If you're a product-driven company looking for an API-focused and deeply integrated help desk, Plain is your best bet.
On the other hand, if you're looking for a collaborative help desk that integrates into all of your support and social media channels, then Front would work better.
We believe there are better options available in this category, read below to learn what this software does well, and what they could do better. ⤵
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Bring all your customer conversations from your support channels – like Slack, email, and forms – into a single, lightning-fast interface. Integrated with the tools you already use, backed by their powerful API.
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.
Plain is focusing heavily on product-teams that can benefit from deeper integrations with tools like Linear, Slack, and Stripe.
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.
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.
If you're looking for a more traditional help desk, 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!
The all-in-one help desk chat tool for teams of all sizes. Great if you want to offer support from all channels to your customers and don't mind not having as much control.
My main question here is, are you planning on having your social channels and chat apps as your main source of support?
I mean really, think about that question deeply. I understand that the gut reaction is "yes, that would be great!"—but maybe those 5 customers of yours that prefer to message you via Facebook Messenger or Twitter DM's shouldn't be the sole cause of fragmentation across support channels, requiring you to then use a tool like Front to rope it all back in. So ask yourself, just because you "can" open up your support channels, "should you"?
If the answer is "yes", then that's where I can vouch for Front, but again, you're accepting support fragmentation, and good luck roping that back in in the future.
Again, if you're a small team, you should probably have a primary and centralized support channel, usually "[email protected]"—that way you can better control routing and tracking feedback.
Also, if you're like us and you love using Superhuman for your direct emails, you're not going to benefit from the other features of Front, like "shared inboxes" and such across the team.
You really need to use Front as your main email inbox to get the most use out of it.
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