Open-source helpdesk
Looking for an open-source, self-hosted helpdesk?
Dev teams rejecting per-agent SaaS pricing usually land on the same shortlist: Chatwoot, FreeScout, and Zammad. All three are real, actively maintained open-source projects that solve the pricing problem by letting you self-host for free. What they all still ask of you is the same thing: a server, updates, backups, and uptime — on you, not a vendor. Scitor solves the pricing problem a different way — no self-hosting, because GitHub already is the backend you're looking for.
The three you'll keep running into
Chatwoot
Live chat and multi-channel inbox
Self-hosted core is free; cloud plans from $0 (capped) to $99/agent/month as of Sep 2026.
Full comparisonFreeScout
Zendesk/Help Scout-style ticketing, PHP/MySQL stack
Free, open-source core with unlimited agents; optional paid marketplace modules.
Full comparisonZammad
Multi-channel (phone, chat, Telegram, WhatsApp) + native GitHub/GitLab integration
Free, open-source core; hosted plans from €9 to €27/agent/month, or paid support contracts for self-hosting, as of Sep 2026.
Full comparisonThe trade-off nobody states plainly
"Free and open source" describes the license, not the total cost. Self-hosting any of these three means you're responsible for the server it runs on: provisioning it, patching it, backing up its database, and keeping it online. That's a real, ongoing job — not a one-time setup step — and it's separate from whether the software itself costs money.
Scitor's answer: don't self-host anything
Scitor is a GitHub App. Inbound support email and web-form submissions become GitHub Issues in a repository you already have — no server to run, because the "self-hosted-feeling" backend is GitHub itself, which you're already trusting with your code. Pricing is $0 / $9 / $19/month flat. The honest trade: you get zero infrastructure, but also none of the channel breadth (human-staffed live chat, phone, Telegram/WhatsApp) that Chatwoot and Zammad offer, and none of the total data-location control that comes with genuinely running your own instance. (Scitor's Enterprise plan has an optional AI chat widget that answers from your docs, which is a different thing from a live-agent chat channel.) Scitor doesn't have an importer for any of the three, either — moving to Scitor means starting a fresh ticket queue, not migrating history out of whichever one you're running.
Evaluating this specifically as an open source maintainer? See Scitor for open source maintainers for the maintainer-specific case.
Questions people ask before choosing
- Do I need to self-host Chatwoot, FreeScout, or Zammad to avoid per-agent pricing?
- Not necessarily. Self-hosting gets you free software but real ongoing costs: a server, updates, backups, and uptime, all on you. Scitor is the third option — no self-hosting and no per-agent fee, because tickets live as GitHub Issues in a repo you already have.
- What happens to my data if I stop using Scitor?
- Your support conversations are GitHub Issues in your own repository — they don't live on our servers, and uninstalling the app doesn't touch them. Your full ticket history stays exactly where it is, in GitHub, with no export needed. Everything Scitor itself holds — attachments, CSAT responses, contact profiles, and usage metrics — is deleted when you uninstall the GitHub App, so download any attachments you need before you do. Full detail: scitor.io/security.
- Does Scitor support live chat like Chatwoot does?
- Not human-staffed live chat. Email and embeddable-web-form submissions become GitHub Issues — that's one path to a ticket. Scitor's Enterprise plan separately offers an optional AI chat widget that answers from your docs, which is a different thing from Chatwoot's live-agent chat. If real-time chat with a person is a requirement, a self-hosted Chatwoot instance (or a hosted live-chat tool) covers that in a way Scitor doesn't.
GitHub is already the backend you need
Takes under 5 minutes. Free tier available. No credit card required.