Helpdock — Open-Source Helpdesk & Support Platform

Helpdock — Open-Source Customer Support Platform

Overview

Helpdock is an open-source customer support platform that brings ticketing, a help center, a live chat widget and grounded AI into one self-hosted deploy that serves many brands. It is built as a self-hosted alternative to Zoho Desk, Zendesk and Freshdesk.

Status: Helpdock is pre-1.0 and in active development. Milestones M0 to M8 have shipped. M9 (security hardening and the 1.0 release) and M10 (WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram) are still open, with parts of both already finished.

Why Helpdock

One deploy, many brands. Each brand gets its own ticket prefix, inboxes, channels, widget theme, AI knowledge and help center on its own domain.
Isolation enforced by the database. PostgreSQL row-level security stops one brand from reading another brand's data, and agents see only their own departments.
Zoho-style ticketing discipline. Departments, teams, SLAs with business hours, workflow rules, macros, saved views, merge and split, and CSAT.
Grounded, controlled AI. Answers come only from your own knowledge, every AI feature is a toggle, and spending is capped per brand.
Security and speed as requirements. Encrypted secrets, signed widget identities, rate limits everywhere and a chat widget under 40 KB.

Features

Ticketing

One workspace to reply, add internal notes and attachments, assign, tag and close.
Custom statuses that can pause SLA timers, renamable priorities, and a choice of whether closed tickets can reopen.
Merge and unmerge with a 24-hour undo, split tickets, and link follow-ups to the original.
Personal and shared saved views, plus built-in My open, Unassigned, Overdue and Escalated.
Tags and custom fields on tickets, contacts and accounts, and ticket templates with placeholders.
Manual, round-robin or skill-based assignment with per-agent limits, and auto-unassign after 15 minutes offline.
Collision indicator, spam handling with blocked senders, time tracking, and satisfaction surveys when a ticket closes.
Search that stays fast beyond 50,000 tickets.

Contacts and accounts

Contacts grouped into company accounts, each with a full timeline.
One person across email, phone, Telegram, widget and Meta identities. Automatic merges happen only on verified identities, and manual merges can be undone.
Privacy tools: anonymise a person, or export everything held about them as JSON.

Channels

Email: IMAP or inbound webhooks from Postmark, SendGrid, Mailgun, Resend or generic JSON; SMTP per brand; safe threading; English and Arabic auto-replies with loop protection; HTML cleaning and remote-image blocking.
Live chat widget: under 40 KB, four modes, theming with a live preview, right-to-left support, rich media, transcripts by email, and signed identity that follows a user across devices.
Web form: a hosted form for each brand, plus a documented widget protocol for mobile apps.
Telegram: bots for each brand, with photos, documents, voice notes and locations, English or Arabic, and retry for failed replies.
WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram: ticket channels that respect Meta's 24-hour reply window, with per-reply delivery status and automatic token refresh.

Automation and SLAs

Business hours and holidays per brand, with department overrides.
First-response and resolution targets per priority, counted in business hours, with warning and escalation steps.
Event-based and scheduled workflow rules, a visual rule builder with test runs against real tickets, macros, and canned responses in English and Arabic.

Help center

Categories, sections and articles with a version per language, a rich editor, and Markdown import and export.
Draft, scheduled and archived publishing, with public or internal articles.
Built-in SEO: sitemaps, hreflang, Open Graph tags and structured data.
Typo-tolerant search in Arabic and English, custom branding and CSS, and custom domains with automatic HTTPS.
Article feedback, plus insights on top searches, searches with no results, views and helpfulness.

AI

Pluggable language-model providers, with a per-brand model and cost tracking.
Knowledge from help articles, PDF, Word, Markdown and text files, website crawls, Notion and Google Drive, searched with combined semantic and keyword retrieval that respects article visibility.
Agent assist: suggested replies with citations, ticket summaries, suggested tags and priority, and translation and tone rewriting between Arabic and English.
AI auto-reply on the widget, email and Telegram with citations and a "talk to a human" handoff, plus auto-triage as a workflow action.
Safeguards: personal data removed before AI calls, prompt-injection filtering, made-up citations dropped, and daily and monthly spending caps.

Reports, API and webhooks

Ticket volume, response and resolution times, SLA compliance, backlog, satisfaction, agent workload heatmaps, and AI usage and cost, with CSV export.
Scoped, rate-limited, revocable API keys and a REST API v1 with interactive docs.
Signed webhooks with retries, a delivery log, replay and secret rotation.

Security and operations

Admin, Team Leader, Agent and Viewer roles; breach-checked passwords, email sign-in links, Google and GitHub sign-in, and two-factor authentication.
Encrypted secrets with master-key rotation, outbound requests that can't reach internal network addresses, an audit log and data retention.
OWASP ASVS Level 2 review completed, with security scanners running in CI.
One Docker image that runs as API or worker, a transactional outbox so no job is lost or duplicated, structured logs, tracing and Prometheus metrics.
Signed releases for amd64 and arm64.

Languages and accessibility

English and Arabic everywhere, with full right-to-left layouts.
Keyboard navigation and focus handling, with automated WCAG 2.1 AA checks in CI.

Tech Stack

The backend runs on Node.js 24, TypeScript and NestJS, with Drizzle ORM, PostgreSQL 17 with pgvector, Redis with BullMQ, and Socket.IO for live updates. The admin app is React with MUI, the help center is rendered with Vite SSR, and the chat widget is built with Preact. Everything ships as Docker images and deploys with Docker Compose and Caddy.

Roadmap

Shipped: M0 skeleton, M1 ticketing core, M2 email, M3 automation and SLAs, M4 widget and realtime, M5 help center, M6 Telegram, M7 AI, M8 API, webhooks and reports.
In progress: M9 hardening and the 1.0 release, and M10 Meta channels (WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram).
Planned for v1.1: Slack and Discord channels.

Self-Hosting

Helpdock needs Docker Engine with Compose v2, a Linux server with 2 vCPU and 4 GB of memory, two DNS names pointing at it, and ports 80 and 443 open. Each release is published to the GitHub Container Registry as ghcr.io/docker-hunterpedia/helpdock.

bash.txt

git clone --depth 1 --branch v<version> https://github.com/Docker-Hunterpedia/Helpdock.git
cd Helpdock/docker
cp ../.env.example .env
# Fill in .env: HELPDOCK_VERSION, APP_URL, APP_MASTER_KEY (openssl rand -base64 32),
# the database passwords, the S3 bucket, ADMIN_HOST and API_HOST.
docker compose up -d

Then open the admin host and finish the first-run wizard. Back up the .env file together with the database: without the master key, encrypted data can't be read back.

License and Links

Helpdock is licensed under AGPL-3.0. The source, documentation and releases are on GitHub.