FreeScout
FreeScout is a free, self-hosted help desk and shared mailbox built as an open-source alternative to Zendesk and Help Scout. It focuses on email-based customer support, letting a whole team reply to one mailbox from a single web interface with customer histories, notes, and canned responses.
Key Features
- Shared inbox — Multiple agents manage the same email mailbox without conflicts or duplication
- Email integration — IMAP and SMTP support for any provider, with real-time fetching and sending
- Web forms — Embeddable contact forms that convert website enquiries directly into conversations
- Customer profiles — Full conversation history, contact details, and notes for every customer
- Canned responses — Reusable message templates to answer common questions quickly
- Collision detection — See which of your team is already replying to a conversation to avoid double replies
- Custom fields and modules — Extend conversations with custom data and enable optional modules
- Multi-language — Localised interface with support for dozens of languages
Why Use FreeScout?
FreeScout is genuinely free with no per-agent pricing, unlike the SaaS tools it replaces. It runs on modest hardware or shared hosting, is GDPR-friendly because you host the data yourself, and its clean, fast interface takes little time for agents to learn.
Use Cases
- Small businesses that want a professional shared mailbox without subscription costs
- Teams migrating from Zendesk or Help Scout to a self-hosted alternative
- Organisations with strict data-privacy requirements that need on-premise support software
Platform
Web-based (self-hosted) · Linux · Docker · Shared hosting (PHP)
Licence
AGPL-3.0