Plain vs Intercom

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!

Intercom is great, but is quite expensive for what you get, and it's super live chat focused.

Something I'm regularly reminding small businesses of is that having a live chat has a huge (hidden) cost associated with it, especially as a small team.

It brings with it anxiety of responding (had one client that wouldn't use the restroom out of fear they weren't there to respond to a customer shortly after implementing Intercom into their business.

Yep, it's safe to say that it didn't last very long for their small team, they are no longer using Intercom.

They also charge based on number of contacts and the various components (features) and it gets wildly expensive very quickly.

They are great though and the industry standard for live chat (if you can justify having a few full-time employees to manage your live chat).