Deploy and Host Chatwoot (Self-Hosted Intercom Alternative) on Railway

Chatwoot is an open-source customer engagement suite — a self-hosted alternative to Intercom, Zendesk, and Freshdesk. Give your team a shared inbox for live chat, email, and social channels, plus canned responses, automation rules, and a help center, all from one instance you own. [Updated August '26]

About Hosting Chatwoot (Self-Hosted Intercom Alternative)

This template runs the full Chatwoot stack: a Rails web server, a Sidekiq worker for background jobs, a PostgreSQL database (pgvector-enabled for AI features), and Redis for queues and caching. The web service runs rails db:chatwoot_prepare on first boot to create and migrate the schema, so the app is ready immediately — open the URL and create your super-admin account. Web and worker share the same SECRET_KEY_BASE over Railway's private network, and uploads persist to a volume so nothing is lost on redeploy.

Common Use Cases

Customer support shared inbox across live chat, email, and social
In-app live chat widget for your website or product
Help center and canned responses to scale a small support team

Dependencies for Chatwoot (Self-Hosted Intercom Alternative) Hosting

A PostgreSQL database with pgvector (included in this template)
A Redis instance for background jobs (included in this template)
A Sidekiq worker service (included in this template)

Implementation Details

The web service starts with bundle exec rails s -p 3000 and the worker with bundle exec sidekiq. Both point at the same Postgres and Redis over the private network. For production email and large-scale file storage, configure SMTP and an S3-compatible storage backend.

Why Deploy Chatwoot (Self-Hosted Intercom Alternative) on Railway?

Railway is a singular platform to deploy your infrastructure stack. Railway will host your infrastructure so you don't have to deal with configuration, while allowing you to vertically and horizontally scale it.

By deploying Chatwoot (Self-Hosted Intercom Alternative) on Railway, you are one step closer to supporting a complete full-stack application with minimal burden. Host your servers, databases, AI agents, and more on Railway.