Konversio and Chatwoot: what carries over, what changed

Konversio is a fork of Chatwoot CE v4.13, not a rewrite. If you are coming from Chatwoot, most of what you know still applies. This article covers what is identical, what changed, and how to think about whether to migrate an existing instance or start fresh.

What is identical

Everything in Chatwoot CE at v4.13 carries over unchanged:

• Inboxes and conversations — the same channel types, the same conversation model, the same status workflow
• Agents, teams, and roles — identical permission structure
• Automation rules — same rule builder, same trigger and action types
• Reports — overview, CSAT, label reports, all present
• Help Center — article-based knowledge portal, same editor
• Canned responses and labels — no changes
• SLAs — same configuration and enforcement
• Integrations — Slack, Webhooks, SMTP, and the others from CE are all intact
• API — the REST API is the same; existing integrations built against Chatwoot CE should work without modification
• Database schema — the schema is the same at the point of the fork, which is relevant for migrations (see below)

If a feature existed in Chatwoot CE v4.13, it exists in Konversio.

What changed

Captain is gone. Chatwoot's proprietary AI agent has been removed. If you were using Captain on a Chatwoot Cloud plan, that functionality does not carry over. Captain was never part of CE, so self-hosted CE users are not affected.

Pilot is added. Konversio ships its own AI support agent, Pilot, which is MIT-licensed and runs on open models — Gemma 4, Qwen, Whisper. Pilot is not a drop-in replacement for Captain feature-by-feature; it is a different implementation with a different configuration model. Expect to set it up from scratch.

License is fully MIT. Chatwoot CE was already MIT-licensed for the application code, but the broader Chatwoot project included proprietary components. Konversio is MIT throughout — no proprietary layers.

Upstream divergence will grow. Konversio is a fork, not a downstream package. Bug fixes and features from Chatwoot will not automatically appear. The Konversio team will backport security fixes and may selectively pull CE improvements, but the two projects will diverge over time.

Who should migrate from Chatwoot CE

Migration is straightforward if you are self-hosting Chatwoot CE on v4.13. Because the database schema matches at the fork point, a database dump from Chatwoot CE v4.13 can be restored into Konversio with no schema changes required.

Good reasons to migrate:

• You want Pilot and the fully open AI stack
• You want a platform whose roadmap is focused on EU deployment and open inference
• You do not need or want future Chatwoot Cloud features

Reasons to stay on Chatwoot CE:

• You are tracking Chatwoot's upstream actively and want new CE features as they ship
• You have no use case for the AI layer and the fork does not add value for you

Who should start fresh

If you are evaluating both platforms with no existing data, start with Konversio directly. There is no meaningful setup cost difference, and you will be on the platform you intend to run long-term.

Summary