Open-Source HubSpot Service Hub Alternatives: Self-Hosted Help Desks With Your Customer Data Attached
HubSpot Service Hub is a help desk built on top of a CRM: every ticket, chat and survey sits next to the contact's deals and marketing emails. That is its strength, and also why leaving it is harder than leaving a plain ticket tool. You need a new home for tickets and a plan for the customer records behind them. This guide lists open-source help desks and suites that can take over, sorted by where your customer data lives. We read each project's licence on its official repository and checked its latest release on 9 November 2026; abandoned projects and tools that are not really open source are listed separately.
Quick answer: if you want help desk and CRM in one open-source system, use Frappe Helpdesk with Frappe CRM, Odoo Community with the OCA Helpdesk modules, or SuiteCRM. If you only need to replace the help desk, Zammad is the closest full match, FreeScout the lightest, Chatwoot or Libredesk the best for live chat and WhatsApp, and osTicket the simplest. For IT and service-management teams, look at Request Tracker, Znuny or OTOBO.
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What HubSpot Service Hub Includes and Costs in 2027
HubSpot no longer sells Service Hub on a separate price list: its service pricing page now opens one plan set for sales, marketing and service together. In the default view we saw on 9 November 2026 (euros from our Netherlands location, billed annually), Free costs €0 for up to 2 users and includes the CRM, Breeze Assistant and routing of incoming tickets to the right team. Starter was shown at €7 per seat a month as a limited-time 65% discount, for up to 10 users, and adds chat with website visitors. Professional costs €90 per seat a month and is where the real help desk starts: the Help Desk workspace, the AI Customer agent, a knowledge base (up to 100 knowledge bases and 10,000 articles), SLAs and NPS, CES and CSAT surveys. Enterprise costs €175 per seat a month. Paid plans also include monthly HubSpot Credits (5,000, 10,000 or 15,000) that AI agents and some features use up.
The Service Hub product page describes it as AI-powered, omni-channel and connected to marketing and sales data, with a help desk workspace, knowledge base, customer portal, Customer Agent and a Knowledge Base Agent in beta, plus a 14-day free trial. The catch for a small team: the help desk, knowledge base and AI agent all sit in Professional, so a five-person support team pays for five Professional seats. An open-source help desk costs nothing per agent; you pay for a server and someone's time instead.
Open-Source HubSpot Service Hub Alternatives Compared
Sources: each project's official website, licence file and GitHub releases, checked 9 November 2026. Self-hosting has no licence fee, but servers, backups and updates cost money and time.
Help Desks Closest to Service Hub
1. Zammad: the most complete open-source help desk
Zammad covers most of what Service Hub Professional does: tickets from email, web forms and SMS, plus chat, Telegram, Facebook and WhatsApp on higher plans, a knowledge base for agents and customers, ticket templates, full-text search and a REST API. You can host it yourself for free or let Zammad host it in Germany; the Zammad pricing page lists hosted plans from €7 per agent a month (Starter, up to 5 agents), with the knowledge base from the Professional plan and a multilingual one in Plus. AI features such as ticket summaries are optional and, on hosted plans, cost €0.03 per AI call. The code is AGPL-3.0 on GitHub; version 7.2.2 was tagged on 8 October 2026 and 7.4 was already in alpha in November. Zammad keeps users and organisations but is not a CRM, so most teams pair it with one.
2. FreeScout: a light shared inbox with an optional CRM module
FreeScout calls itself a free self-hosted Zendesk and Help Scout alternative. The core app gives you unlimited agents, mailboxes and tickets, and brings email, WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook, Slack and live chat into one inbox. It is a PHP and MySQL app, so it even runs on shared hosting. Extra features come as modules: a Customers Management (CRM) module adds custom customer fields and CSV import and export, and other modules add a knowledge base, an end-user portal, workflows and SLAs. Paid modules are open source too (AGPL-3.0) and come with a lifetime licence per installation, while the AI Integration module is free: it drafts and summarises replies with OpenAI, Claude, Gemini or a local model through Ollama. The FreeScout repository is AGPL-3.0, and release 1.8.250 came out on 7 November 2026.
