98% faster resolution time
Tinybird reduced enterprise resolution time from 6 days to 2 hours.
Plain vs Front
Why teams choose Plain over Front
Front is a shared inbox for teams working a support email together. Plain is open infrastructure for B2B support, so your channels, workflows, and AI agents are never limited by what fits in an inbox.
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COMPARISON TABLE
How Plain compares with Front, side by side
Plain
Front
What it was built for
Customer support, from the ground up.
SLAs, tiers, and routing are yours to configure in the workflow builder or through the API. AI resolves what doesn't need a person, with the option to bring your own agent.
Collaborative email.
Front pioneered the modern shared inbox and is still built around it. Support is a team working an inbox together, with account-level workflows layered on top.
Channels
One queue for every support channel.
Slack, email, chat, and in-app are included on every plan, with Teams and Discord supported as you scale. Messages land in one queue as tickets, and customers get your replies natively in the channel they're already in.
Email first, channels added.
Starter covers a single channel type, so email or Slack or SMS, not several. Omnichannel, including social, voice, and WhatsApp, starts at Professional at $65 a seat.
Architecture & API
Customer infrastructure, full API.
100ms UI, a GraphQL API with full UI parity, headless builds, and no rate limits. A native MCP server with 30 read/write tools.
Channels API for connectivity.
50 API calls a minute on Starter, 100 on Professional, 200 on Enterprise. Raising the limit is a paid add-on at every tier.
Customer context
Full customer context, directly on the ticket.
Every ticket is tied to a customer and their account, with tier, support volume, and open tickets. Bring in fields from your CRM or your own database, and build custom cards from your own API.
Contact records and integrations.
Context comes from Front's CRM integrations and the Channels API. Agents look up backend state in another tab.
AI packaging
AI included, billed on usage
Plain's Customer Agent resolves tickets end to end with citations to your docs. Sidekick Agent investigates across GitHub, Sentry, Datadog, and past tickets. Both run on the credits included in your plan.
Four add-ons, and the resolving one is always extra.
Copilot, Smart QA, and Smart CSAT are add-ons on Starter and Professional, included at Enterprise. AI Autopilot, the one that resolves conversations, is an add-on on every tier including Enterprise.
Bring your own agent
Run your own model.
Any LLM or third-party agent through the API and Machine Users, alongside or instead of Plain's own.
Automation
No rule cap.
Build the workflows your support model needs, in the builder or through the API.
Counted in rules.
10 automation rules on Starter, 20 rules plus macros on Professional, unlimited only at Enterprise. One workspace on Starter, five on Professional.
Seats & SLAs
Free viewer seats, SLAs on Horizon.
1-5 user seats on Foundation, up to 10 on Horizon. Unlimited free viewer seats on every plan. SLAs and escalation paths from Horizon, with no cap on how many policies you set. Business hours on every plan.
plain/pricingEvery seat is paid, SLAs start at Professional.
Per-seat pricing across all three tiers. Ticket SLAs, response time rules, and business hours all require Professional.
front/pricingPricing
Published, AI included.
$45/user/mo Foundation, $99/user/mo Horizon, custom Frontier, all billed annually. AI credits included, viewer seats free, 7-day trial with no credit card.
$25 a seat, with two cliffs.
Starter $25 caps at 10 seats and one channel type. Professional $65 caps at 50. Enterprise $105, annual only. All billed annually; monthly is $35 and $85. Your eleventh hire takes a 10-person bill from $250 to $715 a month.
The top reasons why B2B teams choose Plain
You outgrew the inbox.
Email in, replies out works until accounts have tiers, SLAs, and ticket history. Plain puts plan, usage, and account state on the ticket the moment it lands, so your team, your workflows, and your AI all see the same customer.
You set the rules, not your vendor.
Decide how tickets get routed, escalated, and closed. Plain is fully programmable, so changing how the tool works is something you ship, not something you file a request for. Bring your own AI agents and run them inside Plain.
Anything you can do by hand, you can do through the API.
Full API access from day one: build headless support, embed support in-product, or run Plain behind the tools your team already uses. Clerk built four-tier SLA prioritization themselves.
