Plain Review Features, Pricing, Pros & Cons

Plain has taken a unique approach to the best help desk space by doing what the name suggests and taking a more "plain" and simple approach to it all.

A single inbox for support teams to prioritize and respond to customers across email, Slack, and other areas. You're not meant to think of Plain as a shared inbox, like many of the other best help desks mentioned.

Plain is focusing heavily on product-teams that can benefit from deeper integrations with tools like Linear, Slack, and Stripe.

Plain Features & Integrations

The standout features of Plain are actually the deep native integrations. If you're using Stripe for your product, you can easily display all the details of the plan and purchases on the right-hand side.

In-fact, the same is the case with Linear + Slack, you can easily turn a Slack message into a support ticket and spin up a Linear issue from that, pulling in full context to one place:

So if you're a team especially that has shared Slack channels with customers/partners, Plain has a pretty impressive integration with Slack that we haven't really seen with any other Help Desk on the market.

Knowledge Sources

Plain even allows you to add sites as a source, which helps with their knowledge-set that their AI features rely on. So say for example you're a software review and comparison site (like us) and you are often recommending software to your customers (like us), you might want to index your site into Plain to give it all the context.

That said, it's one URL per page, it can't scrape entire sites, so you'd want to automate the adding of pages to Plain, or import them in bulk via their CLI tool (if this is confusing to you, yeah, it's because they are an API-first company, developers and software companies will probably appreciate hearing this functionality exists).

Final Verdict

If any of the above integrations sound exciting, they great! You're probably in their target customer profile, if not? That makes sense, it's for quite a specific type of software product team, one that is likely using Linear and Slack already.

Just to be clear, Plain is not a shared inbox in the general sense, so you're not going to want to send to it "contact@ admin@ billing@", you're going to only want to use it for your support@ channel, for customers who you specifically want to respond to, likely via an SLA.

If you're looking for a more traditional help desk (or shared inbox), you might want to check out Help Scout instead. That said, if the above fits your use-case, then we think plain is a fantastic choice, and super promising in the somewhat stagnant and uninspiring help desk space!