Help Desk and CRM in One Open-Source System
3. Frappe Helpdesk and Frappe CRM: the closest open-source match to HubSpot's model
Frappe Helpdesk promises "unlimited agents" and is open source: email becomes tickets, assignment rules route them, SLAs show what is overdue, saved replies speed up answers and a public knowledge base lets customers help themselves. Frappe does not charge per agent; managed hosting on Frappe Cloud starts at $5 a month. What makes it a HubSpot-style setup is the rest of the family: Frappe CRM is a free and open-source CRM for leads and deals, and ERPNext adds accounting and inventory, all on the same framework. Licences and releases: Helpdesk AGPL-3.0, v16.1.0 on 4 November 2026; Frappe CRM AGPL-3.0, v16.0.2 on 5 November 2026; ERPNext GPL-3.0, v16.54.0 on 6 November 2026.
4. Odoo Community with the OCA Helpdesk modules: an all-in-one suite, with a catch
Odoo's own Helpdesk app is not open source. The Odoo editions comparison marks Helpdesk and Knowledge as Enterprise (licensed) only, while CRM, Live Chat and Discuss are part of the open-source Community edition, which is published under LGPLv3. The gap is filled by the Odoo Community Association: its OCA Helpdesk repository (AGPL-3.0) contains helpdesk_mgmt plus add-ons that link tickets to CRM, live chat, the customer portal, ratings, projects and sales. The repository was still being updated on 9 November 2026. This route suits founders who also want Odoo for invoicing, inventory or a website, and who have someone comfortable installing community modules.
5. SuiteCRM: a CRM with a built-in case desk
SuiteCRM is an open-source CRM for sales, marketing and service. Its Cases module records customer help requests, lets you assign and close them, keeps a threaded history that is emailed to the related contacts (internal notes stay private), and can create cases automatically from a shared support inbox; a knowledge base and an optional customer portal sit in the same customer-service section. The SuiteCRM 8 repository is AGPL-3.0, and v8.10.2 came out on 31 July 2026. Pick it when the CRM matters more than the help desk: the case screens are plainer than Zammad or Frappe Helpdesk.
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Live Chat, WhatsApp and Simple Ticketing
6. Chatwoot: an omnichannel inbox to replace HubSpot's chat and tickets
Chatwoot brings website chat, email, WhatsApp and social messages into one inbox, with contacts, a help centre and an AI agent called Captain. Its code is MIT-licensed outside an enterprise folder, and v4.19.1 came out on 24 October 2026. The self-hosted plans page lists the Community Edition at $0, free forever, but without Captain AI, SLA policies or SSO; Premium Support at $19 per agent a month adds them. In the cloud, the Chatwoot pricing page shows a free Hacker plan for up to 2 agents and 500 conversations a month (no help centre or AI), and Startups at $19 per agent a month with 300 Captain AI credits.
7. osTicket: plain email ticketing that just works
osTicket is one of the oldest open-source help desks: emails and web forms become tickets, with filters that route them, canned responses, SLA plans, a customer portal and a knowledge base for self-service. It is GPL-2.0, and v1.18.4 was released on GitHub on 17 June 2026. The team is working on osTicket 2.0, rebuilt from the ground up with a modern interface, but has not given a release date. A paid cloud-hosted version is available if you do not want to host it.
8. Request Tracker: ticketing for technical teams, now with AI
Request Tracker (RT), from Best Practical, is open-source ticketing used by IT, security and operations teams, self-hosted or in RT's cloud (14-day trial). RT now has built-in AI features (suggested replies, ticket summaries, sentiment detection and smart routing) and an RT MCP Server that lets Claude or other AI assistants query and act on tickets. It is GPL-2.0, and rt-6.0.4 came out on GitHub on 29 October 2026. It is powerful but less friendly for a small customer-facing team.
