Chatwoot vs Plain
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
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The short answer
Both sides assessedChatwoot compared with Plain
Both attract technical buyers, but Chatwoot's appeal is owning the source and the infrastructure while Plain's is a hosted GraphQL API and a B2B channel model built around Slack, Teams, and Discord. Chatwoot's channel mix is consumer and web messaging (WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok); Plain's is business collaboration channels. If your customers message you on WhatsApp, Chatwoot; if they open a Slack Connect channel and file Linear issues, Plain.
Plain compared with Chatwoot
Both attract technical buyers, but for opposite reasons: Chatwoot's appeal is owning MIT-licensed source you can self-host and modify, while Plain's is a hosted GraphQL API and a channel model built around Slack, Teams, and Discord. Chatwoot's channel mix is consumer web messaging (WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok) and it is far cheaper per agent; Plain's is business collaboration channels with native Linear and Jira escalation. If your customers message you on WhatsApp, take Chatwoot; if they open a Slack Connect channel and expect a Linear issue back, take Plain.
Choose Chatwoot if
Technically capable teams that need data residency, source-code control, or a genuinely zero-cost support platform: EU and regulated companies with sovereignty requirements, agencies deploying per-client instances, and cost-constrained startups with an engineer willing to own a server.
Choose Plain if
B2B software companies, especially developer-tools and infrastructure startups, whose customers are technical, whose support arrives in shared Slack, Teams, or Discord channels, and who have engineering capacity to use an API-first platform properly.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Chatwoot | Plain |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Support | Support |
| Starting price | $0 (Community Edition self-hosted, or cloud Hacker tier); $19 per agent per month for cloud Startups | $45 per user per month billed annually (Foundation, $55 monthly) (7 days trial) |
| Pricing model | Two parallel ladders: a per-agent cloud subscription (Hacker free, Startups, Business, Enterprise) and a self-hosted ladder (Community Edition free under MIT, Premium Support, Enterprise Edition). Captain AI is metered by credits on both, with allowances by tier and overage sold per 1,000. | Per-seat subscription in three tiers, each with a seat band and a monthly credit allowance that both AI agents draw on. Ari, the customer-facing agent, costs 100 credits per resolution; Sidekick, the internal copilot, costs 15 to 300 or more credits depending on the effort a task takes. Viewer seats are unlimited and free on every plan. Billed annually or monthly, with the annual rate roughly 20% lower and double the included credits. |
| Free plan | Two free options: cloud Hacker for up to 2 agents with 500 conversations a month, live chat only, and 30-day data retention; or self-hosted Community Edition, free forever with unlimited agents but no Captain AI, voice, custom branding, or SSO. | No |
| Free trial | 15 days on cloud plans | 7 days, no credit card required |
| Best for | Technically capable teams that need data residency, source-code control, or a genuinely zero-cost support platform: EU and regulated companies with sovereignty requirements, agencies deploying per-client instances, and cost-constrained startups with an engineer willing to own a server. | B2B software companies, especially developer-tools and infrastructure startups, whose customers are technical, whose support arrives in shared Slack, Teams, or Discord channels, and who have engineering capacity to use an API-first platform properly. |
| Setup time | Cloud: minutes to a working inbox with a 15-day trial. Self-hosted: a competent engineer can have a Docker deployment running in a few hours, but a production-grade install with backups, monitoring, TLS, S3 storage, and an upgrade plan is realistically two to five days of work plus ongoing maintenance. | A working workspace with Slack and email connected in an afternoon. Getting real value (workflows routing to Linear, customer cards populated from your own API, Ari trained on your documentation, SLAs configured) is more like two to four weeks with engineering involvement. |
| Learning curve | Low for agents; the inbox behaves as expected. Moderate for administrators configuring automation rules, macros, SLA policies, and Captain AI. High for whoever owns a self-hosted deployment, since that person needs to be comfortable with Postgres, Redis, object storage, and version upgrades. | Low for agents, moderate to high for the person configuring it. The API-first design means the best implementations involve writing code, and teams that treat Plain as a point-and-click help desk will under-use it. The 7-day trial is short for a proper technical evaluation, so plan the pilot before starting the clock. |
| Platforms | Web app, Self-hosted (Linux with PostgreSQL, Redis, S3-compatible storage), Cloud SaaS, iOS and Android apps, REST API | Web app, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Discord integrations, Embeddable chat and forms, Customer portal, GraphQL API, MCP server |
| Compliance | SOC 2 Type II (cloud service), with documented personnel, development, testing, and cloud security practices, Encryption, audit logs, and role-based access controls, GDPR: self-hosting allows full control over data location, which is the practical route to residency compliance | GDPR handling as a UK-incorporated operator (Not Just Tickets Ltd), Advanced security controls positioned on the Frontier tier; detailed certification evidence is not published on the marketing pages |
| Founded | 2017 | 2020 |
| Headquarters | Distributed; Chatwoot Inc, with roots in Kerala, India and a Y Combinator (W21) background | London, United Kingdom (with a San Francisco office opened after the 2025 Series A) |
| Ownership | Venture-backed (early stage), with an MIT-licensed open-source core | Venture-backed; operated as Not Just Tickets Ltd |
Strengths and limitations
Chatwoot
Strengths
- MIT-licensed source with 25,000+ GitHub stars and 300+ contributors, which means no vendor can take the product away from you, raise your price unilaterally, or sunset your deployment.
