Chaskiq
Conversational marketing and customer support messaging platform alternative to Drift and Intercom.
Why consider Chaskiq?
Chaskiq is an open-source conversational chat and marketing platform. It features customizable website widgets, automated chatbots, email newsletters, and CRM integrations.
Learn Chaskiq by building
Practical setup notes, real use cases, and copy-ready examples in one focused guide.
In this guide10 sections
What is Chaskiq?
Chaskiq is an open-source conversational marketing and customer support platform written in Ruby on Rails and React. It operates as a full-featured alternative to proprietary marketing automation platforms like Intercom and Drift.
Chaskiq bridges the gap between real-time live chat and marketing automation: it allows businesses to engage visitors with proactive chat popups, build interactive chatbot conversation trees, broadcast automated email marketing campaigns, and manage customer support conversations from a unified dashboard.
Who Is It For?
- SaaS Founders & Growth Marketers: Triggering personalized in-app messages, feature announcements, and onboarding tours to users based on behavioral events.
- Customer Success Teams: Guiding leads through interactive conversational bot questionnaires to qualify prospects before routing to sales agents.
- E-Commerce Operators: Sending automated abandoned cart recovery emails and product recommendation messages.
Key Features
- Multi-channel conversational messenger widget with support for custom embedded video, surveys, and calendaring.
- Visual Bot Builder: Construct automated decision trees and conversational bots for lead qualification and FAQ deflection.
- Automated email campaigns and one-off broadcast newsletters with open and click tracking.
- In-app tours and banner announcements triggered by user attributes and telemetry events.
- Integration ecosystem supporting Segment, Slack, Mailgun, AWS SES, and webhooks.
Deploying Chaskiq with Docker Compose
version: '3.7'services: app: image: chaskiq/chaskiq:latest container_name: chaskiq_app restart: unless-stopped ports: - "3000:3000" environment: - DATABASE_URL=postgres://chaskiq:secure_pass@db:5432/chaskiq_production - REDIS_URL=redis://redis:6379/1 - HOST=http://localhost:3000 - SECRET_KEY_BASE=generate_secure_random_64_character_hex_key depends_on: - db - redis db: image: postgres:14-alpine container_name: chaskiq_db restart: unless-stopped volumes: - ./db_data:/var/lib/postgresql/data environment: - POSTGRES_USER=chaskiq - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=secure_pass - POSTGRES_DB=chaskiq_production redis: image: redis:7-alpine container_name: chaskiq_redis restart: unless-stoppedStart the instance:
docker compose up -dOpen http://localhost:3000 to register your primary administrator account and copy your embeddable JavaScript messenger code.
Practical Use Cases
1. Automated Lead Qualification Chatbot
A marketing team builds a bot that asks visitors their company size and budget, automatically routing enterprise leads to sales reps while directing hobbyists to community docs.
2. User Onboarding Email Sequences
A SaaS product triggers an automated 5-part email onboarding sequence when a new user registers, educating them on core product capabilities over two weeks.
3. In-App Feature Announcement Banners
A product manager displays a targeted popup announcement to active users inside the web application introducing a major platform update.
Troubleshooting and Limitations
- ActionCable WebSocket Configuration: Ensure your reverse proxy passes WebSocket connections properly to avoid dropping live chat sessions.
- Email Service Provider Setup: Connecting an SMTP/API provider (such as SendGrid or AWS SES) is required for outgoing newsletter broadcasts and verification emails.
Official Resources
- Official Website: https://chaskiq.io
- GitHub Repository: https://github.com/chaskiq/chaskiq
- Documentation: https://docs.chaskiq.io
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