cerb.ai

What It Is

Cerb is a customer support and ticketing platform built for support teams. Its core positioning is not simply as a live chat tool, but as a workflow platform for building custom support processes. It turns email and social accounts into shared inboxes, and organizes team collaboration around tickets, contacts, organizations, workspaces, dashboards, automation, and AI Agents.

Core Capabilities

Cerb’s basic modules include shared inboxes, ticket statuses, assignees, priorities, SLAs, customer satisfaction, response times, drafts, ticket merge/split, and anti-spam. For collaboration, it supports custom workspaces, tabs, widgets, comments, @mentions, and watched records notifications. Its key differentiator is KATA: an automation-oriented web programming language with a browser IDE, debugger, and simulator. It can trigger events, call APIs, query data, modify records, pause workflows, and resume them on future events. AI Agents can connect to multiple large language model providers, answer questions based on documentation, draft replies, summarize conversations, and be given tools to perform actions.

Pricing and Deployment

Pricing is relatively transparent: for self-hosting, the first 3 seats are free forever, and additional seats cost $40/seat/month; Cerb Cloud is also $40/seat/month. The cloud version offers a no-credit-card trial with no time limit while active, along with high availability, autoscaling, automatic backups, point-in-time recovery, and data centers in the US, UK, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. The self-hosted version can be deployed quickly with Docker and is suitable for teams that need control over data and infrastructure, but installation, upgrades, scaling, backups, and email configuration are your own responsibility.

Integrations, Security, and Developer Support

Cerb supports authentication methods including OAuth, API Key, Bearer, HTTP Basic, and AWS. It provides Webhooks, an OAuth2 REST API, plugins, a community portal, and OpenID Connect/SAML single sign-on. On security, the source text mentions least-privilege policies, GDPR, EU-U.S. DPF, automatic security patches, SPF/DKIM/DMARC, and optional data center selection.

Pros, Cons, and Who It’s For

Cerb’s advantages are its support for both self-hosted and cloud deployment, the free first three seats, and strong depth in automation and integrations. It is well suited to technical support, customer success, and operations teams that need to build complex workflows. The downsides are the learning and maintenance costs introduced by KATA and self-hosted operations; non-technical teams may prefer more out-of-the-box products.

Access from China

The crawled text does not provide information on access from mainland China, a Chinese-language interface, or local payment options, so china_access can only be rated as unknown. If you have localized requirements for access, payments, or compliance, you may want to compare it with Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom, as well as local alternatives such as 美洽, Udesk, and 环信客服.