Chatwoot vs Crisp
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Both sides assessedChatwoot compared with Crisp
Crisp is the polished commercial alternative with a far richer widget (co-browsing, video calls, MagicType) and flat per-workspace pricing that stops scaling with headcount. Chatwoot is cheaper at the floor (free, self-hosted, unlimited agents) and the only one of the two that can put your data on your own server. Pick Crisp if you want it to work well with no operations burden; pick Chatwoot if data control or a zero licence budget is the requirement you cannot compromise.
Crisp compared with Chatwoot
Chatwoot is the open-source answer to the same problem: self-host under MIT for nothing, or pay $19 to $39 per agent in the cloud with Captain AI credits at $20 per 1,000. Crisp costs money from day one but needs no infrastructure and ships a far richer widget with co-browsing, MagicType, and in-chat video calls. Choose Chatwoot if data residency or a zero licence budget is non-negotiable and you have engineering capacity; choose Crisp if you would rather pay $95 a month and never think about Postgres.
Choose Chatwoot if
Technically capable teams that need data residency, source-code control, or a genuinely zero-cost support platform: EU and regulated companies with sovereignty requirements, agencies deploying per-client instances, and cost-constrained startups with an engineer willing to own a server.
Choose Crisp if
Small and mid-sized teams (roughly 3 to 25 agents) that want chat-led, multi-channel support with AI automation included, care more about a predictable monthly bill than about polish, and would rather buy one $95 workspace than ten $25 seats.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Chatwoot | Crisp |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Support | Support |
| Starting price | $0 (Community Edition self-hosted, or cloud Hacker tier); $19/agent/mo for cloud Startups billed annually (free plan available) | $45/mo flat (Mini, 4 seats included) (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Two parallel ladders: a per-agent cloud subscription (Hacker free, Startups, Business, Enterprise, billed annually) and a self-hosted ladder (Community Edition free under MIT, Premium Support, Enterprise Edition). Captain AI is metered by credits on both, with allowances by tier and overage sold per 1,000. | Flat monthly price per workspace across four tiers (Free, Mini, Essentials, Plus) with a block of seats included in each and additional agents at $10 per month, plus a bundled AI credit allowance per tier. Monthly or yearly billing; Enterprise is quoted. |
| Free plan | Two free options: cloud Hacker for up to 2 agents with 500 conversations a month, live chat only, and 30-day data retention; or self-hosted Community Edition, free forever with unlimited agents but no Captain AI, voice, custom branding, or SSO. | Free tier for 2 seats: basic shared inbox, chat widget, and mobile apps, with no AI credits included. |
| Free trial | 15 days on cloud plans | 14 days, all features, no credit card required |
| Best for | Technically capable teams that need data residency, source-code control, or a genuinely zero-cost support platform: EU and regulated companies with sovereignty requirements, agencies deploying per-client instances, and cost-constrained startups with an engineer willing to own a server. | Small and mid-sized teams (roughly 3 to 25 agents) that want chat-led, multi-channel support with AI automation included, care more about a predictable monthly bill than about polish, and would rather buy one $95 workspace than ten $25 seats. |
| Setup time | Cloud: minutes to a working inbox with a 15-day trial. Self-hosted: a competent engineer can have a Docker deployment running in a few hours, but a production-grade install with backups, monitoring, TLS, S3 storage, and an upgrade plan is realistically two to five days of work plus ongoing maintenance. | Under an hour for a live widget and a connected mailbox, especially through the Shopify or WordPress plugins. Adding WhatsApp and Instagram, writing the knowledge base, training the AI model, and building bot flows is more like one to two weeks, most of it content work. |
| Learning curve | Low for agents; the inbox behaves as expected. Moderate for administrators configuring automation rules, macros, SLA policies, and Captain AI. High for whoever owns a self-hosted deployment, since that person needs to be comfortable with Postgres, Redis, object storage, and version upgrades. | Low for agents, moderate for the person building bots. The drag-and-drop builder is approachable but the confidence thresholds, fallback paths, and training-source management need deliberate testing before you let a bot answer customers unsupervised. |
| Platforms | Web app, Self-hosted (Linux with PostgreSQL, Redis, S3-compatible storage), Cloud SaaS, iOS and Android apps, REST API | Web app, Windows and macOS desktop apps, iOS and Android apps, Chat widget in 50 languages, REST API, JavaScript and mobile SDKs |
| Compliance | SOC 2 Type II (cloud service), with documented personnel, development, testing, and cloud security practices, Encryption, audit logs, and role-based access controls, GDPR: self-hosting allows full control over data location, which is the practical route to residency compliance | GDPR handling as a French company operating under EU law, Formal certification evidence (for example a SOC 2 report or trust portal) is not prominently published on public pages |
| Founded | 2017 | 2015 |
| Headquarters | Distributed; Chatwoot Inc, with roots in Kerala, India and a Y Combinator (W21) background | Nantes, France (office opened 2018; remote-first, globally distributed team) |
| Ownership | Venture-backed (early stage), with an MIT-licensed open-source core | Bootstrapped, 100% founder-owned |
Strengths and limitations
Chatwoot
Strengths
- MIT-licensed source with 25,000+ GitHub stars and 300+ contributors, which means no vendor can take the product away from you, raise your price unilaterally, or sunset your deployment.
- Genuine self-hosting on modest infrastructure (4GB RAM, 2 CPU cores minimum) solves data residency and sovereignty requirements that most competitors answer only on a custom enterprise contract.
