| Functionality | 5 <p>Plain's positioning focuses on delivering exceptional functionality for B2B software teams. This includes excellent support for channels such as Slack, MS Teams, email etc. However, compared to other CS tools, Plain lacks some common functionality you might expect such as the ability to create help centres or configure chatbots.</p> | 10 <p>Zendesk packs all the essential support tools most SMBs—and even enterprises—could ask for. It stands out with the most comprehensive range of support channels in our curation, making it easy to manage seamless cross-channel communication with customers within a single ticket. Plus, its advanced automation, AI capabilities, and robust reporting features are hard to beat.</p><p>In our experience, Zendesk tends to be the go-to platform for companies looking to level up their customer support as they grow.</p> | 8 <p>Pylon is "modern support platform for B2B companies". It offers a good range of features including support for email, live chat, ticket forms, Slack/ Teams and help centre. It also offers decent automation, AI and reporting functionality.</p><p>However, it lacks support for many channels (e.g. phone, socials) or custom objects.</p> | 2 <p>Channeled's Slack-centricity means that it's overall feature set as a dedicated customer support tool is relatively lacking. To be more specific, Channeled is best suited to businesses who primarily manage their customer interactions via Slack and not via other channels such as SMS, live chat or email. That being said, when it comes to managing Slack threads, it provides a robust and complete feature set including shortcuts that can be triggered by emoji reactions within Slack, and analytics/sentiment analysis over Slack threads.</p> |
| Ease of Use | 9 <p>As a result of it's focus on B2B software teams and opinionated product positioning, Plain has created a focused and intuitive product with a shallow learning curve. An average SMB employee would require less than 30 minutes and no guidance to master the product. It's onboarding process is simple, short and easy to understand. Additionally, it's web app is beautifully designed and intuitive to use.</p> | 2 <p>Zendesk has one of the steepest learning curves we’ve seen. The interface can feel overwhelming, with settings spread out across different areas like Zendesk Chat and the Admin Center. If you don’t have an admin with prior experience configuring and managing Zendesk, getting up to speed can quickly become frustrating.</p> | 8 <p>Pylon has a relatively quick learning curve - an average employee should take 1-2 hours to familiarize themselves with the key workflows, with the bulk of that time spent on getting up to speed with how Slack/ Teams integration works.</p> | 9 <p>As a result of it's focus on Slack, Channeled has a shallow learning curve. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">An average SMB employee would require less than 30 minutes and no guidance to master the product. </span>It's onboarding process is simple, short and easy to understand and makes full use of Slacks native integrations. Additionally, it's web app is simple, intuitive and easy to navigate.</p> |
| Look and feel | 9 <p>Plain stands out as one of the best designed products on the market. It's clear that the team have crafted the product with a lot of care. The web app is modern, slick and very fast to use. Animations and sound effects are used with taste to add a high level of polish to the user experience.</p><p>Additionally, the web app neatly labels core buttons with a corresponding keyboard shortcut enabling agents to rattle through support tickets faster than they might have done with just a mouse.</p> | 4 <p>From both an agent and admin perspective, Zendesk’s interface feels plain, and some pages can come across as cluttered and overwhelming. But on the bright side, page load times are quick.</p> | 6 <p>We find Pylon's interface to be clean and modern. However, some pages can be slow to load e.g. opening a ticket takes ~2 seconds, and the analytics dashboard can take >5 seconds to load.</p> | 8 <p>Channeled's web app is simple, modern and easy to navigate. Additionally, it's design aesthetic is minimalist making it easy to work with and fast to load.</p> |
| Customisability | 7 <p>Though Plain has built an opinionated product, it's API-centric nature provides a number of options for customisability. For example, businesses are able to sync customer data right into Plain via their API by connecting their backend to the platform and configuring custom fields. This means that businesses don't have to worry about syncing customer data or integrations. However, it's worth noting that whilst this is great for modern B2B software teams, businesses looking for something a little less developer focused should look elsewhere.</p> | 10 <p>Zendesk offers a high level of customization for both internal and external pages. Externally, you can deeply customize the style and layout of your Help Center (supporting over 40 languages), even using custom code to make it uniquely yours. Internally, the agent workspace is also highly flexible—you can tailor the layout and how information is displayed, with dynamic updates based on the content of each ticket.</p> | 8 <p>Pylon offers good customization options including custom views, custom fields, and custom reporting (including the view of customer context within Account Management). A unique feature here is that users can create swimlane diagrams for Kanban views. However, it lacks more advanced customization features like creating custom data objects and tracking custom events. </p> | 3 <p>Channeled does provide some elements of customisability such as the ability to create custom tags which businesses can assign to conversation threads, or the ability to create custom shortcuts which can be triggered by emoji reactions directly from Slack. However, there are limited routes for further customisability such as the inability to manipulate analytics dashboards or save custom views.