FreeScout vs Spike
FreeScout and Spike are both team inbox software. FreeScout is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 4.6k GitHub stars. Spike is a commercial product from Spike.
Which to pick
- Pick FreeScout when
- A small team wants Help Scout-style email support on cheap PHP hosting.
- Pick Spike when
- A small team already uses Spike and wants a basic shared inbox cheaply.
Side by side
A shared inbox and helpdesk in PHP, modelled on Help Scout, with many add-on modules for channels and features.
A chat-style email app whose team plans add shared inboxes with assignment, status labels and snooze.
Many useful features are paid modules, and the AGPL licence matters if you modify and expose it.
Its shared inbox pages list no internal notes on a message, no rules and no reports.
Production-ready
Usable
Self-hosted server
Cloud service, desktop app and mobile app
PHP, Laravel and MySQL
Not published
Open source, AGPL-3.0 (network copyleft)
Closed source, sold by Spike
Use inside your business is unrestricted. If you change it and let customers use it over the internet, you must publish your changes.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
4.6k GitHub stars
88 Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Established: started 8 years ago, latest release 1.8.249.
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.