| Functionality | 5 <p>Chatwoot is a lightweight tool that offers some support functionality that most SMBs will need. Chatwoot allows you to offer support via live chat, email, WhatsApp, social channels and create Help Centres. It also has basic automation and reporting functionality.</p><p>However, it lacks phone support, a no-code chatbot builder to automate chat-related workflow and meaningful analytics functionality.</p> | 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> |
| Ease of Use | 8 <p>Chatwoot has a simple, intuitive interface that is easy to use. It is easy to locate key information and navigating key workflows such as replying to tickets, setting up automation are straightforward and smooth. It should only take a few hours for an average startup employee to be proficient with Chatwoot.</p> | 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> |
| Look and feel | 7 <p>While not as slick as more established competitors, we find Chatwoot's interface modern and slick with fast page load times.</p> | 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> |
| Customisability | 8 <p>Chatwoot only offers basic customisability out of the box. Ticket routing and automation options are limited, only basic stylistic changes can be made to the Help Centre, and there's no custom reporting.</p><p>However, Chatwoot is open source. This means its source code is publicly available, so you can customise pretty much anything if you have the engineering resources to do so.</p> | 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> |
| Ease of Setup | 6 <p>Chatwoot offers a simple self-serve free trial for their platform. We found the initial setup to be very simple, taking less than 10 minutes. However, setting up your first channels can be a little tricky. For example, non-Outlook email users will need to configure email connections manually rather than a simple one-click approach. Additionally, Chatwoot offers a number of deeper customization options which can take some time to set up - such as workflow automations.</p> | 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> |
| Customer Support | 6 <p>Chatwoot offers in-app live chat support during US business hours. In our experience, the quality of Chatwoot's customer support has been quite inconsistent.</p><p>At times, the team is very responsive and helpful. But we've also had experiences of having to wait up to 3 days for a response.</p> | 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> |
| Integratability | 3 <p>Chatwoot only has 10 pre-built integrations, none of which are CRMs or phone systems, which many customers would ideally link to Chatwoot.</p><p>However, it does have an API for custom integrations.</p> | 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> |
| Ease of Migration | 5 <p>Chatwoot offers easy contact export but doesn't allow for the export of conversations via self-serve. However, that latter should still be possible via API.</p> | 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> |
