20x support capacity
n8n scaled support volume 20x while growing the team just 2x. AI handles 60% of tickets.
Plain vs ClearFeed
Why teams choose Plain over ClearFeed
ClearFeed's AI answers what you've documented. Plain's reads your code, logs, and issues, so your team resolves technical tickets without waiting on an engineer.
Fyxer
COMPARISON TABLE
How Plain compares with ClearFeed, side by side
Plain
ClearFeed
What it is
One support platform.
Slack, Teams, Discord, email, chat, and in-app in one queue, with SLAs, routing, AI, and a help center.
Three products, priced separately.
External Helpdesk for customers, Internal Helpdesk for employees, and Integrations, which pipes Slack into Zendesk or Jira. You buy each on its own, and the same person working across two is billed twice.
How you're billed
Per seat, plus credits for work done.
A resolution is 100 credits. A connected agent is 15 per ticket assignment and 15 per discussion. You pay for outcomes, not for the number of channels you're in.
Channels or tickets, whichever is higher.
Usage plans round up in slabs of 10 channels and 100 tickets, counted at the maximum ClearFeed was added to on any single day that month.
Channels
Every channel, no feature gate.
Slack, email, chat, and in-app on any plan, with Teams and Discord as you scale.
Slack, email, and web chat on Starter.
Microsoft Teams, Discord, and Telegram all require Professional at $49 an agent, double the entry price.
SLAs
SLAs, business hours, and escalation paths.
Set first response and resolution targets by customer tier, run them on your set business hours, and escalate automatically when an SLA is at risk.
Professional only.
SLA configuration and reports start on Professional. Starter has none, and the Integrations edition never gets them.
Account context
Account context, built in.
Every ticket is tied to a customer and their account, with tier, support volume, and open threads. Bring in fields from your CRM or your own database, or build custom cards from your own API.
CRM sync at Professional.
HubSpot and Salesforce sync require the $49 tier. Below that, context is custom fields you configure.
AI investigation
Reads the system, not just the docs.
Plain's Sidekick Agent checks deploys in GitHub, pulls errors from Sentry and Datadog, and searches past tickets, so your team resolves technical tickets without waiting on an engineer.
Reads what you've documented.
AI agents answer from knowledge sources like Notion, Confluence, and Google Drive, and take actions in Jira, Zendesk, HubSpot, Okta, and BambooHR. No GitHub, Sentry, or Datadog.
Bring your own agent
On any plan.
Run your own LLM or a third-party agent on Plain's infrastructure, alongside or instead of Plain's own.
Enterprise only.
You can bring your own AI model on a custom plan, above 15 agents or 50 channels, but not on any lower plan.
Seats
Counted per product.
Someone who is an agent in both your Internal and External Helpdesk accounts is billed twice.
Pricing
Published, credits included.
$45 a user a month on Foundation with 1,000 credits, $99 on Horizon with 2,500, and custom Frontier, billed annually. Viewer seats free, 7-day trial with no credit card.
Two models, three products.
Agent plans are $24 or $49 an agent for 1 to 15 agents. Usage plans start at $40 a month for 10 channels and 100 tickets. The AI Pack is $20 a month on top, and each product edition is billed separately.
The top reasons why B2B teams choose Plain
Your engineers stop being the escalation path.
Plain's Sidekick Agent reads your code, logs, and issues, so the tickets that used to go to engineering get answered by support in minutes.
You can run your own model on any plan.
Bring your own LLM or a third-party agent and run it on Plain's infrastructure, alongside or instead of Plain's own. On ClearFeed that needs an Enterprise plan, above 15 agents.
You pay for outcomes, not channels.
ClearFeed's usage plans bill on the highest number of Slack channels you were in on any single day that month. Adding a customer channel raises your bill before anyone sends a message.
What companies are seeing with Plain
50 hours saved each week
Resend reclaimed 50 hours a week across a five-person team handling 1,000 tickets weekly.
95% faster first response time
Voltage Park cut first response time from over an hour to 3 minutes after leaving a legacy help desk.
98% faster resolution time
Tinybird reduced enterprise resolution time from 6 days to 2 hours.
By giving your support team the tools that are usually outside their remit, the loop is shorter. If we can edit our own internal tools, that makes us faster to fix people's problems. If we can fix the bugs ourselves, even better.
