Is Chatwoot or Hiver cheaper?

Chatwoot starts at $0 (Community Edition self-hosted, or cloud Hacker tier); $19/agent/mo for cloud Startups billed annually (free plan available). Hiver starts at $25 per user per month (Growth, billed annually; $35 monthly) (free plan available).

Chatwoot vs Hiver

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

Editorial assessment

Hiver compared with Chatwoot

Chatwoot is open source and self-hostable, which is the answer when data residency or budget is the binding constraint, and its cloud tier undercuts Hiver's Growth plan. Hiver is commercial SaaS that requires no infrastructure and integrates natively with the mail client your team already uses. The trade is the usual one: Chatwoot costs less in licence fees and more in engineering time, and it cannot put a help desk inside Gmail. If you have an engineer who wants to own it, Chatwoot; if you do not, Hiver.

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 Hiver if

Small and mid-sized teams already standardised on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 whose support is email-led and whose biggest problem is coordination rather than volume. It suits support, finance, IT, and operations teams of roughly three to thirty people who need assignment, SLAs, and real reporting without asking anyone to abandon their inbox.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Chatwoot	Hiver
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)	$25 per user per month (Growth, billed annually; $35 monthly) (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.	Per-user subscription across three paid tiers, billed monthly or annually, with AI bundled into the seat price from Growth upward rather than metered per resolution. Seats are sold in fixed increments rather than one at a time.
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.	None currently advertised on Hiver's pricing page. Several third-party pricing trackers still list a free tier, which appears to be stale; treat the 7-day trial as the evaluation path and confirm at signup.
Free trial	15 days on cloud plans	7 days on the Elite tier, 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 already standardised on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 whose support is email-led and whose biggest problem is coordination rather than volume. It suits support, finance, IT, and operations teams of roughly three to thirty people who need assignment, SLAs, and real reporting without asking anyone to abandon their inbox.
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 working setup. Install the extension across the team, connect the shared mailboxes, and the sidebar appears in everyone's Gmail. This is the fastest meaningful deployment in the category precisely because there is no new interface to roll out.
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.	Close to zero for agents, which is the entire point. The only new concepts are assignment, status, and internal notes, all of which sit visibly in an interface people already know. The administrator has automation rules, SLA policies, and mailbox configuration to learn, which is an afternoon rather than a project.
Platforms	Web app, Self-hosted (Linux with PostgreSQL, Redis, S3-compatible storage), Cloud SaaS, iOS and Android apps, REST API	Gmail and Google Workspace browser extension, Outlook and Microsoft 365, Hiver Omni standalone web app, iOS and Android apps
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	SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, ISO 27001, HIPAA compliance support on the Elite tier
Founded	2017	2011
Headquarters	Distributed; Chatwoot Inc, with roots in Kerala, India and a Y Combinator (W21) background	San Jose, California, United States, with significant operations in Bangalore, India
Ownership	Venture-backed (early stage), with an MIT-licensed open-source core	Venture-backed, privately held. Operates as GrexIt, Inc. doing business as Hiver.

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.

Hiver

Strengths

Adoption is close to free. Agents keep working in Gmail or Outlook, which sidesteps the single biggest failure mode of help desk rollouts.
AI is bundled into the seat price from Growth upward with no per-resolution meter, so the monthly bill is genuinely fixed while competitors scale with volume.
Because Hiver operates on your existing mailboxes, evaluating it carries almost no switching risk: if you stop paying, your mail is exactly where it always was.
Analytics are strong for an inbox product: response time, resolution time, workload distribution, SLA compliance, and CSAT all reported properly.

Limitations

The seat increment structure is user-hostile. Two, then five, then multiples of five means teams routinely pay for one to four seats they do not use.
No light agent or read-only seat, so every engineer, contractor, or stakeholder who needs visibility costs a full licence.
It is an inbox, not a ticketing engine. There are no custom ticket fields, conditional forms, skills-based routing, or multi-brand help centers, and a growing support operation will hit that ceiling.
The knowledge base is functional but noticeably weaker than Zendesk's or Freshdesk's on theming, multi-brand support, and SEO control.

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.

Hiver

Per-user subscription across three paid tiers, billed monthly or annually, with AI bundled into the seat price from Growth upward rather than metered per resolution. Seats are sold in fixed increments rather than one at a time.

Growth$25
Pro$55
Elite$85

Hiver's value case is adoption and predictability rather than raw capability. You are paying so that nobody has to learn a new tool, and so that your support bill stays the same number every month regardless of volume. Both are worth real money. At $25 a seat with AI included, a five-seat team pays $125 a month for coordination, automation, analytics, and AI drafting, which is less than a single Zendesk Suite Professional seat plus Copilot. The weaknesses are structural: the seat increments overcharge teams whose headcount is not a multiple of five, there is no light agent option, API access costs $55 a seat, and the knowledge base and routing are noticeably thinner than a real help desk. If your support is email-led and your problem is coordination, this is excellent value. If your problem is volume, Hiver is the wrong shape and its bundled AI will not save you.

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 profile

Hiver

Hiver solves a real and underrated problem: help desks fail not because they lack features but because agents quietly keep working in Gmail. By putting assignment, SLAs, analytics, and AI inside the mail client people already use, Hiver gets adoption almost for free, and it is one of very few vendors in this category that has refused to attach a per-resolution meter to its AI. A five-seat team pays $125 a month at any volume, which is a genuinely differentiated offer in 2026. The reservations are concrete rather than philosophical: the two-then-five-then-fives seat structure overcharges most teams, there is no light agent seat, API access costs $55 per user, and the knowledge base and routing are thinner than a real ticketing platform. Buy Hiver if your support is email-led, your team is on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, and coordination rather than volume is your problem. If you need deflection at scale or a configurable ticket model, buy something else.

Read the full Hiver profile

Chatwoot profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Hiver last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.