Opencom
an open-source Intercom alternative given the Salesforce deal
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I built Opencom, an open-source alternative to Intercom for customer support chat, with knowledge-base and AI support, and mobile apps for push notifications etc.It includes a web widget, agent inbox, customer/company profiles, conversations, realtime messaging, AI support and a live demo. The aim is to provide a simple, self-hostable foundation for teams that want Intercom support without being locked into a large SaaS platform.Salesforce has just announced its acquisition of Fin, formerly Intercom, for around $3.6bn. Customer communication is important infrastructure, and I think there should be a credible open-source option.Built with TS, NextJS, React Native & Expo, and Convex backend for easy setup and ability for full self-hosting. Repo: https://github.com/opencom-org/opencom.Appreciate any feedback on architecture, self-hosting setup, and which Intercom-style features people would want before using it in production, along with any other thoughts.It is entirely OSS - no paid features behind a paywall. I hope this could become a community project.
HN · launched Jun 16, 2026 · 5 upvotes (top 87%) · 0 views
Niche: omnichannel customer support platforms · 96 launches, 11 in the last 7 days ▼ -21% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Communication
- B2B
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 96 launches in omnichannel customer support platforms →
Could you build this?
Partial Building a basic customer chat widget with RAG capabilities is manageable, but creating a full-scale Intercom replacement requires robust multi-tenant real-time messaging, ticketing state machines, and multi-channel synchronization.
What it would actually take: A production version requires an event-driven architecture using WebSockets/SSE (e.g., Elixir/Phoenix or Node/Go with Redis Pub/Sub), PostgreSQL for durable conversation histories, and vector search (pgvector) for the RAG agent. Hard parts include reliable bi-directional email syncing (handling MIME complexities, threading headers, spam filters) and high-throughput real-time deliverability across web and mobile push notifications. It demands skilled backend and infrastructure engineering to maintain sub-second latency and zero message loss.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 72 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #64 of 73 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 228 days after the earliest competitor.
- Opencom, full Intercom alternative, open-source, Convex Backend · hn · 2026-02-28 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.71
- Libredesk · hn · 2026-04-19 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Libredesk · hn · 2026-04-20 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Sidebar · hn · 2026-08-07 · 16 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Cossistant · hn · 2025-11-21 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Chatvia.ai · ph · 2026-11-03 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Inyon · ph · 2026-10-23 · 87 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- OpenBoxComm · ph · 2026-11-13 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.38
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