Help Scout vs Plain

We use Help Scout for sales, customer support, admin, receipts (e.g. we forward all of our receipts into an inbox), invoicing, and even recruitment. We've been using Help Scout for over 5 years and we love it!

Help Scout can be best described as a customer-centric tool. They have done an incredible job at building somewhat of a community around their software. For example, when I see a company is using Help Scout (on either the website chat or email response), I have an immediate reaction of feeling that they care deeply about customer support and will have equally caring support reps.

I'm also part of their "Support Driven" Slack community as well and am regularly seeing teams of all sizes (big and small) actually switching over to Help Scout from Zendesk, Intercom, and Front, amongst others.

They have a nice implementation of live chat in their product, as it's actually thoughtful (and further customer-focused). How you might ask? Expectations matching. For one, you have to mindfully to mark yourself as "available", and if you aren't actively in Help Scout for a long enough period of time, it will automatically mark you as "away" (wait that's a feature...? hold on, let me explain).

There's nothing worse than having a "live chat" on your website that gives the impression that you'll get an immediate response, but in reality, you just get a bot that asks for your email address because "the team is away". It's a bad expectation mismatch. Help Scout doesn't allow this to happen.

They have more of an "email first" approach, with a "we might be live though" as a secondary. So when the live chat shows on your website, you can be sure that there's actually a human on the other end. Great expectation matching, which as a small team, I appreciate a lot. Now take that, versus Intercom, which simply upon seeing the logo, you and everyone else expects to speak to someone immediately, and if you aren't on the other end, they get frustrated - you're set up to lose versus surprise and delight (which is what Help Scout constantly allows for). If you're a small or mid-size team, why not set yourself up for success and delight out of the box?

One of the areas that got me obsessed with Help Scout many years back was their robust workflows functionality. You can set up either automatic or manual workflows. Automatic is great when you can set up some type of consistent trigger, like when a due date is today and the conversation is active or pending, then mark it active, set the priority custom field to P1, and add the tag "due":

Pair this with the API and you can trigger some pretty powerful workflows both inside and outside of Help Scout.

Help Scout has gone a human-centric approach to AI (unsurprisingly, as it's true to brand). What they've done is things like, automatic summarization of chat threads. So if you're jumping in and out of threads and collaborating with team members on a daily basis, it'll help you get back up to speed, without having to read the entire conversation thread:

We for one appreciate how Help Scout has handled their approach to AI, as when comparing Help Scout to Intercom for example, Intercom tries to rope in AI at every corner, in chat, and trying to automate conversation threads. While this is cool in theory, it does feel a bit like we're back in the "you must first talk to a bot before talking to a human" time period, which still is a bit frustrating. I'm sure Help Scout will do more in this area as AI continues to evolve in time.

Help Scout also has some pretty cool AI assist features coming to the actual compose window, pulling the likes of ChatGPT directly where you're actually responding to messages:

The thing is, the app is a bit buggy from time to time. You can accomplish most of what you'd like to do on-the-go, the thing is, it's missing some core features like the "workflows" functionality. This means, if you rely heavily on workflows when using Help Scout, you're going to be a bit frustrated when on mobile. I'll admit, I've definitely visited the desktop app on my phone every now-and-again to run a quick workflow 😅

On the plus side, the have an iOS and Android app, and both have similar feature-parity. It really just needs that final 20% added to the mobile app to make it great.

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.

• For product-led teams where support and engineering need to stay closely connected
• Deep integrations with Slack, Linear, and Stripe that few help desks offer
• API-first architecture makes it flexible for developer-heavy teams
• Clean, minimal interface centered around a single inbox
• Great Slack workflows (turn messages into tickets and Linear issues)

• Not designed as a traditional shared inbox (contact@, billing@, admin@ workflows)
• Best suited for technical teams, which may limit adoption for non-technical support staff
• Fewer mature help desk features compared to established tools like Help Scout or Zendesk
• Knowledge base and automation capabilities are more limited

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:

Plain Integration with Linear

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.

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 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!