action-oriented workflows also often necessitates coding via Chatwoot’s API, rather than a no-code approach.
Yes, Chatwoot’s pricing is based on a per-agent, per-month fee. This model means that every new team member added increases your recurring costs, which can feel like a penalty for growing your support team.
