opendesk

opendesk is an open-source helpdesk from Mindroot Ltd that brings support email, live chat and a public help center into one shared inbox. It is available as a hosted cloud service and as a self-hosted install that runs the same Apache-2.0 code. Its built-in AI, Ollie, drafts replies, summarizes, triages, translates and answers chats from the knowledge base.

What It Is

opendesk turns email forwarded from any provider, a live chat widget and API-created requests into tickets in a single queue. Tickets carry status, priority, assignee, team, tags and SLA targets, with notes, merge, snooze and bulk edit. Replies leave from your own address through Google, Microsoft 365 or SMTP. Reports cover volume, response and resolution times, SLA breaches and CSAT by channel and agent.

How Ollie Works

Ollie answers chats from published knowledge base articles in the customer's language, drafts replies from the thread, saved replies and articles, and hands off to a person with a summary and tags. It can look up orders and accounts through connected tools over MCP and asks for approval before making changes. Actions are marked as Ollie. The site states that customer content is not used to train models and that admins can turn AI off for the workspace. It works with Anthropic or OpenAI-compatible providers, including local models.

Self-Hosting and API

Self-hosting runs from a single install command on a Linux server with Docker. The stack is one Go binary, an Elixir realtime gateway and Postgres behind Caddy, with no Redis or Kafka. The REST API is the same one the app uses, with scoped keys, idempotent creates, signed webhooks, a realtime socket with replay and an OpenAPI 3.1 spec. Integrations listed in the repository include Linear, GitHub, Jira, Sentry, Slack, Stripe and any MCP server.

Apps

Desktop apps are available for macOS, Windows and Linux, plus a native iPhone app with push notifications and keyboard-first shortcuts.