- Genuine self-hosting on modest infrastructure (4GB RAM, 2 CPU cores minimum) solves data residency and sovereignty requirements that most competitors answer only on a custom enterprise contract.
- Broader channel coverage than most paid rivals at this price: eleven-plus channels including WhatsApp Business API, Instagram, TikTok, Telegram, LINE, SMS, and native voice.
- Cloud Startups at $19 per agent undercuts nearly everything comparable while including all channels except voice, a help centre, and 300 Captain AI credits.
Limitations
- Self-hosting is free of licence cost, not free of cost. Running PostgreSQL, Redis, S3, upgrades, and backups is ongoing engineering work, and teams routinely underestimate it into a bad decision.
- Captain AI is entirely excluded from the free Community Edition, so the open-source story stops precisely at the feature most teams now want.
- Captain credit consumption per action is not published, making the included 300 to 800 credit allowances difficult to translate into an expected number of automated conversations.
- SSO and SAML sit at $99 per agent on both ladders, a jump from $39 that is out of proportion to the feature for mid-sized teams.
Plain
Strengths
- Slack, Teams, and Discord are treated as genuine support channels with assignment, status, and SLA tracking, which no general-purpose help desk in this set does properly.
- Both AI agents run from one credit pool rather than a separate per-resolution invoice line, so AI spend is capped by the allowance you bought instead of accruing unpredictably.
- Unlimited free viewer seats let an entire engineering organisation follow customer threads without a per-seat charge, matching how B2B software companies actually work.
- The GraphQL API, MCP server, and bring-your-own-agent model make Plain programmable in a way that lets a team build its own support surface rather than living inside the vendor's UI.
Limitations
- Ari stopped being free. The October 2026 pricing page meters a customer-facing resolution at 100 credits, so Foundation's 1,000 monthly credits cover about ten of them, and the pricing page publishes no rate for buying more.
- Sidekick credits are metered by effort rather than volume, which makes the variable portion of the bill genuinely hard to forecast month to month.
- No voice or telephony of any kind, and no realistic path to phone support.
- Wrong shape for consumer and ecommerce support: no order-management story, no Shopify depth, and a channel mix aimed at business customers.
Pricing compared
Chatwoot
Two parallel ladders: a per-agent cloud subscription (Hacker free, Startups, Business, Enterprise) and a self-hosted ladder (Community Edition free under MIT, Premium Support, Enterprise Edition). Captain AI is metered by credits on both, with allowances by tier and overage sold per 1,000.
- Hacker (cloud)$0
- Startups (cloud)$19
- Business (cloud)$39
- Enterprise (cloud)$99
- Community Edition (self-hosted)$0
- Premium Support (self-hosted)$19
- Enterprise Edition (self-hosted)$99
Chatwoot has the best floor and a competitive middle. Community Edition at zero licence cost with unlimited agents is unmatched by any proprietary product here, and cloud Startups at $19 per agent undercuts Help Scout's $21 while including WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, and a help centre. Captain AI at $20 per 1,000 credits is far more forgiving than $0.75 per resolution once volume climbs. The honest accounting is that free self-hosting has a labour cost that most teams undercount: Postgres, Redis, S3, upgrades, backups, and the incident at 2am are real work, and one engineer-day a month at market rates already exceeds a $19 cloud seat. Chatwoot is outstanding value if data control is a requirement you would otherwise pay a premium for, and merely good value if you were only chasing a lower invoice.
Plain
Per-seat subscription in three tiers, each with a seat band and a monthly credit allowance that both AI agents draw on. Ari, the customer-facing agent, costs 100 credits per resolution; Sidekick, the internal copilot, costs 15 to 300 or more credits depending on the effort a task takes. Viewer seats are unlimited and free on every plan. Billed annually or monthly, with the annual rate roughly 20% lower and double the included credits.
