4.5k stars · AGPL-3.0 for the core; several official modules are paid · 1.8.233 (2026-08-07) per ungh.cc/repos/freescout-help-desk/freescout/releases/latest · Track this in Scout
A shared inbox and help desk for a support email address, with no per-agent charge and no ticket limit.
▶Repo detailsthe review · specs · pros & cons · install
What it is
A PHP web application that collects mail from one or more addresses and presents it as a queue of conversations with assignment, notes, tags and canned replies. Extra channels — chat, WhatsApp, Telegram — arrive as separate modules.
What it is good for. The moment a support address stops being one person's problem. Until then a normal mail program is fine; after it, two people reply to the same customer within a minute of each other. It is also useful alone, because it keeps the whole history of one customer in one thread rather than scattered across a mailbox. There is no per-agent charge and no ticket limit, which is what separates it from the hosted services it copies: the cost of adding the fourth person is zero.
- Unlimited users and unlimited conversations with no licence fee, which is the whole reason it exists.
- Ordinary PHP and MySQL, so it runs on cheap shared hosting as well as on a container, and the requirements are lower than almost anything comparable.
- The core is AGPL-3.0 and genuinely open, and 33 languages ship with it.
- AGPL-3.0: if you modify it and offer it to other people as a service, you owe them your changes. Running it unmodified for your own support is unaffected.
- Many of the useful pieces — chat, several mailboxes, reporting — are paid modules. The core is free; the product people usually picture is not.
- It is PHP 7.4 to 8.x with a database and a web server to keep patched. That is one more thing to maintain forever.
chatwoot/chatwootIt also handles customer conversations across channels, but it is built around live chat first and email second, and it needs considerably more memory.
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abhinavxd/libredeskIt does the same job from a single downloaded file with no PHP at all, and it is much younger, so it has fewer features.
Track this in Scout- frappe/helpdesk
It also manages support tickets, but it is built on the Frappe framework and is aimed at ticket workflows rather than at a shared mailbox.
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git clone https://github.com/freescout-help-desk/freescout.git cd freescout # point a web server at the public/ folder, create an empty MySQL database, # then open the site in a browser and follow the installer
