Assembly Line

Chatwoot vs Spike

Chatwoot and Spike are both team inbox software. Chatwoot is open source under a license set out in its repository, with 39k GitHub stars. Spike is a commercial product from Spike.

Which to pick

Pick Chatwoot when
You want to self-host a shared inbox, especially one that handles WhatsApp or chat beside email.
Pick Spike when
A small team already uses Spike and wants a basic shared inbox cheaply.

Side by side

What it does

A customer messaging inbox for email, website chat, WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS and social, with assignment, private notes, collision warnings, canned responses, rules, reports, contact profiles and mobile apps.

A chat-style email app whose team plans add shared inboxes with assignment, status labels and snooze.

Watch out

Reply-time policies are in the paid Enterprise edition, and the chat-style screen handles long email threads less naturally than an email client.

Its shared inbox pages list no internal notes on a message, no rules and no reports.

Ready for

Production-ready

Usable

Runs as

Self-hosted server, cloud service and mobile app

Cloud service, desktop app and mobile app

Built with

Ruby, Rails, Vue, PostgreSQL and Redis

Not published

Source code

Open source, license unclear on GitHub

Closed source, sold by Spike

What the license allows

GitHub could not read the license. Check it in the repository before reusing any code.

Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.

How widely known

39k GitHub stars

88 Wikipedia readers a month on phones

How established

Established: started 7 years ago, latest release v4.19.1.

Not known

Other comparisons

More team inboxes and shared inbox tools

Every team inbox product and project, ranked

Both sides were judged on 2026-11-06 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.