- Foundation$45
- Horizon$99
- FrontierCustom
Plain repriced in 2026 and the shape of the deal changed with it. Where Foundation was $35 a month for a seat with the AI agent thrown in, it is now $45 per seat per month billed annually with AI metered out of a 1,000-credit allowance, and Horizon doubles that to $99 with a three-seat minimum. Against Help Scout's $25 Standard seat or Chatwoot's $19, Plain is now clearly the premium option on list price, and the credit meter means a successful deflection programme costs more rather than less. What still justifies it for the right buyer: unlimited free viewer seats, so a fifteen-engineer company can pay for five and let everyone read; Slack, Teams and Discord as first-class channels rather than integrations; and a GraphQL API deep enough to build your own support surface. For a five-person developer-tools company whose customers file issues in Slack, that combination has no real substitute and the startup programme's 50% takes the sting out. For a non-technical team doing email support, Plain is now expensive in both dimensions, seat and usage, and the alternatives are better value.
Editorial verdict on each
Chatwoot
Chatwoot is the only product in this category that lets you own the software outright, and for teams with a data-residency mandate or a genuinely zero software budget that single fact settles the decision. The channel breadth is better than most paid rivals, the cloud pricing undercuts them, Captain AI is metered by credits rather than punished per resolution, and SOC 2 Type II on the cloud service is more formal assurance than several better-funded competitors publish. Be honest about two things before choosing it. Self-hosting has a labour cost that reliably exceeds a $19 cloud seat once you count the maintenance, and the free Community Edition deliberately excludes Captain AI, so the open-source pitch stops exactly where the modern feature set begins. Choose it for control, not because free sounds cheaper than $19.
Read the full Chatwoot profilePlain
MomentumPlain is the sharpest product in this category for a specific and growing shape of company: B2B software businesses whose customers are engineers, whose support lands in Slack, and whose escalations end in Linear. The channel model is right, the free viewer seats reflect how those teams actually operate, the GraphQL API and MCP server make it programmable rather than merely configurable, and and one credit pool is simpler to govern than a separate AI invoice. The reservations grew in 2026: the entry seat is $45 and Horizon is $99 with a three-seat minimum, Ari went from included to 100 credits a resolution, credits are hard to forecast because Sidekick meters effort rather than volume, there is no voice channel, and there is no free plan. Buy Plain if your customers write to you in a shared Slack channel. If they do not, almost everything here will serve you better and cost less.
Read the full Plain profileChatwoot profile last reviewed 2026-10-01; Plain last reviewed 2026-10-01. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.
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Frequently asked questions
6 questionsWhat is the difference between Chatwoot and Plain?
Both attract technical buyers, but Chatwoot's appeal is owning the source and the infrastructure while Plain's is a hosted GraphQL API and a B2B channel model built around Slack, Teams, and Discord. Chatwoot's channel mix is consumer and web messaging (WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok); Plain's is business collaboration channels. If your customers message you on WhatsApp, Chatwoot; if they open a Slack Connect channel and file Linear issues, Plain.
Is Chatwoot or Plain cheaper?
Chatwoot starts at $0 (Community Edition self-hosted, or cloud Hacker tier); $19 per agent per month for cloud Startups. Plain starts at $45 per user per month billed annually (Foundation, $55 monthly) (7 days trial). The billing models differ, so the entry price is rarely the whole cost. Chatwoot pricing model: Two parallel ladders: a per-agent cloud subscription (Hacker free, Startups, Business, Enterprise) and a self-hosted ladder (Community Edition free under MIT, Premium Support, Enterprise Edition). Plain pricing model: Per-seat subscription in three tiers, each with a seat band and a monthly credit allowance that both AI agents draw on.
Does Chatwoot or Plain have a free plan?
Chatwoot has a free plan. Two free options: cloud Hacker for up to 2 agents with 500 conversations a month, live chat only, and 30-day data retention; or self-hosted Community Edition, free forever with unlimited agents but no Captain AI, voice, custom branding, or SSO. Trial terms: 15 days on cloud plans. Plain has no free plan. Trial terms: 7 days, no credit card required.
Who should choose Chatwoot?
Technically capable teams that need data residency, source-code control, or a genuinely zero-cost support platform: EU and regulated companies with sovereignty requirements, agencies deploying per-client instances, and cost-constrained startups with an engineer willing to own a server.
Who should choose Plain?
B2B software companies, especially developer-tools and infrastructure startups, whose customers are technical, whose support arrives in shared Slack, Teams, or Discord channels, and who have engineering capacity to use an API-first platform properly.
What are the best alternatives to Chatwoot and Plain?
SaaSTracker profiles 27 products in Customer Support Platforms. The Summer 2026 awards in the category went to Help Scout (Category Leader), tawk.to (Best Value), Intercom (Innovation). Every profile is compiled from primary sources, so a shortlist can be built from pricing, limitations, and fit rather than from star ratings.
