Customermates

[Customermates]

Follow up on every client conversation. The open-source CRM with LinkedIn and email beside every client, replies drafted by Mate or your own AI agent through MCP, and self-hosting under the AGPL.

Website | Demo | Documentation | GitHub | Film

[As seen on Open Source Alternatives]

[Customermates: every client conversation in one place. Follow up on every one.]

Customermates helps small teams follow up on every client conversation. LinkedIn and email sit beside each client (on Cloud from Pro also WhatsApp, Instagram and Telegram), and Mate or your own AI agent through MCP drafts each reply and the next step for you to review and send. Underneath is a full CRM for contacts, organizations, deals, services and tasks, with API access, webhooks, n8n automation and MCP.

You can use the managed cloud version or run Customermates yourself in your own infrastructure with Docker Compose.

Product film

The 70 second product film shows the workspace: client conversations from email, LinkedIn and WhatsApp in one inbox, Mate drafting the reply and the next step, and the same records open to Claude, ChatGPT or any agent that speaks MCP.

Watch the film or find it in this repository at public/customermates-film.mp4.

🚀 Getting Started

There are two ways to start using Customermates:

Docs entry points:

• CRM Overview
• Self-Hosting (install, manage, cloud vs self-host)
• Connect your AI (Claude)
• Webhooks

⭐ Key Features

• CRM for contacts, organizations, deals, services, and tasks
• API access with OpenAPI documentation
• Webhooks and event-driven integrations
• n8n workflows and automation support
• MCP support for agent tooling and structured tool calling
• Unified inbox for email, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Telegram (Cloud, from the Pro plan)
• Audit logging
• Single Sign-On and Whitelabeling on the Enterprise plan (self-hosted Enterprise deployments by agreement)
• Role-based access control for teams
• Several isolated workspaces per login, each with its own data model, members, billing, API keys and MCP connections
• Self-hosted deployment with Docker Compose and PostgreSQL
• Cloud uses monthly per-seat pricing; see the current plans

📊 Comparison

Customermates supports both cloud and self-hosted deployment models.

If you want the full decision guide, see the Self-hosting docs.

🐳 Self-Hosting

Self-hosting is two files (docker-compose.yml and .env) plus docker compose up -d. No git clone, no build step. The published image at ghcr.io/customermates/customermates:latest applies pending migrations every time it starts.

Prerequisites

• Docker and Docker Compose v2.
• A domain name if you want TLS (optional for local).
• ~2 GB RAM and a couple of GB of disk per thousand records.

Setup

mkdir customermates && cd customermatescurl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/customermates/customermates/main/docker-compose.yml -o docker-compose.ymlcurl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/customermates/customermates/main/.env.selfhost.template -o .env# edit .env with real valuesdocker compose up -d

Required .env values:

• BETTER_AUTH_SECRET: long random string (openssl rand -hex 32).
• POSTGRES_PASSWORD: change the default.
• BASE_URL: your public URL (e.g. https://crm.example.com).
• RESEND_API_KEY and RESEND_OPERATOR_EMAIL: for signup verification, password reset, and invitation emails.

Optional: uncomment GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID and GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET, or AZURE_AD_CLIENT_ID and AZURE_AD_CLIENT_SECRET, to offer sign-in with Google or Microsoft. See Can users sign in with Google or Microsoft?.

Set CRON_SECRET (openssl rand -hex 32) and call /api/cron/lifecycle daily with it, or Trash is never emptied after 30 days. See Which scheduled jobs must I run?.

First boot takes ~1 minute while Prisma applies migrations. Watch with docker compose logs -f app, then open <BASE_URL>/auth/signup.

Day-to-day

docker compose pull && docker compose up -d   # updatedocker compose up -d                           # apply .env changesdocker compose logs -f app                     # logs

Front the app with a reverse proxy (Caddy, nginx, Traefik) for TLS and set BASE_URL to the public https:// address. Customermates takes the scheme and host for its links from BASE_URL and sets secure cookies when it uses https://, so X-Forwarded-Proto is not required. The proxy must pass on the original Host header, because the app rejects form submissions whose origin does not match it, including sign-in and sign-up.

More docs:

• Self-Hosting (install and manage)
• Architecture and security

🛠️ Development

Create an isolated worktree and run Customermates locally:

git fetch origin maingit worktree add ../customermates-my-change -b feat/my-change origin/maincd ../customermates-my-changenvm useyarn db:provisioncp .env.cloud.template .env# Paste the printed DATABASE_URL and DIRECT_URL into .env.yarn install --frozen-lockfileyarn db:resetyarn dev

yarn db:provision creates a PostgreSQL 17 container and named volume owned by the current worktree. Re-running it is idempotent. yarn db:reset applies the migrations, seeds the database, and prepares the workflow schemas. Replacing the database volume is destructive and only happens with yarn db:provision --recreate; use yarn db:provision --destroy to remove the worktree's owned database when the worktree is retired.

Useful scripts:

• yarn dev
• yarn build
• yarn lint
• yarn openapi:generate
• yarn db:provision
• yarn db:reset

For configurable CRM architecture review, isolated databases, production-build browser journeys and SSH verification, see the browser verification guide.

📚 Documentation

The docs cover:

• product overview and CRM comparison
• self-hosting and operations
• API integrations and OpenAPI
• MCP and n8n
• architecture and security

Start here: customermates.com/docs

📄 License

Customermates uses an open-core licensing model, described in LICENSING.md.

The Community Edition (all first-party code outside ee/) is licensed under AGPL-3.0-only.

Other first-party files in ee/ are source-available under the Customermates Commercial License, subject to its AGPL client-material exception. Production use of Commercial Software outside the limited Community Build permission, including any Enterprise Feature, requires a Commercial Agreement.

The official Community image at ghcr.io/customermates/customermates is built from the shared codebase and contains compiled Commercial Software. The limited Community Build permission allows anyone to run its unmodified commercial support components where documented APP_MODE=self-hosted operation necessarily executes them; it does not license Enterprise Feature use.

Contributor terms are available in .github/CLA.md.

Third-party data keeps its own license: the address formats from Google libaddressinput that ship with Customermates and the postal codes it downloads from GeoNames are licensed under CC BY 4.0, see THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.