Chatwoot versus Hubspot

Chatwoot is a Free Open Source Software and SaaS live chat platform. You can choose to have your live chat hosted by them or opt for self-hosting. The installation process of a self-hosted live chat has been simplified with their one-click install guides for cloud providers like AWS, DigitalOcean, and Heroku or with deployment options like Docker, Linux VM (Ubuntu 20.04 LTS), or the Chatwoot CTL.

Open Source

Chatwoot’s Community Edition is published under the MIT license. You can find SDK implementations, review the code or contribute to the projects in the Chatwoot repository. The Enterprise Edition is available under a proprietary license. You can still audit the source code. However, modification is not allowed.

Hubspot has a wide range of tools and products for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service. They offer 5 Hubs for each respective suite.

The idea for Hubspot was conceived in 2004 by two graduate students at MIT who saw the need for a more helpful, less interruptive, customer service platform. Nowadays, Hubspot has over 140,000 customers in 120+ countries and can be seen as one of Salesforce’s main competitors.

Hubspot’s products and plans are sorted into Hubs for Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, CMS, and Operations. You can combine the Hubs to create your own bundle or choose the complete Hubspot suite. Their Live Chat is included in the Free Tools plan of the Service Hub. This suite also includes the free features of their CRM Hub.

In 2017 Hubspot acquired a company named Motion.ai, a company purely focused on creating the best chatbots. Motion.ai is now known as Hubspot’s Chatbot Builder and is included in their CRM hub.

The Service Hub has integration options for more than 50 apps, most of which incur an additional fee.