</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 7 <p>Plain offers a simple self-serve free trial for their platform. We found the initial setup to be simple, taking <5 mins. Setting up your first channels are particularly easy too - given Plain's focus on Slack and similar channels these take only a few clicks to connect and configure. However, when it comes to longer term customization, there are endless options available to teams who wish to take advantage of Plain's very flexible API.</p> | 3 <p>We found Zendesk's onboarding process to be clunky and a bit overwhelming. Configuring even a basic setup can take over 30 minutes, largely because the interface feels disjointed, with settings scattered in different places. Connecting your first channels can be especially frustrating—for instance, linking external emails requires manual configuration unless you’re using Gmail. And because the platform is so customizable, it’s easy to spend an entire week fine-tuning everything to fully unlock its potential.</p> | 5 <p>Frustratingly, Pylon does not offer a self-serve free trial on its website. Instead you'll need to trudge through a sales demo to access the platform. However, calls are generally short and often deals are often closed in just one call if you're looking to purchase right away. Once you're in, initial setup is very slick, taking less than 10 minutes. Additionally, given its Slack centricity, connecting core channels is a one-click process.</p> | 8 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Channeled offers a simple self-serve free trial for their platform. We found the initial setup to be simple, taking <5 mins. Setting up your first channels are particularly easy too - given Channeled's focus on Slack. It takes only a few clicks to connect and configure.</span></p> |
| Customer Support | 5 <p>Plain's support team can be contacted via email or in app form. We find their agents to be fairly responsive (response times <12 hours), knowledgeable and helpful. When tested, they are often able to troubleshoot issues within one response.</p> | 2 <p>Multiple users we’ve spoken to have raised concerns about Zendesk’s customer support. A common frustration is the support team’s tendency to provide unhelpful responses, often redirecting users to irrelevant Help Center articles and requiring far too much back-and-forth. We also found navigating Zendesk’s Help Center to be a challenge—it’s missing the clear visuals and video guidance that other platforms do so well.</p> | 9 <p>Pylon offers support via in-app live chat and Slack/ Teams. We've found the team helpful, and quick to respond. Pylon is also known for being very responsive to product feedback.</p> | 3 <p>Channeled customer support options for most of it's pricing tiers remains minimal. Channeled provides a contact email address for support requirements as well as a documentation website which offers explanations and walkthroughs of its core features; however, the latter is still largely unfinished at the time of writing.</p> |
| Integratability | 7 <p>Plain offers a handful of built in integrations with popular CRMs (such as Salesforce and Hubspot) as well as project management tools (such as Linear). However, it does lack the breadth of pre-built integrations that some of its competitors offer. That being said, its best in class API offers additional extensibility, though this is best suited to developer centric software teams.</p> | 9 <p>Zendesk boasts a massive ecosystem of pre-built integrations that cover most of the tools startups rely on. This includes popular CRMs like HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Salesforce, email marketing tools like Mailchimp, and project management platforms like Asana, Jira, and Trello. Beyond that, it offers an extensive marketplace for even more integrations, plus a robust API for building custom connections.</p> | 7 <p>Pylon currently offers only 10 integrations, though they cover key areas like project management (JIRA, Linear, Asana) and CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive). The recent addition of webhook support improves its integration capabilities. However, it still lacks integrations in categories like data enrichment, surveys, and marketing tools. It does offer an API for custom integrations.</p> | 7 <p>Channeled provides a number of integrations with popular CRMs (Salesforce, Hubspot), helpdesks (Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk), project management tools (Linear, Asana etc.) and automation platforms like Zapier. Additionally, it offers an API through which users can interact with data directly, though this is a relatively new feature that Channeled is continuing to build upon.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 3 <p>Plain does not currently offer any self serve data export functionality, however, they do offer this on-demand to customers on their highest pricing tier.</p> | 8 <p>Zendesk allows you to self-serve export key data with ease. For most other data, exports are available either through the API or by making a request to their support team.</p> | 5 <p>Pylon's data export capabilities appear to be limited. While users can export reports to CSV, it doesn't seem possible to self-export tickets.</p> | 7 <p>Businsses can export data themselves via the web app as well as through Channeled's dedicated API.</p> |
