Self-hosted Intercom alternatives
Chatwoot is the direct open-source equivalent of Intercom: live chat, email, WhatsApp, Instagram and Telegram in one inbox, with teams, canned responses, a help centre and AI reply suggestions. Self-hosted, it replaces per-agent pricing with a fixed monthly instance and keeps every transcript on infrastructure you control.
At a glance
| What it replaces | Licence | Hosted here from | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chatwoot | Intercom, Zendesk Chat, Crisp | MIT (community edition) | $13.99/mo |
| Rasa | Scripted support bots | Apache-2.0 (open source edition) | $18.99/mo |
| Botpress | Chatbot builders | MIT (open-source runtime) | $11.99/mo |
Two reasons teams leave hosted support desks
The first is arithmetic. Per-agent pricing grows with the team, and support teams grow exactly when the business is going well. A fixed instance does not.
The second is the data. Support transcripts are among the most sensitive records a company holds — they contain account details, complaints, and occasionally things a customer should not have pasted. Keeping them on infrastructure you control is a defensible position in a way that “our vendor is SOC 2” sometimes is not.
What Chatwoot actually gives you
One inbox across live chat, email, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Telegram. Teams and assignment rules, canned responses, labels, a public help centre, reporting, and a contact record that survives the conversation. The AI features — reply suggestions and conversation summaries — run against a model key you supply, so they cost provider rates rather than a per-seat AI upgrade.
Upstream recommends four cores and 4 GB as a working minimum. Plans here start there rather than below it, because a support desk that lags is worse than no support desk.
When you want a bot rather than an inbox
Rasa builds assistants from intents, entities and explicit dialogue policies. That determinism is the point: in regulated support, a bot that follows an approved flow beats one that improvises. Botpress sits between the two — a visual studio non-developers can use, with a runtime you host.
A common arrangement is Chatwoot as the inbox with one of these handling first-line questions and escalating to a human.
The verdict
For a like-for-like Intercom replacement, Chatwoot on a dedicated instance. Add Rasa or Botpress only if the deflection bot is a project in its own right — and point the AI features at your own model key so the conversation data and the inference bill both stay under your control.
Mentioned on this page
Chatwoot
An omnichannel support desk with AI replies, on your own infrastructure.
from $13.99/moDetails →
Rasa
A conversational AI framework for assistants that must behave predictably.
from $18.99/moDetails →
Botpress
A visual chatbot studio with an open runtime.
from $11.99/moDetails →
LiteLLM
One OpenAI-compatible endpoint in front of every model provider you use.
from $5.99/moDetails →Questions
Does Chatwoot support WhatsApp?
Can I migrate conversations from Intercom?
Do the AI features cost extra?
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