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. ⤵
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!
Team inbox and chat tool that empowers teams to collaborate around email, SMS & social media messaging apps.
While we don't think Missive is the best email app, it does solve two problems really well. The first being that it helps consolidate all your inboxes across different platforms (email, WhatsApp, SMS, social media).
The second, is that it helps team members collaborate on answering to messages. Whether it's via assigning messages to the best person suited to respond, or discussing the best way to respond privately internally via the team chat feature.
If you're looking to delegate your inbox and get your team to help respond to messages, Missive is the ideal solution. You don't need to give full access to your email inbox to team members, just simply assign the emails you want taken off your plate!
Do team members typically need your input when responding? With Missive they can easily send you a private chat message to get your help, right on the platform. All of this makes Missive great for remote teams.
If you're wanting team collaboration on emails, Missive will be a better choice as Superhuman doesn't have these features (yet anyway!). Also, if you're wanting a unified inbox for emails, SMS messages, WhatsApp, and social media DM's, Missive will also be a better choice for you.
ButiIf you're comparing Missive vs Superhuman for solo-use (without a team), Superhuman has a much more beautiful minimal UI and the user experience is also a lot more smooth. Superhuman's interface isn't designed like every other email app out there, they put a lot of thought into making email more simple to use, yet more powerful.
If you're a professional who wants the best email experience, Superhuman is going to be your best bet (it's what we've used here at efficient app for 5+ years).
That said, if you're someone who wants something more budget friendly, Missive is a good choice since they have a free plan.
Missive is a great entry into having a more established Help Desk. We might recommend it for small teams, but for larger teams there are more established tools we'd recommend.
Missive is great for Founders who perhaps are at the point of scaling their business and wanting to bring the greater team in to help support email and messaging tickets. Missive will allow you to start delegating your inbox, and in the meantime, we recommend setting up specific email addresses for different business functions (e.g. [email protected], [email protected]). Missive will be a great tool to help you start to experience this segmentation.
Once your processes are more established, you might want to switch over to a proper Help Desk. The team who built Missive is small (about 3 people), so if you're a more established business, a larger help desk company is probably what you need.
A proper help desk will allow you to have chat features right on your website and separate inboxes for different email addresses (with different team permissions). You will also get great collaboration features like assigning emails to different team members, and leaving notes for one another if further collaboration is needed. Further you get a knowledge base for creating self-service content for customers. Read about the help desk we use, Help Scout or if you want something similar to Missive, check out Front.
All this being said, if you use WhatsApp, SMS, and social media DM's as core messaging components to your business, Missive will be a better choice.
Curious how this app compares to others?