Vicky Firth
CX Lead, Granola
How we make migrating to Plain easy.
Migrating a system of record isn't what anyone gets excited about. So here's what the process actually looks like, specifically.
1
You stop paying for two tools.
If ClearFeed is bridging Slack into Zendesk, Freshdesk, or Jira, Plain replaces both halves. Your Slack channels stay where they are.
2
We buy out your contract.
If you're mid-contract, we'll buy out your remaining months so you're not paying twice.
3
We create an action plan.
Week 1-2: sandbox setup and test import. Week 3-4: pilot with 4-5 power users. Week 5-6: full rollout.
4
We rebuild what matters.
We treat migration as a reset, not a lift-and-shift. We don't replicate your ClearFeed setup in Plain. We figure out what you were actually trying to achieve, and build that instead.
Our honest comparison promise
Most comparison pages are dressed-up sales collateral.
Comparison tables are especially easy to rig: choose the rows carefully enough, and one side always wins.
Competition is good. Selective, outdated comparison pages aren't.
So here's our promise. Every row in our table cites a source, covers both products in the same level of detail, and includes the places where ClearFeed is the better choice. If you've received a comparison about Plain from a competitor, or found a false claim here, we're happy to fact-check and correct: factcheck@plain.com.
Simon Rohrbach
Co-Founder & CEO, Plain
Where ClearFeed may be a better fit.
Your service desk is internal.
ClearFeed sells an Internal Helpdesk for IT, HR, finance, and legal requests, with integrations into Okta, JumpCloud, and BambooHR. Plain does customer support and isn't a fit for that.
You're keeping your existing help desk.
If Zendesk or Freshdesk is staying, ClearFeed's Integrations edition puts Slack in front of it without replacing it. Plain replaces your support tool altogether.
You have few agents and many channels.
ClearFeed sells usage-based plans with no agent licenses at all, so anyone can reply. For an engineering team with no designated agents, that shape can work out cheaper.
Questions and answers.
Frequently asked questions we get when comparing Plain and ClearFeed.
What is the difference between Plain and ClearFeed?
Both run support in Slack for B2B teams, so the difference is structure rather than category. ClearFeed sells three separately priced products: an Integrations edition that files tickets into another tool, plus Internal and External Helpdesk editions. Usage is metered by channels, tickets, and AI credits. Plain is one platform. Slack, Teams, Discord, email, chat, and in-app in one queue, with SLAs, routing, AI, and a help center, and an API that does everything the UI does.
Can Plain replace ClearFeed?
Yes, and often the help desk underneath it too. If ClearFeed is bridging Slack into another ticketing tool, Plain replaces both, so you're removing a line item rather than swapping one. If you're using their Internal Helpdesk for IT and HR requests, that's a different job and Plain isn't a fit.
How does the billing compare?
ClearFeed's usage plans bill on the greater of your channel count or ticket volume, rounded up in slabs of 10 channels and 100 tickets, with channels counted at the maximum ClearFeed was added to on any single day that month. So a quiet month across many channels still bills as a busy one. Plain charges a seat price plus credits for work done. A resolution is 100 credits. A connected agent is 15 per ticket assignment and 15 per discussion. Being in a channel costs nothing.
Is ClearFeed expensive?
The $24 entry tier is competitive, but thinner than it looks. Microsoft Teams, Discord, and Telegram channels, SLA configuration, the knowledge base, the customer portal, and CRM sync all require Professional at $49 an agent. AI is separate again: the AI Pack is $20 a month for 100 credits, roughly one credit per AI invocation, then $2 per 10.
Can we run our own AI agent?
Yes, on any Plain plan. Run your own LLM or a third-party agent on Plain's infrastructure at 15 credits per ticket assignment or discussion, and Plain handles routing, queues, SLAs, and handoff. ClearFeed offers Bring Your Own AI Model on Enterprise plans, above 15 agents or 50 channels.
Does Plain show customer data from our product?
Yes. Every ticket is tied to a customer and their account, with tier, support volume, and open threads. You can bring in fields from your CRM or your own database, or build custom cards from your own API.
Does Plain require an engineering team to run?
No. Support teams of two to two hundred run on Plain day to day. The smallest is two co-founders with no support function at all. AI works with no code, started from a ticket, Slack, a workflow, or a schedule. Engineering enters when you want it to.