9. Libredesk: a modern inbox with a free AI assistant
Libredesk is a newer self-hosted help desk that ships as a single binary. It combines live chat, email and WhatsApp in one inbox, adds a help centre, and includes an AI assistant that answers chats from your knowledge base and hands off to a person when it cannot help. It is AGPL-3.0, free and self-hosted, and v2.9.2 came out on GitHub on 31 October 2026. Being young, it has fewer integrations than Zammad or Chatwoot.
10. UVdesk: ecommerce support, with slow releases
UVdesk is an open-source help desk aimed at ecommerce and marketplaces, with multichannel ticketing, a knowledge base, workflows and a form builder. Its community edition is OSL-3.0. Code was still pushed in October 2026, but the last release, v1.1.8, dates from 19 September 2025, so test it carefully before you rely on it.
11. Znuny and OTOBO: the OTRS successors for service management
When OTRS ended its free Community Edition, two forks took over. Znuny maintains the OTRS Community Edition line with long-term support; versions 7.3.8 and LTS 6.5.26 both came out on 14 October 2026 (GPL-3.0). OTOBO is a "100% open source" service management platform for IT, customer and enterprise service; its website announces OTOBO 11.1, and the 11.1.1 tag appeared on GitHub on 26 October 2026 (GPL-3.0). Both suit teams with ITIL-style processes more than a startup's first support inbox.
Discontinued, Changed or Not Really Open Source
The 2025 version of this article listed ten tools. osTicket, UVdesk, SuiteCRM and FreeScout stay. Here is what happened to the rest, plus names you will meet in other lists:
- Odoo: still listed, but its Helpdesk app is Enterprise only; the open-source route is Odoo Community plus the OCA modules (item 4).
- ERPNext: active and GPL-3.0; its help desk now lives in the separate Frappe Helpdesk app, so we merged it into item 3.
- Mautic: active (GPL-3.0, 7.2.2 on 26 October 2026), but it is marketing automation, not a help desk. Use it next to one of the tools above if you also want to replace HubSpot Marketing Hub.
- erxes: active, but its licence adds a clause to the AGPLv3 that forbids hosting erxes as a competing SaaS, and its enterprise plugins have their own licence, so it is not plain open source.
- HelpDeskZ: GPLv2, but its last release, 2.0.2, dates from March 2021 and the code has not changed since 2023. Removed.
- Liberum Help Desk: we found no maintained release. Removed.
- Helpy: MIT, but its last release, 2.8.0, dates from February 2020. Not recommended.
- Peppermint: its GitHub repository is archived; the last release was 0.5.5 in November 2024.
Which Open-Source Service Hub Alternative Should You Choose?
- You want help desk and CRM in one place, like HubSpot: Frappe Helpdesk with Frappe CRM.
- You also want invoicing, inventory or a website: Odoo Community with the OCA Helpdesk modules.
- Your sales team lives in the CRM and support is smaller: SuiteCRM with Cases.
- You want the most complete stand-alone help desk: Zammad.
- You are 1 to 5 people answering email: FreeScout or osTicket.
- Most questions arrive by chat or WhatsApp: Chatwoot, or Libredesk if you want a free AI assistant.
- You run IT or internal service desks: Request Tracker, Znuny or OTOBO.
- You want to keep HubSpot's free CRM: run any of these help desks next to it and sync contacts through an integration or automation tool.
How Founders Replace HubSpot Service Hub With Open-Source Tools
The first decision is not the help desk but the customer records. Some founders keep HubSpot's free CRM and only move support; others move both to Frappe CRM, Odoo, SuiteCRM or Twenty, an open-source CRM (AGPLv3, with a few files under a commercial licence; v2.56.1 came out on 5 November 2026). Then import a sample of tickets, rebuild routing, SLAs and saved replies, and switch your support address and chat widget at the end of a billing period. Before you move, test what you really need with the 30-day validation sprint.
