Papercups

Key Features of Papercups

• Reply to support tickets directly from email.
• Handle SMS conversations by forwarding Twilio messages.
• Embed a fully customizable chat widget on your website.
• React, React Native, and Flutter support for easy app integration.
• Slack and Mattermost integrations for seamless team communication.
• Markdown support for rich text formatting in messages.
• Invite teammates to collaborate on customer conversations.
• Manage conversations by closing, assigning, and prioritizing.
• Built with Elixir for real-time updates, fault-tolerance, and high performance.

Open Source Live Chat for Customer Support

When it comes to customer support, businesses often face a tough tradeoff between usability and control. Most teams turn to hosted services like Zendesk or Intercom for their sleek interfaces and rich feature sets, but what if you don’t want your customer data flowing through third-party servers? What if privacy, security, and ownership of your data come first?

That’s exactly why Papercups was created.

Papercups is an open-source live customer support web app, built in Elixir, designed for teams who want the convenience of modern support tools without compromising control over their data. And while it's open source and self-hostable, there’s also a fully managed version available at app.papercups.io if you prefer not to run your own infrastructure.

A Tool That Works the Way You Do

From the beginning, Papercups has focused on flexibility. It’s designed to plug into your existing tools and workflows, rather than forcing you to adopt new ones. Whether you’re communicating via email, SMS, or in-app chat, Papercups helps you stay connected with your customers.

You can respond to customer tickets directly from email, or connect your Twilio account to handle SMS conversations seamlessly. For teams already working inside Slack or Mattermost, integrations make it easy to view and reply to messages from the channels you use daily.

Embedding support into your app or website is straightforward. Papercups offers a fully customizable chat widget, which you can integrate using a simple HTML snippet, or, if you’re using React or React Native, there are dedicated components ready to drop in. Even Flutter is supported, thanks to contributions from the open source community.

Built for Teams

Papercups isn’t just for solo operators. You can invite teammates, assign and prioritize conversations, and manage your queue as a team. It’s built for collaboration.

Messages support markdown, so you can add formatting and structure to your replies. It even supports emoji, though you can skip those if you're keeping it strictly professional.

Why Elixir?

Choosing Elixir as the foundation means Papercups can take full advantage of the language’s strengths: real-time updates, high performance, and fault tolerance. Whether you're managing a handful of users or scaling up to support thousands, Elixir’s concurrency model ensures that Papercups remains responsive and reliable.