Community-skeleton vs Spike
Community-skeleton and Spike are both team inbox software. Community-skeleton is open source under OSL-3.0, with 20k GitHub stars. Spike is a commercial product from Spike.
Which to pick
- Pick Community-skeleton when
- You want a free PHP helpdesk and can live with a slower release pace.
- Pick Spike when
- A small team already uses Spike and wants a basic shared inbox cheaply.
Side by side
UVdesk's open-source helpdesk: email ticketing, workflows, knowledge base and agent permissions on Symfony.
A chat-style email app whose team plans add shared inboxes with assignment, status labels and snooze.
Releases are infrequent, community support is thin, and the vendor pushes its paid SaaS; star count overstates activity.
Its shared inbox pages list no internal notes on a message, no rules and no reports.
Usable (both)
Self-hosted server and cloud service
Cloud service, desktop app and mobile app
PHP, Symfony and MySQL
Not published
Open source, OSL-3.0 (strong copyleft)
Closed source, sold by Spike
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
88 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.