Comparing help desks from another angle? Our free HubSpot Service Hub alternatives cover hosted tools with free plans, the open-source Zendesk alternatives explain how to move tickets out of a help desk, the open-source Freshdesk alternatives compare AI features, and the open-source Zendesk AI alternatives focus on AI agents and chatbots. If you do not want to host anything, start with the free Zendesk alternatives.
For live chat, read the open-source Intercom alternatives and our comparisons Intercom vs Zendesk, Tidio vs Zendesk, Zendesk vs Olark, Olark vs LiveChat and Olark vs Intercom. Leaving the rest of HubSpot too? See HubSpot vs ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp vs ActiveCampaign, the open-source Mailchimp alternatives and the open-source Salesforce Einstein alternatives for AI in an open-source CRM.
To connect the help desk to the rest of your stack, use the open-source Zapier alternatives; to build internal support dashboards, the open-source Retool alternatives and open-source Airtable alternatives; and for an internal knowledge base, the open-source Notion alternatives. To run your own AI model for reply drafts, start with the open-source ChatGPT alternatives.
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FAQ About Open-Source HubSpot Service Hub Alternatives
Is HubSpot Service Hub open source?
No. Service Hub is proprietary HubSpot software sold as a subscription. Open-source alternatives such as Zammad, FreeScout, Frappe Helpdesk, SuiteCRM and Chatwoot can be downloaded, self-hosted and changed.
How much does HubSpot Service Hub cost in 2027?
When we checked on 9 November 2026, HubSpot's pricing page (euros, billed annually) showed Free at €0 for up to 2 users, Starter at €7 per seat a month as a limited-time discount, Professional at €90 and Enterprise at €175 per seat a month. The help desk workspace, knowledge base and Customer agent are in Professional.
What is the best open-source alternative to HubSpot Service Hub?
For help desk plus CRM in one system, Frappe Helpdesk with Frappe CRM. For the most complete stand-alone help desk, Zammad. For a small team answering email, FreeScout. For chat and WhatsApp, Chatwoot or Libredesk.
Is there an open-source help desk with a built-in CRM?
Yes. Frappe Helpdesk works with Frappe CRM and ERPNext, Odoo Community has a CRM and community helpdesk modules from the OCA, and SuiteCRM is a CRM with a Cases module. FreeScout sells a CRM module for customer fields.
Is Odoo Helpdesk open source?
No. Odoo's editions page lists Helpdesk as an Enterprise-only app. Odoo Community (LGPLv3) includes CRM and Live Chat, and the OCA Helpdesk modules (AGPL-3.0) add ticketing to Community.
Can I keep HubSpot's free CRM and use an open-source help desk?
Yes. HubSpot Free stays €0 for up to 2 users. Run Zammad, FreeScout or Chatwoot for tickets and sync contacts with an integration or an automation tool.
Which open-source help desk has AI like HubSpot's Customer agent?
Libredesk includes a free AI assistant that answers chats from your knowledge base, FreeScout's free AI module drafts and summarises replies, Request Tracker has built-in AI and an MCP server, Zammad offers optional AI features, and Chatwoot's Captain AI comes with its paid plans.
Is erxes open source?
Only partly. Its licence is AGPLv3 with an extra clause that forbids hosting erxes as a competing SaaS, and its enterprise plugins have a separate licence, so it does not meet the usual open-source definition.
What does self-hosting a help desk cost?
No licence fee, but you pay for a server, backups, email delivery and someone's time for updates and security. Zammad, Frappe and Chatwoot also sell hosted plans if that becomes a burden.
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About the Author
Violetta Bonenkamp, also known as MeanCEO, is an experienced startup founder with an impressive educational background including an MBA and four other higher education degrees. She has over 20 years of work experience across multiple countries, including 5 years as a solopreneur and serial entrepreneur. Throughout her startup experience she has applied for multiple startup grants at the EU level, in the Netherlands and Malta, and her startups received quite a few of those. She’s been living, studying and working in many countries around the globe and her extensive multicultural experience has influenced her immensely.
