Cliedesk

Cliedesk is a complete helpdesk that runs on your own WordPress site. Your team works in a fast, full-screen app at /dash (the address can be changed). All conversations, customers and files stay in your own database. There are no per-agent fees and no limits in the free plugin.

Shared inbox

• Live chat, contact forms and the customer portal in one inbox; replies go out by email (WordPress mail or SMTP) with a link to the portal, where customers answer
• With Cliedesk Pro: connect your support mailbox (IMAP or forwarding), so customer emails become conversations and customers can just reply to your emails
• Assign, prioritise, tag, snooze, merge and split conversations; private notes and @mentions
• Saved views, search with filters, keyboard shortcuts and a command palette
• Saved replies and macros, signatures, scheduled and undo-send replies
• Collision detection so two agents never answer the same customer at once

Chat widget and forms

• A lightweight chat widget with business hours and offline messages
• A request form as a block, a shortcode or its own link
• With Cliedesk Pro: Contact Form 7, WPForms, Gravity Forms, Fluent Forms and Formidable Forms entries become conversations
• A JavaScript API for developers (Cliedesk.open(), Cliedesk.prefill() and more)

Help center and customer portal

• Knowledge base with categories, search and article feedback
• Customer portal: customers see and answer their own conversations; with WooCommerce it is a “Support” tab in My Account
• Article suggestions while customers type

Automation and business hours

• One-step rules that run on events (new conversation, customer reply, status or field change, contact changes) with conditions and actions, plus ready-made recipes such as an automatic acknowledgment; resolved conversations close by themselves after a few days
• Queues with manual or round-robin assignment, a default assignee and Online/Away status
• Business hours, public holidays and closure mode, with an honest “we will reply by” time for customers

WooCommerce

• The customer’s orders next to every conversation, read live from WooCommerce (works with high-performance order storage)
• Order lookup by number, email, phone, name or product
• Private and customer order notes from the helpdesk; order notes in the conversation timeline

Team, reports and privacy

• Unlimited agents, teams, six default roles and an audit log
• Reports: overview (volume, response and resolution times), channels, backlog, satisfaction (CSAT), the help center and the chat widget
• Contacts and organisations with custom fields, segments and a customer timeline
• Privacy tools: export, erase and retention rules, connected to the WordPress privacy tools
• WP-CLI commands for jobs, data, exports and more

Cliedesk Pro

Cliedesk Pro is a separate, paid add-on for growing teams. It adds AI (copilot and AI agent, with your own AI provider key), incoming email (support mailboxes by IMAP or forwarding, and replies by email), multi-step and time-based automation, SLA policies, advanced routing, advanced reports and exports, custom roles and permissions, settings per product, more channels and email providers, WooCommerce actions such as refunds, and a public API.

This plugin does not need Cliedesk Pro. It contains no Pro or AI code, has no trial or locked features, and never locks your data: export and the WordPress privacy tools always work.

Privacy

Cliedesk sends no usage data and has no telemetry. It loads no remote fonts, scripts or analytics. The services listed under “External services” are used only when you turn on the feature that needs them.

Source code, bugs and contributing

The source code of the app and chat widget (TypeScript), with the build tools and build steps, is on GitHub: github.com/degird/cliedesk. Report bugs or contribute there.

External services

Cliedesk contacts no external service on its own. These services are used only after you turn on the feature that needs them:

• Your email server (SMTP): when you add an SMTP connection, Cliedesk connects to the server you enter to send email. Only your login and the emails are exchanged, with the provider you chose.
• Cloudflare Turnstile or hCaptcha: when you turn on spam protection with one of them, the chat widget and forms load the provider’s check and your site sends the visitor’s answer token to the provider to verify it. Turnstile terms: https://www.cloudflare.com/website-terms/ Privacy: https://www.cloudflare.com/privacypolicy/ hCaptcha terms: https://www.hcaptcha.com/terms Privacy: https://www.hcaptcha.com/privacy
• Browser push services: when an agent turns on push notifications, notifications are sent, encrypted, to the push service of that agent’s browser (for example Google, Mozilla or Apple). The message contains the notification text only.
• Web pages you add as knowledge: when you add a web page or sitemap as a knowledge source, Cliedesk downloads those pages from the addresses you entered.
• Gravatar (by Automattic): when the Gravatar setting is on, avatars may be loaded from gravatar.com by the browser. The request contains a hash of the email address. Terms: https://automattic.com/tos/ Privacy: https://automattic.com/privacy/
• Freemius: the bundled Freemius SDK runs in anonymous mode and sends nothing from this plugin. It is used only when you choose to install or activate Cliedesk Pro. Terms: https://freemius.com/terms/ Privacy: https://freemius.com/privacy/