Cairn Help Desk
A help desk turns scattered customer emails into tracked, assignable tickets — shared inbox, SLAs, a customer portal. Cairn Help Desk gives you that support stack as software you own, instead of renting it per agent.
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A complete app, yours to keep.
Every Cairn Trail ships as a complete, AI-native application — full source in your own repository, a native MCP server, and a first-class CLI. Here’s what Cairn Help Desk includes out of the box.
- Shared inbox with assignment and collision detection
- Ticketing with statuses, tags, and queues
- SLA timers and escalation rules
- Customer-facing portal and email threading
- Saved replies and macros
- Native MCP server and CLI for triage automation
Every way to get help desk.
We’d rather you saw the whole map than a sales pitch. Here are the tools teams actually evaluate — what each is good at, said plainly. Cairn is one option among them.
Commercial
Hosted, polished, rented — your data lives on their cloud.Open source
Self-hostable and yours to run — read each license closely.So why Cairn?
Zendesk and Intercom set the bar for support tooling — and bill per agent, and per AI resolution, as you grow. The open-source desks remove that meter, but you inherit their stack and pace. Cairn Help Desk gives you the core support workflow as documented code in your repo: own it once, automate triage with your own agents, and never pay by the seat to answer your own customers.
However you get there, Cairn Help Desk is software you own — full source in your GitHub repository, running in your own cloud. No phone-home, no license server, no kill switch. Export your data any time; Cairn could disappear tomorrow and your software would keep working.