Why these together

Customer support doesn't fit one tool — you need a live in-app channel, an email shared inbox, a self-serve forum, and a way to email everyone proactively when something breaks. Chatwoot covers the in-app messenger and the multi-channel inbox; FreeScout is the lighter shared-mailbox tool when most of your support is plain email and you don't need Chatwoot's heavier deploy; Discourse hosts the public help forum and the community SEO that pulls in organic answers; Listmonk sends the status broadcasts. The compose.yml on this page ships Chatwoot (web + sidekiq + postgres + redis) and Listmonk (+ postgres) — the two with first-party docker images and clean compose installs. FreeScout uses MySQL and ships its own compose; Discourse installs via its own `launcher` bootstrap rather than plain compose — both linked from inside the file. Route inbound by channel: chat to Chatwoot, support@ to FreeScout, community questions to Discourse, outage notice to Listmonk.