Libredesk
Libredesk is a free and open-source, self-hosted customer support desk that puts email, live chat and WhatsApp conversations into one shared inbox. It is written in Go and ships as a single binary: the agent inbox, the website chat widget, the admin panel and the HTTP API all come out of the same process, with PostgreSQL and Redis as the only other moving parts. It is released under the AGPL-3.0 licence, and the current release is v2.8.0 (August 2026).
It is built as a lightweight, no-seat-fee alternative to Zendesk, Intercom and Freshdesk. There is no hosted edition and no paid tier — SLAs, the help centre, SSO and the AI assistant all ship in the same build you run on your own server. The project publishes a public demo instance at demo.libredesk.io if you want to look around before installing anything.
Key Features
- Omnichannel shared inbox — email, live chat and WhatsApp (through the Meta Cloud API) land in the same queue, so an agent works one list instead of three tools
- Embeddable live chat widget — real-time chat for your website with a pre-chat form, and every transcript becomes a conversation in the inbox
- Help centre — publish a searchable, multilingual knowledge base with full-text search and suggestions as visitors type, two layouts, your own theme, logo, CSS and JS, and an optional custom domain
- AI assistant and agent copilot — assistants answer live chat questions from the articles you allow them to use, search your knowledge base, call your own APIs and hand over to a human when they cannot help; copilot drafts replies, summarises conversations and suggests tags
- Automations and macros — tag, assign and route conversations with rules you define, and apply saved replies plus a set of conversation actions in one step
- SLA management — set response and resolution targets and get notified about conversations at risk of breaching them
- Auto assignment — distribute incoming conversations by agent capacity or your own criteria
- CSAT surveys and analytics — collect customer ratings and track response times, resolution rates and agent activity
- Inbox organisation — teams, tags, custom statuses, custom contact attributes, snoozing and full-text search
- Roles, SSO and API — per-action permissions, sign-in through Google, Microsoft or any OIDC provider, activity logs for agents and admins, plus HTTP/JSON APIs and webhooks for custom integrations
Why Use Libredesk?
Support conversations are some of the most sensitive data a small business holds — customer names, order numbers, screenshots and complaints — and hosted desks charge per agent per month to keep that on someone else’s infrastructure. Libredesk runs the same workflow on a server you control: one binary plus Postgres and Redis, no per-seat pricing, and no feature reserved for a paid tier. If you already run Docker, setup takes minutes and the migration path is a config file rather than a sales call.
Worth knowing before you commit: the project is young (started in 2024) and still moving quickly, it is a customer support desk rather than a full ITSM suite, and the AI features are labelled beta and need an OpenAI-compatible provider — including a local Ollama if you want to keep everything in-house.
Use Cases
- Support teams replacing a per-seat helpdesk (Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom) with a self-hosted system they own
- Small businesses that want one shared inbox for email and website chat without a monthly per-agent bill
- Companies that need a public knowledge base, SLA tracking and reporting on infrastructure they control
- Teams with data-residency or GDPR obligations who cannot put customer conversations in a third-party cloud
- Anyone wanting to trial a helpdesk properly — the public demo is a working instance rather than a guided sales tour
Alternatives
- Zammad — a mature, feature-rich open-source helpdesk covering email, chat, phone and social channels; the better fit when you need telephony and a longer track record.
- FreeScout — a deliberately lightweight, PHP-based shared inbox for teams that mostly handle email and want minimal moving parts.
- OTOBO — a full service-management platform with ITSM processes, when ticket workflow and process compliance matter more than a modern chat-first inbox.
- Request Tracker — the long-standing Perl-based ticketing system, built for complex workflows and heavy customisation rather than a quick setup.
- Zendesk, Intercom and Chatwoot — the hosted tools Libredesk is an alternative to: nothing to run and no maintenance, at the cost of per-agent pricing and your conversation history living on someone else’s servers.
Platform
Self-hosted — Linux, macOS, Windows and the BSDs (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD), as a single binary or a Docker container; PostgreSQL 13+ and Redis are required.
Licence
AGPL-3.0 (free and open source)