// the find
papercups-io/papercups
Open-source live customer chat
Papercups is a self-hosted Intercom/Zendesk alternative built on Elixir/Phoenix with a React frontend. It gives privacy-conscious companies a live chat widget, multi-channel inbox (Slack, SMS, email), and basic CRM — without customer data flowing to third parties. The Elixir foundation means real-time chat via Phoenix Channels is genuinely good, not bolted on.
Phoenix Channels for real-time messaging is the right tool for this problem — you get WebSocket presence, fan-out, and fault tolerance for free from OTP. The integration surface is wide: Slack, Mattermost, Twilio, Gmail, HubSpot, Intercom import — more than most self-hosted tools bother with. The chat widget is a separate open-source package, so you can embed it without pulling in the full server dependency. One-click Heroku deploy with a proper Procfile means the setup friction is genuinely low for a Phoenix app of this complexity.
It's in maintenance mode as of the README — last push February 2024, no major features coming. If you adopt this, you own it. The frontend is Create React App, which has been unmaintained since 2023; the build tooling will rot and already requires an older Node (see .nvmrc). The 'Lambdas' feature — letting you deploy serverless functions from the UI — is half-baked and not documented; it's the kind of thing that sounds clever and then becomes a support burden. Session replay (rrweb integration) is included but wiring it to Storytime requires a separate undocumented service that isn't in the main docker-compose.