20x support capacity
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Plain vs Help Scout
Why teams choose Plain over Help Scout
Help Scout is a clean shared inbox for small teams working email. 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 Help Scout, side by side
Plain
Help Scout
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.
Email, done well.
A shared inbox, a Docs knowledge base, and the Beacon widget. Built for small teams answering email together.
Channels
One queue for every support channel.
Slack, email, chat, and in-app are included on every plan, with Teams and Discord as you scale. Messages land in one queue as tickets, and customers get your replies natively in the channel they're already in.
Email, chat, and social.
Email on every plan, with live chat, Messenger, and Instagram on Standard and WhatsApp starting at Plus. Phone and SMS run through integrations. Slack and Microsoft Teams are not supported, so Slack support means forwarding into an inbox.
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.
Ten custom fields, fifty customer properties.
Capped counts of static data points. Good for who someone is, not built to show what their account is doing right now.
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.
Help Scout's AI Answers, or nothing.
No documented path for running your own agent inside the inbox.
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.
$0.75 per resolution.
AI Answers is a usage add-on on every paid tier, charged once per resolved conversation. 1,000 resolutions a month is $750 on top of seats, which can exceed the seat bill entirely.
Seats & SLAs
Free viewer seats, SLAs on Horizon.
1-5 user seats on Foundation, up to 10 on Horizon, and 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.
Seats capped, SLAs thin until Pro.
Standard is capped at 25 users, Plus at 50, and Pro has a 10-seat minimum. Viewer seats start at Plus: 5 included, 15 on Pro. SLAs are one basic policy on Standard and two on Plus.
Pricing
Published, AI included
$45/user/mo Foundation, $99/user/mo Horizon, custom Frontier, billed annually. AI credits included, viewer seats free, 7-day trial with no credit card.
$25 a seat, then the meters.
Free for 5 users. Standard $25, Plus $45, Pro $75 per user per month billed annually, or $30, $54, and $90 monthly. Pro is sold through sales on a 10-seat minimum.
Automation
No workflow cap.
Build what your support model needs, in the builder or through the API.
Counted, and gated.
150 basic workflows on Standard, 500 advanced on Plus, unlimited on Pro. One basic SLA policy on Standard, two on Plus.
The top reasons why B2B teams choose Plain
Your customers are in Slack.
You support customers in Slack, Teams, and Discord, and with Plain they get your replies right in the channel they're already in. Help Scout has none of them, so Slack support means forwarding into an inbox and losing the thread.
You set the rules, not your vendor.
Decide how tickets get routed, escalated, and closed, and change rules when your support model changes. No cap on workflows, no upgrade to unlock them.
Anything you can do by hand, you can do through the API.
Full API access from day one: build headless support, embed it in your product, run your own AI agents inside Plain, or put Plain behind the tools your team already uses.
What companies are seeing with Plain
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.
98% faster resolution time
Tinybird reduced enterprise resolution time from 6 days to 2 hours.
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 Help Scout, 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. Help Scout 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 Help Scout workflows 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 Help Scout 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 Help Scout may be a better fit.
You're a small team and email is the job.
Help Scout is the cleanest shared inbox there is. Under ten people answering a support@ address, it does that well and Plain is more tool than you need.
You want to start free.
Five users, one inbox, and one Docs site at no cost. Plain's entry is $45 per user a month after a 7-day trial.
Your team isn't technical.
Help Scout is built to be set up in an afternoon by someone who isn't an engineer. Plain's ceiling needs an API to reach.
Questions and answers.
Frequently asked questions we get when comparing Plain and Help Scout.
What is the difference between Plain and Help Scout?
Help Scout is a shared inbox with a knowledge base attached. It's built for small teams answering email together, and it's one of the cleanest products in that category. 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. Help Scout suits teams whose support is email. Plain suits teams whose support is a function with its own channels, SLAs, and automation.
Can Plain replace Help Scout?
Yes, and it's one of our one-click migrations. 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 support is a small team answering a support@ address and nothing more, Help Scout does that well and you may not need to move.
How does Plain's pricing compare with Help Scout'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. AI is included and billed on usage, and viewer seats are free. Help Scout is per user: free for 5 users, then Standard at $25, Plus at $45, and Pro at $75 per user per month billed annually, or $30, $54, and $90 monthly. Pro is sold through sales on a 10-seat minimum. On top of seats, AI Answers is $0.75 per resolution, extra inboxes are $10 a month, and extra Docs sites are $20.
Is Help Scout expensive?
The seats aren't. The meters are. A ten-person team on Standard is $250 a month on annual billing, or $300 monthly, which is genuinely cheap. Add 1,000 AI resolutions and it's $1,000, with the AI line now larger than the seat line. The smaller meters add up too: a second Docs site is $20 a month, and every inbox past your plan's limit is $10.
Does Help Scout support Slack?
Not as a support channel. There's an integration for notifying your team, but customer conversations in Slack have to be forwarded into an inbox, which breaks the thread and loses the formatting. Plain runs Slack as a native channel on every plan: 25 channels on Foundation, unlimited on Horizon and above, with Teams and Discord as you scale. A message in a private customer channel is a ticket, with an SLA.
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. Help Scout has contact records and custom fields, which tell you who someone is. They don't tell you what that account is doing right now.
Does Plain's AI cost extra?
No. It runs on the credits included in your plan, and you can top up if you need more. Help Scout's AI Answers is $0.75 every time it resolves a conversation, on every paid tier. There's a 3-month trial and you can cap monthly spend, though capping it means the AI stops working when you hit the limit.
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 Help Scout.
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.