Intercom is more known as being a live chat tool than a help desk even. So if you're looking to have a more chat-focused experience with your customers, Intercom is your best bet.
On the other hand, if you're a product that has shared Slack connect channels with your customers and support often flows into Slack, then Plain has your back with an incredibly robust and deep Slack integration bringing everything to a single pane of glass.
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 live chat and help desk for growing SaaS teams. Recommended only if you have a full-time support person.
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).
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