The real question here is who runs the server

Chatwoot is an open source customer support platform, and the licence is the fact that changes everything else. The repository footer states that Chatwoot is released under the MIT License, and the site describes the product as the modern, open source, self hosted customer support platform. The deployment routes published on the repository include Docker images, a one click Heroku button and a one click Kubernetes deployment on DigitalOcean.

There are two separate price lists. The self hosted page lists Community Edition at $0 an agent a month, marked free forever, with the note that you host it on your own infrastructure. Above it sit Premium Support at $19 an agent a month billed annually and Enterprise Edition at $99 an agent a month billed annually. Custom branding is listed as not included in Community Edition and included in both paid self hosted tiers.

The cloud list is per agent. Hacker is $0 an agent a month for up to two agents, with 500 conversations a month, live chat only and 30 days of retention. Startups is $19 billed annually with every channel and 300 Captain AI credits, Business is $39 with 500 credits, and Enterprise is $99 with 800 credits, single sign on, audit logs and Remove Branding. Further Captain usage is listed at $20 per 1,000 credits.

Captain AI is described on their own page as learning from your help center, past conversations and FAQs, and as handing off to human agents when needed. The channels listed run to website live chat, email, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, TikTok, SMS, voice, Telegram and LINE. Every figure above is what Chatwoot published on the checked date across those two pricing pages. Prices move, so read both of theirs and ours before treating any of it as current.

Written to be used rather than to be waved at. If any of these describe you, this is the wrong product and the rest of the page will not change that.

• You can run a server, or you can pay somebody who can. Community Edition is published at $0 an agent a month and marked free forever, and the repository names the MIT License. If that describes you, self host Chatwoot and stop reading this page. It is a larger product than this one and the software itself costs nothing.
• You want the source. Nothing here is readable, forkable or auditable by you. With Chatwoot you can read every line, patch what annoys you, and keep running the thing whatever happens to the company that wrote it. That is not a small thing to hand over to a small vendor.
• You run an open source project. Their pricing page states that the Startups plan is offered free of charge for open source projects, on request by email, which is a better deal than anything on our list.
• You need the channels and a queue behind them. Website chat, email, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, TikTok, SMS, voice, Telegram and LINE all land in a shared inbox with teams, automation and campaigns around it. This answers on one website and hands off by email.
• Your headcount is small and stable. Two people on the cloud Startups tier is $38 a month billed annually with unlimited conversations and every channel, which is a great deal of product for the money if you genuinely have two people.

• There is nothing to operate. No server, no upgrade to apply, no backup to check, no outage that belongs to you. That is the entire trade this page is about: you pay a monthly fee instead of paying attention.
• Nobody is priced per agent, because there are no agents. Free at $0, Starter at $29 a month, Growth at $99, Agency at $299, and adding a colleague does not add a line to the invoice.
• Taking our name off the widget is part of every paid tier. On their published lists, Remove Branding sits on cloud Enterprise at $99 an agent a month, and custom branding is excluded from Community Edition.
• Answers are confined to what you indexed, each one carries numbered citations back to the passage it used, and below a match threshold you set the assistant returns your own fallback wording without reaching the model at all.
• Getting started is a script tag plus either a crawl of your own site or a folder of uploaded files. There is nothing to deploy first and no help centre to write before the assistant has anything to say.

Read off their own site on that date, quoted narrowly. Prices and packaging in this category change often, so treat this as a snapshot and check both before you decide.

Listing this is more useful than filling it in. Every line here is something that was not clearly published, or was behind a sign-up.

• What one Captain AI credit buys, in replies or in conversations, was not defined on the pages read, so the credit allowances above cannot be turned into a number of answers.
• Whether the enterprise only features, Remove Branding among them, fall under the MIT licence named on the repository or under separate terms was not established from the pages read.
• Monthly rather than annual billing figures for the cloud tiers were not shown beside the annual ones.

Should I just self host Chatwoot?

If you can run and maintain a server, probably yes, and we would rather say it plainly than sell around it. Community Edition is published at $0 an agent a month and the repository names the MIT License. Come back if the maintenance turns out to cost more than the licence saved.

Is this open source as well?

No. You cannot read it, fork it or audit it, and that is a genuine disadvantage next to Chatwoot. What you get in exchange is that nobody at your end ever has to patch anything.

Can it run a shared inbox for a team?

No. There is no inbox, no queue, no assignment and no agent seats of any kind. When a visitor asks for a person it collects a name, an email and a message, and emails that to an address you nominate.

Does it answer on WhatsApp or Instagram the way Chatwoot does?

No. Your own website and nowhere else. No messaging channel, no social, no SMS, no voice.