Open Source Front Alternatives
A curated collection of the 2 best open source alternatives to Front.
The best open source alternative to Front is Freescout. If that doesn't suit you, we've compiled a ranked list of other open source Front alternatives to help you find a suitable replacement. Other interesting open source alternative to Front is UnInbox.
Front alternatives are mainly Email & Communication but may also be Customer Support & Success or Marketing & Customer Engagement. Browse these if you want a narrower list of alternatives or looking for a specific functionality of Front.
Lightweight PHP help desk and shared inbox that centralizes email, chat and social conversations, a self-hosted alternative to Zendesk and Help Scout.
Running support on Zendesk or Help Scout leaves your customer conversations on somebody else's server, with a bill that grows alongside the team. FreeScout answers both problems, a free help desk and shared inbox built on Laravel, written from scratch and hosted wherever you like.
Everything arrives in one inbox. Email flows in over SMTP, IMAP or POP3, with modern OAuth authentication for Microsoft Office 365 and Google Workspace, while WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook, Slack and live chat feed the same queue.
Day-to-day work is shaped by a handful of behaviors.
- Unlimited everything: agents, tickets and mailboxes are never counted against a license.
- Collision detection: a notice appears when two agents open the same conversation.
- Conversation handling: forwarding, merging, moving, starring, internal notes and auto replies are built in.
- Accessibility: the interface fully supports screen readers and works on mobile.
- Translations: close to thirty languages ship with the application.
Requirements stay modest, Nginx, Apache or IIS, PHP 7.4 through 8.x, and MySQL, MariaDB or PostgreSQL, with no stated processor or memory floor, so shared hosting is a realistic target. A web installer and updater handles setup and upgrades, and one-click installs exist for Docker, Cloudron, Softaculous and several managed hosts. Mobile apps mirror the web version, installed modules included.
Open source email built for teams, with shared spaces, per-conversation workflow statuses and unlimited addresses, for anyone drowning in shared inboxes.
The first email was sent almost 45 years ago, before the mobile telephone existed, and the experience has barely moved since while the volume has exploded. UnInbox keeps the universal protocol and retires the inbox around it, so a team stops forwarding messages to each other to work out who is answering.
Conversations live in shared spaces that a whole team can read, comment on and reply to from one address. It runs alongside existing email infrastructure or replaces it entirely, and the web app is a TypeScript project built on Next.js with a Hono public API and MySQL behind Drizzle.
Collaboration is native here rather than bolted on afterwards.
- Shared spaces: a team comments on a conversation and replies from a shared address instead of forwarding it.
- Workflow statuses: each conversation carries a status, so everyone can see whether it has been dealt with.
- Unlimited addresses: support, sales, billing and any other address a team invents point at the same place.
- Sender screening: unknown senders are screened before they land in front of the team.
- Conversation notes: context is written on the conversation itself rather than in a side channel.
Running it locally needs Node.js 20 or later, pnpm 9 or later and Docker. Clone it, copy the example environment file, bring up the containers, push the schema and start the dev server. Self-hosting in production is possible but takes extra manual configuration for email, which the Discord community documents. The license is AGPLv3, and cloning into a private repository requires a commercial license.