What companies are seeing with Plain
20x support capacity
n8n scaled support volume 20x while growing the team just 2x. AI handles 60% of tickets.
50 hours saved each week
Resend reclaimed 50 hours a week across a five-person team that handles 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.
The most important thing was meeting our customers where they were. 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
Technical Support Manager, Voltage Park
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
We buy out your contract.
If you're mid-contract with Front, we'll buy out your remaining months so you're not paying twice.
2
We create an action plan.
Week 1: sandbox setup and test import. Week 2: pilot with 4 to 5 power users, then full rollout. Front stays read-only for reference.
3
We rebuild what matters.
We treat migration as a reset, not a lift-and-shift. We don't replicate your Front rules 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 Front 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 Front may be a better fit.
Your support is email.
Front's shared inbox is the best in the category at what it does. If your team triages a support@ address and that's the job, Front does it well and Plain is more tool than you need.
Your team isn't technical.
Front is built for ops and non-technical teams working an inbox together. Plain's ceiling needs an API to reach.
You need SMS, WhatsApp, or social.
Front covers SMS and social from Professional up, and sells native WhatsApp as an add-on. On Plain you'd build them through the API.
Questions and answers.
Frequently asked questions we get when comparing Plain and Front.
What is the difference between Plain and Front?
Front is a shared inbox. It took collaborative email and made it work for a team: assignment, internal comments, rules, and analytics on top of the mail you already have. It's strongest when support means working a support@ address together. Plain is infrastructure for B2B customer support. Your product's data sits on every ticket, Slack and Teams are real channels, AI resolves and investigates, and everything in the UI is in the API. Front suits teams whose support is email. Plain suits teams whose support is a function with its own channels, SLAs, and automation.
Can Plain replace Front?
Yes, for B2B software companies. You get email, Slack, Teams, Discord, chat, and in-app in one queue, a help center, AI agents, workflows, and an API to build on. If your team relies on Front's SMS, WhatsApp, or social channels, check whether you need those natively or would rather build them on Plain's API.
How does Plain's pricing compare with Front's?
Plain publishes its prices: Foundation at $45/user/month, Horizon at $99/user/month, and Frontier custom, billed annually, with a 7-day free trial and no credit card. AI is included and billed on usage, and viewer seats are free. Front charges per seat, billed annually: Starter $25, Professional $65, Enterprise $105. Monthly billing is $35 and $85, and Enterprise is annual only. AI is separate below Enterprise: Copilot, Smart QA, and Smart CSAT are add-ons, and AI Autopilot is an add-on on every tier.
Is Front expensive?
The entry price isn't. The cliffs are. Starter is $25 a seat but caps at 10 seats and a single channel type. A 10-person team pays $250 a month. The eleventh hire moves you to Professional at $65, and that same team now pays $715. Professional caps at 50, and the fifty-first seat moves you to Enterprise. Automation is capped too: 10 rules on Starter, 20 on Professional, unlimited only at Enterprise. Teams often reach Enterprise by accumulation rather than choosing it.
Is Plain or Front better for Slack support?
Plain runs Slack as a native customer channel on every plan: 25 channels on Foundation, unlimited on Horizon and above, with Microsoft Teams on Horizon and Discord on Frontier. A message in a private customer channel is a ticket, with an SLA. Front supports Slack as a channel, but Starter covers a single channel type, so Slack alongside email means Professional at $65 a seat.
Does Plain show customer data from our product?
Yes. Customer Cards pull live from your API, so plan tier, MRR, workspace ID, deployment status, or anything else you define sits next to every conversation and updates itself. This is the main day-to-day difference from a shared inbox. In Front, an agent reads the message, then opens your admin tool to find out who they're talking to.
Does Plain's AI cost extra?
No. It's included in the plan and billed on actual usage, not as a separate license per seat. On Front, Copilot, Smart QA, and Smart CSAT are priced per seat below Enterprise, and AI Autopilot, the one that resolves conversations, is an add-on at every tier.
Can we run our own AI agent?
Yes. Run any LLM or a third-party agent through Plain's API and Machine Users, alongside or instead of Plain's own, and Plain handles routing, queues, SLAs, and handoff. There's no equivalent path in Front.
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.