Community-skeleton vs Help Scout
Community-skeleton and Help Scout are both team inbox software. Community-skeleton is open source under OSL-3.0, with 20k GitHub stars. Help Scout is a commercial product from Help Scout.
Which to pick
- Pick Community-skeleton when
- You want a free PHP helpdesk and can live with a slower release pace.
- Pick Help Scout when
- A small support team wants customer email handled cleanly without the overhead of a ticketing system.
Side by side
UVdesk's open-source helpdesk: email ticketing, workflows, knowledge base and agent permissions on Symfony.
Shared inbox helpdesk with a knowledge base, live chat beacon and simple customer profiles, designed to feel like email.
Releases are infrequent, community support is thin, and the vendor pushes its paid SaaS; star count overstates activity.
Phone support and complex routing are limited.
Usable
Production-ready
Self-hosted server and cloud service
Cloud service and mobile app
PHP, Symfony and MySQL
Not published
Open source, OSL-3.0 (strong copyleft)
Closed source, sold by Help Scout
Use inside your business is unrestricted, but anything you distribute that includes it must be released under the same license.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
20k GitHub stars
25 Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Established: started 8 years ago, latest release v1.1.8.
Not known
Other comparisons
More team inboxes and shared inbox tools
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.