- Broader channel coverage than most paid rivals at this price: eleven-plus channels including WhatsApp Business API, Instagram, TikTok, Telegram, LINE, SMS, and native voice.
- Cloud Startups at $19 per agent undercuts nearly everything comparable while including all channels except voice, a help centre, and 300 Captain AI credits.
Limitations
- Self-hosting is free of licence cost, not free of cost. Running PostgreSQL, Redis, S3, upgrades, and backups is ongoing engineering work, and teams routinely underestimate it into a bad decision.
- Captain AI is entirely excluded from the free Community Edition, so the open-source story stops precisely at the feature most teams now want.
- Captain credit consumption per action is not published, making the included 300 to 800 credit allowances difficult to translate into an expected number of automated conversations.
- SSO and SAML sit at $99 per agent on both ladders, a jump from $39 that is out of proportion to the feature for mid-sized teams.
Crisp
Strengths
- Flat workspace pricing with included seat blocks, which breaks the per-agent cost curve that makes support software expensive as a team grows.
- AI is bundled as credits rather than metered per resolution, so successful deflection lowers your cost per conversation instead of raising your bill.
- The widget is the most feature-dense at this price: co-browsing, video and audio calls with screen sharing, MagicType, rich media, and 50 languages.
- Genuinely broad scope for one subscription: inbox, chat, bot builder, knowledge base, CRM, campaigns, and analytics, where competitors sell several of those separately.
Limitations
- AI credit consumption is published only as approximate dollar equivalents and conversation counts, which is friendlier than per-resolution pricing but harder to forecast precisely or audit after the fact.
- The free tier has no AI credits and only 2 seats, so it is not a realistic long-term home the way Chatwoot's or Tidio's free plans can be.
- A team of roughly 20 to 30 people cannot match the documentation, help content, or support responsiveness of vendors ten times the size, and it shows.
- Enterprise compliance evidence is thin on public pages: no prominently published SOC 2 report, certification portal, or data-residency options, which will stall a formal security review.
Pricing compared
Chatwoot
Two parallel ladders: a per-agent cloud subscription (Hacker free, Startups, Business, Enterprise, billed annually) and a self-hosted ladder (Community Edition free under MIT, Premium Support, Enterprise Edition). Captain AI is metered by credits on both, with allowances by tier and overage sold per 1,000.
- Hacker (cloud)$0
- Startups (cloud)$19
- Business (cloud)$39
- Enterprise (cloud)$99
- Community Edition (self-hosted)$0
- Premium Support (self-hosted)$19
- Enterprise Edition (self-hosted)$99
Chatwoot has the best floor and a competitive middle. Community Edition at zero licence cost with unlimited agents is unmatched by any proprietary product here, and cloud Startups at $19 per agent undercuts Help Scout's $21 while including WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, and a help centre. Captain AI at $20 per 1,000 credits is far more forgiving than $0.75 per resolution once volume climbs. The honest accounting is that free self-hosting has a labour cost that most teams undercount: Postgres, Redis, S3, upgrades, backups, and the incident at 2am are real work, and one engineer-day a month at market rates already exceeds a $19 cloud seat. Chatwoot is outstanding value if data control is a requirement you would otherwise pay a premium for, and merely good value if you were only chasing a lower invoice.
Crisp
Flat monthly price per workspace across four tiers (Free, Mini, Essentials, Plus) with a block of seats included in each and additional agents at $10 per month, plus a bundled AI credit allowance per tier. Monthly or yearly billing; Enterprise is quoted.
- Free$0
- Mini$45
- Essentials$95
- Plus$295
- EnterpriseCustom
On raw capability per dollar Crisp is the best value in this category and it is not particularly close. Essentials at $95 a month covers ten seats, every channel, a knowledge base, a trained AI bot, and campaigns; the equivalent team on a per-seat platform with per-resolution AI would spend three to five times that. The bundled AI credits are the sharpest contrast: Help Scout charges $0.75 for every AI resolution while Crisp includes roughly 450 automated conversations in the $95 tier. What you trade away is polish, documentation depth, enterprise compliance evidence, and the reassurance of a large vendor. If your evaluation is a spreadsheet, Crisp wins; if it is a procurement review, it may not survive one.
Editorial verdict on each
Chatwoot
Chatwoot is the only product in this category that lets you own the software outright, and for teams with a data-residency mandate or a genuinely zero software budget that single fact settles the decision. The channel breadth is better than most paid rivals, the cloud pricing undercuts them, Captain AI is metered by credits rather than punished per resolution, and SOC 2 Type II on the cloud service is more formal assurance than several better-funded competitors publish. Be honest about two things before choosing it. Self-hosting has a labour cost that reliably exceeds a $19 cloud seat once you count the maintenance, and the free Community Edition deliberately excludes Captain AI, so the open-source pitch stops exactly where the modern feature set begins. Choose it for control, not because free sounds cheaper than $19.
Read the full Chatwoot profileCrisp
Crisp is the value play in customer support software, and its flat per-workspace pricing with bundled AI credits looks better every quarter that competitors push further into per-resolution billing. The widget is genuinely the best in this price range, the scope covers products that other vendors sell separately, and being bootstrapped means the pricing is unlikely to be re-engineered against you. The costs are real too: thin compliance evidence, a support and documentation operation sized for a 25-person company, and a steep jump to the $295 tier for features small teams reasonably expect. If you are a chat-led team of five to twenty who will never face a formal security review, Crisp is the shortlist leader. If your buyer is a CISO, look at Help Scout instead.
Read the full Crisp profileChatwoot profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Crisp last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.