Adding New Conversation Channels to Chatwoot

[sojan-official]

One of the prominent requests which we receive in Chatwoot forums is around adding new conversation channels. This discussion aims to clarify the core team's thoughts on the same.

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We want Chatwoot to be the software where all the in-build channels behave like primary citizens of the product. This requires any new features like CSAT surveys, business hours, automated responses, etc., to behave consistently across all these channels.

There might be some exceptions, namely the likes of interactive messages such as cards and inputs, etc., which aren't supported by all channels. But we try to leverage all the available APIs, provide workarounds and give a complete experience for the users of Chatwoot.

This comes with the following pain points when adding a new channel.

• Additional overhead in feature planning: Adding a new channel implies additional effort whenever a new feature is planned. The person writing spec would have to consider how that feature behaves for a particular channel.
• Maintainability: The core development team would have to be familiar with all the APIs of the new channel and follow the breaking changes in the channel APIs.
  While there might be community contributions for newer channels, the team would still need to guarantee fixes in production breakages.
• Testing: For each release/build, we will need to test the behavior of conversations and features across all these channels. So each new channel brings an additional overhead for us to release a new version.

Because of these, we would have to be super judicious while adding channels.

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Providers

While Chatwoot aims to package native channel integrations inside the product, there are two exceptions.

1. SMS via Twilio

2. Whatsapp via Twilio

This decision was taken during development due to API access and delivery time constraints. Back then, we opted for Twilio to ensure a way for our global community to use these channels.

This encouraged the community to request more such provider channels for SMS, Whatsapp vendors across the globe. These requests come with genuine reasons like regional support, better pricing, etc. But due to the concerns mentioned above, we often don't have the capacity to tackle them. So, for the time being, we would be putting away all efforts in adding provider channels / nor be encouraging PRs for them.

Alternatives

API Channel: One could write a bridge service and leverage the Chatwoot API channel if they want to work with a provider channel ( APIs available through Agent Bots, HTTP APIs, Webhooks & Web-sockets )

Provider APIs ( future): We are working on ways to decouple the provider logic and expose new APIs for channels like SMS / Whatsapp. This would let the community/providers maintain provider packages, which could be plugged into Chatwoot installations on demand.

This idea is still in its infancy, but keep an eye out for more news and reference implementations.

Forks ( if critical): One could maintain forks with support for a specific channel.

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Future

The core team will be continuing to add native integrations to additional channels like Instagram, telegram, apple/google business chats, etc.

The prioritization is primarily based on the following factors.

• Community interest
• Volume of customer support handled through the channel globally
• Maturity of available APIs
• Maintenance Overhead
• Available Developer Bandwidth

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Notes

• If you are a developer looking to add a provider channel to Chatwoot, please wait until our provider APIs are ready.
• If you are looking to add a native channel to Chatwoot, Please raise an issue so the core team evaluate the above-given factors and give the go-ahead.
• In any case, feel free to raise an issue or open up a discussion and share your ideas before you start working on it.

Feel free to post any feedback & comments.

[voko3456]

I hope you can integrate with whatsapp unofficial API like , whatsapp-web.js or chat - api
whatsapp-web.js it's open source on github but chat api it's paie I think it's better to go with whatsapp-web.js or alternative open source whatsapp web api Like Baileys whatsapp web api on github also

[engmsaleh]

Hi @voko3456 Did you reach an update on this or succeed in implementing any of them?

[smashah]

Any movement on this? I'm the maintainer of https://github.com/open-wa/wa-automate-nodejs and I understand the position of implementing only native integrations from a chatwoot perspective.

It would be great if I could develop some sort of plugin that can be added to the docker-compose.yaml based on user needs without mutating with chatwoot source code.

[sojan-official]

@smashah did you try using the API channel ?

[smashah]

@smashah did you try using the API channel ?

Yes I was playing around with it yesterday. I can now create the inbox automatically using the access token. People still want to be able to scan the qr code from within chatwoot. As far as I know there's no way to do that outside the chatwoot source code still.

[sojan-official]

@smashah one example flow for an inbox maintained by third party integration is the one by csml.
https://docs.csml.dev/studio/getting-started/livechat/chatwoot

They accept an API key and the installation URL. the auth and everything related to the bot happens on the CSML side.
inbox creation and rest of it is performed by csml on chatwoot installation. Would such a flow work in your case ?

[smashah]

@sojan-official in recent releases of open-wa I have implemented a way for users to not need to create an inbox first. Taking your advice, open-wa consumes the api access token + chatwoot url. infers the account id from the access token, attempts to find the inbox with the correct metadata, if it doesn't exist the inbox is created. Thanks.

Any movement on the providers API?

[clairton]

Hello, anyone has use chatwoot with unnoficial whatsapp api, like whatsapp-web.js or https://github.com/adiwajshing/Baileys?

[clairton]

Hi, with Whatsapp Cloud API it is possible #5142

[yaroslavhorokhovets]

it's same