Thoughts on a potential section/category for this?
Today the big players are proprietary services like Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom and many more.
Chatwoot and FreeScout (alternative to Help Scout) are excellent open source, self-hostable alternatives.
Worth also mentioning Chatterbox by Matrix, but it’s just a web widget and not an actual platform.
Interesting. At the moment we don’t really make recommendations on the business side of things, but that doesn’t mean we can’t. I’ll look into some of these options, although I wonder if this would be approaching the territory of becoming just a list of FOSS software. At the moment we kind of have a focus on personal privacy improvements, and although I believe the onus of providing strong privacy is mostly on the businesses rather than the users, that could almost be a whole separate website.
I think with cases like this, we should always take a step back and think about who Privacy Guides is for.
Like @jonah said, this could almost be another website. I don’t really think options like these really add any value to our core readers or the people we want to gear our resources towards.
It’s best to do some things well, than to try and do everything and bog down the website with entire sections that will be irrelevant to most of our readers.
I believe this is out of scope.
“Jack of all of trades, master of none”
I agree that it shouldn’t be added right now. Maybe if there becomes enough demand for it but i haven’t seen much if any requests for such software.
Good points, I agree. I just wanted to see what people thought about this type of software, especially as I’ve recently been seeing some and more open source projects (or startups) adopt Chatwoot which is a unique and fantastic option to have in that niche. Ultimately it comes down to what PG intends to be and whether it wants to take business solutions under its scope, but PG seems to be currently focused around and intended for the user, so software like this more belongs under more comprehensive ‘awesome’ lists and similar.