Assembly Line

Community-skeleton vs Zoho TeamInbox

Community-skeleton and Zoho TeamInbox are both team inbox software. Community-skeleton is open source under OSL-3.0, with 20k GitHub stars. Zoho TeamInbox is a commercial product from Zoho.

Which to pick

Pick Community-skeleton when
You want a free PHP helpdesk and can live with a slower release pace.
Pick Zoho TeamInbox when
You already use Zoho apps and want a team inbox that fits beside them.

Side by side

What it does

UVdesk's open-source helpdesk: email ticketing, workflows, knowledge base and agent permissions on Symfony.

A shared inbox from Zoho with thread owners, internal discussions, snooze, templates, rules, shared drafts and a personal inbox for each user.

Watch out

Releases are infrequent, community support is thin, and the vendor pushes its paid SaaS; star count overstates activity.

Zoho shows a cost estimator rather than a plain price per user, and its feature page names no collision warning or reply-time targets.

Ready for

Usable

Production-ready

Runs as

Self-hosted server and cloud service

Cloud service and mobile app

Built with

PHP, Symfony and MySQL

Not published

Source code

Open source, OSL-3.0 (strong copyleft)

Closed source, sold by Zoho

What the license allows

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.

How widely known

20k GitHub stars

No Wikipedia article of its own

How established

Established: started 8 years ago, latest release v1.1.8.

Not known

Other comparisons

More team inboxes and shared inbox tools

Every team inbox product and project, ranked

Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.