Community-skeleton vs Zammad
Community-skeleton and Zammad are both help desk software. Community-skeleton is open source under OSL-3.0, with 20k GitHub stars. Zammad is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 6k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Community-skeleton when
- You want a free PHP helpdesk and can live with a slower release pace.
- Pick Zammad when
- A support team wants a mature, self-hostable alternative to Zendesk or Freshdesk.
Side by side
UVdesk's open-source helpdesk: email ticketing, workflows, knowledge base and agent permissions on Symfony.
A web helpdesk that gathers email, chat, phone, social and form requests into tickets with SLAs, a knowledge base and reporting.
Releases are infrequent, community support is thin, and the vendor pushes its paid SaaS; star count overstates activity.
Self-hosting needs Rails, PostgreSQL, Redis and Elasticsearch; the paid hosted service is the easier path.
Usable
Production-ready
Self-hosted server and cloud service (both)
PHP, Symfony and MySQL
Ruby, Rails, Vue, PostgreSQL, Redis and Elasticsearch
Open source, OSL-3.0 (strong copyleft)
Open source, AGPL-3.0 (network copyleft)
Use inside your business is unrestricted, but anything you distribute that includes it must be released under the same license.
Use inside your business is unrestricted. If you change it and let customers use it over the internet, you must publish your changes.
20k GitHub stars
6k GitHub stars
Established: started 8 years ago, latest release v1.1.8.
Established: started 14 years ago, no tagged release yet.
Other comparisons
More help desk and ticketing software
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from each project's README and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.