Cerb Review
Source-available shared-inbox help desk with workflow automation, self-hosted or cloud.
- From:
- $40/agent/mo
- Founded:
- 2001
- HQ:
- Covina, US
Cerb is a shared inbox and automation platform from Webgroup Media, a bootstrapped Covina, California company that has been building it since 2001. It is the rare help desk you can run on your own server for nothing, with every feature switched on, or rent as Cerb Cloud. The price of that flexibility is that much of the useful behaviour, AI included, is something you configure or script yourself rather than something that arrives finished.
Is it right for your team?
Tick what's true for you.
Points for
Points against
Tick what describes you. We'll weigh it against this review.
What it does
- Turns email and social accounts into a team inbox, with mail pulled in over POP3/IMAP or, on Cloud, optional instant inbound delivery
- Tickets work like private mailing lists: any number of contacts can be participants and receive every outgoing reply
- Routing, assignment and prioritisation rules, snippets, contextual auto-responses and bulk reply across related conversations
- "Waiting" status with a wait-until date that reopens the ticket on its own, plus merge and split
- Drafts autosave and appear in the ticket timeline, so a second agent sees a reply in progress and moves on
- First-response and first-resolution times recorded per ticket; SLA and CSAT tracking listed as features
- Each ticket gets a random reference like
NCY-35312-825that does not reveal your ticket volume - A spam score on new tickets that learns from replies and "Report spam" clicks, but does nothing until a rule or a person acts on it
- Custom records and fields, configurable dashboards, community portals, plugins, webhooks, an OAuth2 REST API, and SSO over OpenID Connect and SAML
- KATA, Cerb's own automation language, with a browser editor, step debugger and simulator
- Missing: we found no phone, SMS or WhatsApp channel and no Shopify connector on the pages we read. The features page says "email or social account" without naming any networks
Pricing at a glance
| Plan | Billed monthly | Billed annually | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Community | Free | Free | Self-hosted, free forever, with unlimited workers and seats and no license key. |
| Licensed | $40 | – | Self-hosted. |
| Cerb Cloud | $40 | – | $40 per seat/month plus $40 per slot/month, with the first three slots included. |
Prices are an agent a month, in US dollars. Source: cerb.ai/pricing, checked .
- Self-hosted Community: free forever, unlimited workers and seats, every feature, three concurrency slots, two AI agent turns per slot
- Self-hosted Licensed: $40 per seat per month (monthly rate quoted; invoicing cadence not published). Slots are uncapped and each carries six AI turns instead of two
- Cerb Cloud: $40 per seat per month plus $40 per slot per month, first three slots included (monthly rates quoted; invoicing cadence not published)
- A seat is a person who signed in that month, averaged over up to twelve months. Idle and former accounts are never counted
- Seats are an honour system: no login is blocked for going over your number
- Worked example, Cloud: 8 people signing in and the three included slots = $320 a month at the quoted rate. Add five slots for customer-facing AI and it becomes $520 a month
- The same 8 people self-hosted and licensed = $320 a month, plus whatever your servers cost, with no slot charge
- Cloud free trial has no time limit while active. Subscribing is not self-serve: the page says to get in touch so they can size it with you
- Academic institutions get 50% off; registered charities and qualifying open source projects get a free subscription
- Enterprise support (priority support, training, consultation): contact sales, price not published
AI pricing (slots, not resolutions)
- Cerb does not charge per AI resolution or per conversation. AI is paid for indirectly through concurrency slots
- Bring your own model: you connect a provider and its credentials, and the token bill comes from that provider. Cerb logs token spend per turn
- Community caps you at four AI agent turns running at once. Licensed with ten slots allows up to 54
- A turn is one exchange with a model and can hold its slot from seconds to several minutes, so a free install running AI in front of customers will start queueing at even moderate volume
- On Cloud, slots cost $40 per month each past the first three (monthly rate quoted; invoicing cadence not published). Cloud slots cannot be uncapped; the pool is sized with Cerb
- An AI agent is an ordinary worker record: it can own tickets, join groups and be @mentioned. It can never sign in
- Local models work through any OpenAI- or Anthropic-compatible endpoint, such as Ollama, llama.cpp, LM Studio or vLLM
- What it can't do out of the box: anything you have not built. Agent tools are automations, so cancelling an order or issuing a refund means writing that tool against your store's API in KATA
- Until you add a model, the default agent's chat opens and every turn returns an error. Agents you create appear nowhere until enabled for a specific screen
Before you commit
- Nothing is feature-gated, so the gate you actually pay to lift is concurrency. Bulk updates, large imports, exports, search re-indexing and AI turns all compete for the same slots
- Someone on the team has to own KATA. The vendor says no programming experience is required; in practice whoever writes your routing and AI tools becomes a dependency, and you should plan for that
- Community support is documentation, forums and email answered "as we're able", with no response time. Licensed and Cloud get same-business-day email. Anything faster is the unpriced enterprise tier
- Cloud trials run in the US data center. UK, Europe and Asia-Pacific regions come with a paid subscription
- Self-hosting at scale means running Redis, Valkey or Memcached plus a search index such as Elasticsearch. Cerb works without them but slows down
- Exit is unusually clean: a lapsed subscription drops back to Community with nothing locked and no data touched, and data moves freely between self-hosted and Cloud
- Not verified: uptime commitments, a status page, compliance certifications and a mobile app. None appeared on the pages we read
Who should buy it, and who should skip it
Who should buy
- Email-heavy support teams with at least one person who likes building automations
- Organisations that need the data on their own infrastructure, with direct database access
- Teams with seasonal peaks or many occasional users, because seats are averaged and idle accounts are free
- Non-profits, schools and open source projects, which get it free or at half price
- Anyone who wants to run AI on their own choice of model, including one hosted on their own hardware
Who should skip it
- Shopify-first DTC teams that want the agent and the AI to edit, cancel or refund orders on day one without a developer
- Phone, SMS or WhatsApp-led support operations
- Teams that need round-the-clock vendor support without negotiating an enterprise contract
- Buyers who want to put a card in, pick a plan and get a fixed invoice without a sizing conversation
How we checked this
Every figure was read from Cerb's rendered pricing page on 2026-10-06. The prices are in the page text, not drawn in JavaScript. The page quotes rates per month but does not say whether subscriptions are invoiced monthly or annually, so every price line flags that, and we have not assumed either. Features were checked against Cerb's homepage, features page, tickets documentation and AI agents documentation on the same date. Cerb's own pages disagree on how many model providers it supports: the homepage says "a dozen", the features page says fourteen, and the agents documentation lists fifteen. We recorded the conflict rather than picking a number. We did not reach the integrations, license, security or status pages before our fetch limit, so channel coverage, licence terms, compliance and uptime are unverified. No review-site text was used.
What’s new in Cerb
The latest from Cerb’s own changelog, linked to each post.