Zendesk might be the default support tool, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right fit for your team. 

For B2B SaaS companies juggling high-touch support across Slack, MS Teams, Discord, and email, the perfect platform can make or break the customer experience. Your support team needs a solution that works with them — consolidating channels, streamlining collaboration, and surfacing insights — without slowing the pace. Zendesk and Plain are both built to tackle these needs, but in different ways.

In this guide, we’ll break down how they stack up, and the critical features that set them apart for technical, multi-channel support teams. 

“We don’t need a Zendesk replacement; we need the best B2B support tool for developers, and Plain fits that perfectly.” — Christopher O’Neill, Head of Developer Success at Stytch

Plain vs. Zendesk: A side-by-side comparison

Zendesk and Plain are two powerful support platforms built to help teams manage customer conversations, but there’s a world of difference in how they deliver. While Zendesk was designed for transactional B2C support (tickets), Plain is purpose-built for technical B2B teams. Its Slack-first workflows, real-time collaboration features, and deep integrations support technical conversations at scale — without slowing your team.

Here’s how they compare:

Built for B2B, not built to bend

B2B SaaS support is complex by nature. Teams are constantly balancing developer conversations, high-value accounts, and cross-functional workflows. Plain is designed to support this complexity from day one, with features that actually align with how B2B teams operate:

• Tiering lets teams organize and route requests based on what really matters — whether customer plan or strategic value.

• SLA automation tracks your commitments in real time and flags potential breaches before they happen.

• Its unified platform allows support teams to manage and view any customer conversation within a single workspace, no extra tabs required. 

Yes, Zendesk can support some of these needs, but you’ll end up piecing together triggers, macros, custom fields, or relying on third-party add-ons to replicate these workflows. This patchwork approach adds operational headaches and makes scaling support even more complex.

“We didn’t want to adapt our workflows to a legacy tool. Plain’s flexibility and API capabilities allowed us to build a support system that fit our exact use cases.” — Melissa Du, Director of Operations at Voltage Park

Support that happens where your customers actually are

Support conversations don’t just happen over email anymore. And while Zendesk and Plain each promise to help teams manage support across real-time channels like Slack and Teams, only one consolidates every message into one, fast-moving queue. 

With Plain, teams can:

• Route customer messages from Slack, Teams, Discord, and email into a single inbox.

• Map each thread to the right company or user, creating full visibility across channels.

• Triage, reply, and collaborate on every request without switching tools.

This eliminates the risk of missed messages and ensures that performance metrics — like SLA adherence — reflect every customer interaction, not just the ones handled via email.

While Zendesk claims similar collaboration features, it relies heavily on third-party tools like Halp and Channeled to manage Slack-based support. These plugins add another layer of complexity, fragmenting your workflows and reporting. Plus, message delivery isn't always reliable, and duplicate threads can create confusion. The result? You’ll likely be pulling insights across multiple tools by hand. 

“The most important thing for us is to meet our customers where they are. Plain let us do that effectively, and the API-first nature meant we could adapt the tool to our needs — not change our workflows to suit the tool.” — Spencer Mellon, Senior Manager, Technical Support at Voltage Park

Built for how your team works, not how tickets move

Plain keeps things quick and intuitive. It's built for speed with a 100ms interface, so you can instantly respond to incoming requests across Slack and email. This means your support agents respond in real time, and customers aren’t left hanging.

With features like discussions and integrations with tools like Linear and Jira, incident.io, and Rootly, Plain makes collaboration between support and engineering seamless — whether you're logging bugs or managing live incidents.

Legacy platforms like Zendesk simply can’t keep pace. Its interface revolves around a queue-based ticketing system — think rigid forms and tab-heavy dashboards — for transactional workflows. This can feel clunky and disconnected for teams used to real-time, conversational support.

Managing multiple tools and views wastes precious time on everyday tasks. Some users even report performance issues within Zendesk when dealing with complex workflows or high ticket volume, which can bring resolution to a halt.

“The unification of workflows in Plain isn’t just a convenience – it’s critical for scaling our team and ensuring we provide the best possible experience to our customers.” — Christopher O’Neill, Head of Developer Success at Stytch

Understand how you’re performing, and improve it

Support teams move faster when they know where they stand, and both Zendesk and Plain offer tools to help them measure success. But how they do it, and whether you can trust the data, makes a big difference. 

Plain gives support leaders a real-time view of workload, service quality, and SLA performance, so they can take action before problems spiral:

• Real-time metrics like first response time, resolution time, and support volume give teams a continuous pulse on workload and service quality across all channels. Saved views and filters let teams segment data by channel, tier, or priority, helping you spot trends and bottlenecks. 

• SLA tracking is customizable by tier, team, and channel, so teams can meet commitments based on the customer and communication context, without checking on multiple queues.

• Native reporting eliminates the need to piece together data from different tools or plugins. Every metric lives in one place. 

Zendesk also offers dashboard tools and pre-built reports, but visibility gets murky when your support data hides across the tech stack. Slack plugins often operate independently, creating data silos. And metrics tied to different platforms don’t always align, making it harder to trust reports, enforce SLAs, or know how to improve.

“You can see across the board — how a customer is doing, how your team is doing, and where to improve.” — Simon Rohrbach, Co-Founder & CEO at Plain

Switching is easier than you think

Migration is often the biggest barrier to switching support platforms, especially for teams with custom workflows and high-stakes SLAs. That’s why Plain provides flexible, high-touch onboarding with pre-migration planning, configuration guidance, and proactive check-ins to keep things smooth from day one.

What sets Plain apart is how it tailors this experience to each team. Rather than a one-size-fits-all migration, they adapt the platform in real time to match your setup, cutting complexity and accelerating time-to-value.

Plain’s Zendesk importer is crucial for minimizing disruption and preserving your thread history, attachments, and customer context. Before going live, every import is tested to confirm that metadata like SLAs, tags, and user associations stay intact. That means no loss of visibility, no broken links in your workflow, and no risk of re-opening old tickets.

Just ask Prisma. As the first customer to use Plain’s Zendesk importer, they worked closely with the team to shape the migration experience. Their move involved thousands of support threads. But thanks to Plain’s collaborative, test-first approach, all of their context carried over without a hitch, turning a high-risk switch into a low-stress upgrade.

“Being the first team to trial a new feature can be scary. The Plain team made us a lot more comfortable with the migration.” — Petra Donka, Engineering Manager at Prisma

Book a demo to see how Plain can help your team support customers faster, with less effort and more insight.