Updated 3 October 2026: Kommio now connects WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and Slack, has SLA policies, and the Chatwoot importer can leave out contacts who never wrote.

Chatwoot and Kommio are the closest pair in this series: both are conversation-first, both can be self-hosted, both cover email, website chat, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Telegram and SMS, and both help agents with AI; each runs an AI agent that answers customers from a knowledge base, Kommio’s on a free monthly AI allowance on Kommio Cloud or your own provider key. The differences are in how they are built and controlled. Chatwoot is open source and runs on Rails with Sidekiq and Redis. Kommio is a single Go binary on one Postgres database, with roles that go down to the field, SLA policies, and an API contract you can build a product on.

The feature-by-feature table, pricing checked on 20 October 2026, the migration path and a FAQ are on the Chatwoot alternative page.

Where Chatwoot is strong

Open source with an active community and a self-hosted edition.
LINE and a few other messaging channels Kommio does not connect, and WhatsApp through providers other than Meta’s Cloud API.
Captain, an AI assistant for agents and customers.

Where Kommio is different

One binary and one database to run instead of Rails, Sidekiq and Redis.
Roles with visibility scopes and field masking without an enterprise edition, extended to custom attributes and files you mark as ID, payment or other personal data, and an Access page that shows who sees what.
SLA policies by inbox and priority, assignment by skills and load, and reports with backlog, SLA attainment, staffing and satisfaction drivers, exportable to CSV, Excel and a Reports API.
A versioned API contract, idempotent writes and a generated client.
Reporting from maintained rollups rather than live counts over the conversation table.

Choose Chatwoot when

Open source is a hard requirement, or you need LINE or a WhatsApp provider other than Meta’s Cloud API.

Choose Kommio when

You want a lighter deployment, stricter access control, SLA policies and reports a support lead trusts, and an API you can build a product on.

Moving from Chatwoot

Kommio imports a whole Chatwoot account: people, teams, inboxes, contacts with their custom attributes, every conversation with its messages, private notes and attachments, labels as tags, canned responses, CSAT ratings, business hours, webhooks, the help center, and the macros and automation rules that map. Nothing is sent while it runs: no emails, replies, webhooks, rules or bots.

From the app. An administrator opens Settings › Import › Import from Chatwoot, connects with a Chatwoot access token, and runs a dry run that lists anything that cannot be mapped. The import then runs in the background, with no access to Chatwoot’s database needed. It works with Chatwoot Cloud and any Chatwoot that Kommio can reach over the internet. “Only contacts who contacted you” leaves out the contacts with no conversation and no label, which on a busy site with signed-in visitors is most of them; a skipped contact who writes later arrives with that conversation.
From the database. For very large accounts, or a Chatwoot on a private network, the same importer reads a copy of Chatwoot’s database or a pg_dump file, writes in bulk, and carries what Chatwoot’s API does not expose, such as each agent’s current password. On Kommio Cloud we run it for you.
Keep working in Chatwoot until you switch. Chatwoot stays the source of truth: a catch-up applies everything that changed there since the last run, deletions included, and lists any edit it overwrote in Kommio. What your team created in Kommio is never touched. A catch-up that would delete an unusual share of what was imported stops until you allow it.
Signed-in visitors keep their history. Chatwoot and Kommio sign a visitor’s identity the same way, so once you swap the snippet and the setUser call for Kommio.identify, returning customers see their past conversations.
Everything arrives safe. People arrive disabled, rules switched off and webhooks paused, email inboxes paused until you resume them, and the conversations of channels the importer does not reconnect (WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, LINE and the like) come over as read-only history with each contact’s channel id kept; you connect WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram as Kommio inboxes with your own Meta app at the switch.

The full process, with what moves and what does not, is in the migration guide.

How to evaluate the two

Run the importer’s dry run against your Chatwoot account first: it lists what would move and what cannot be mapped, without writing anything. Then import into a free workspace and compare the two deployments you would operate, Rails with Sidekiq and Redis against one binary and Postgres, and the reports your support lead reads each morning.

Kommio Cloud is free and you can create a workspace yourself. Write to [email protected] to plan a migration of a large account.

Kommio vs Chatwoot