Is Hiver or Plain cheaper?

Hiver starts at $25 per user per month (Growth, billed annually; $35 monthly) (free plan available). Plain starts at $35/mo (Foundation, 1 seat included; $35 per additional seat) (7 days trial).

Hiver 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.

The short answer

Editorial assessment

Hiver compared with Plain

Plain is built for engineering-led B2B companies whose customers live in shared Slack, Teams, or Discord channels, and it expects you to treat support as an API-driven system. Hiver is built for non-technical teams in finance, IT, operations, and support who live in email and want as little change as possible. They barely overlap. Choose Plain if your customers are developers and your support team can write code; choose Hiver if the person who owns support would describe a GraphQL API as somebody else's problem.

Choose Hiver if

Small and mid-sized teams already standardised on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 whose support is email-led and whose biggest problem is coordination rather than volume. It suits support, finance, IT, and operations teams of roughly three to thirty people who need assignment, SLAs, and real reporting without asking anyone to abandon their inbox.

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	Hiver	Plain
Category	Support	Support
Starting price	$25 per user per month (Growth, billed annually; $35 monthly) (free plan available)	$35/mo (Foundation, 1 seat included; $35 per additional seat) (7 days trial)
Pricing model	Per-user subscription across three paid tiers, billed monthly or annually, with AI bundled into the seat price from Growth upward rather than metered per resolution. Seats are sold in fixed increments rather than one at a time.	Tiered subscription with a base price that includes a block of seats, per-additional-seat pricing on top, and a monthly Sidekick credit allowance per tier. Ari, the customer-facing AI agent, is included at no per-resolution charge. Monthly or annual billing, with unlimited free viewer seats on every plan.
Free plan	None currently advertised on Hiver's pricing page. Several third-party pricing trackers still list a free tier, which appears to be stale; treat the 7-day trial as the evaluation path and confirm at signup.	No
Free trial	7 days on the Elite tier, no credit card required	7 days, no credit card required
Best for	Small and mid-sized teams already standardised on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 whose support is email-led and whose biggest problem is coordination rather than volume. It suits support, finance, IT, and operations teams of roughly three to thirty people who need assignment, SLAs, and real reporting without asking anyone to abandon their inbox.	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	Under an hour for a working setup. Install the extension across the team, connect the shared mailboxes, and the sidebar appears in everyone's Gmail. This is the fastest meaningful deployment in the category precisely because there is no new interface to roll out.	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	Close to zero for agents, which is the entire point. The only new concepts are assignment, status, and internal notes, all of which sit visibly in an interface people already know. The administrator has automation rules, SLA policies, and mailbox configuration to learn, which is an afternoon rather than a project.	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	Gmail and Google Workspace browser extension, Outlook and Microsoft 365, Hiver Omni standalone web app, iOS and Android apps	Web app, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Discord integrations, Embeddable chat and forms, Customer portal, GraphQL API, MCP server
Compliance	SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, ISO 27001, HIPAA compliance support on the Elite tier	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	2011	2020
Headquarters	San Jose, California, United States, with significant operations in Bangalore, India	London, United Kingdom (with a San Francisco office opened after the 2025 Series A)
Ownership	Venture-backed, privately held. Operates as GrexIt, Inc. doing business as Hiver.	Venture-backed; operated as Not Just Tickets Ltd

Strengths and limitations

Hiver

Strengths

Adoption is close to free. Agents keep working in Gmail or Outlook, which sidesteps the single biggest failure mode of help desk rollouts.
AI is bundled into the seat price from Growth upward with no per-resolution meter, so the monthly bill is genuinely fixed while competitors scale with volume.
Because Hiver operates on your existing mailboxes, evaluating it carries almost no switching risk: if you stop paying, your mail is exactly where it always was.
Analytics are strong for an inbox product: response time, resolution time, workload distribution, SLA compliance, and CSAT all reported properly.

Limitations

The seat increment structure is user-hostile. Two, then five, then multiples of five means teams routinely pay for one to four seats they do not use.
No light agent or read-only seat, so every engineer, contractor, or stakeholder who needs visibility costs a full licence.
It is an inbox, not a ticketing engine. There are no custom ticket fields, conditional forms, skills-based routing, or multi-brand help centers, and a growing support operation will hit that ceiling.
The knowledge base is functional but noticeably weaker than Zendesk's or Freshdesk's on theming, multi-brand support, and SEO control.

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.
Ari is included with no per-resolution fee, which means deflection success lowers your cost per conversation instead of inflating the invoice.
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

The $35 to $299 tier jump is severe, and the per-additional-seat price nearly triples across it, so a team crossing from Foundation to Horizon sees a step change rather than a gradient.
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

Hiver

Per-user subscription across three paid tiers, billed monthly or annually, with AI bundled into the seat price from Growth upward rather than metered per resolution. Seats are sold in fixed increments rather than one at a time.

Growth$25
Pro$55
Elite$85

Hiver's value case is adoption and predictability rather than raw capability. You are paying so that nobody has to learn a new tool, and so that your support bill stays the same number every month regardless of volume. Both are worth real money. At $25 a seat with AI included, a five-seat team pays $125 a month for coordination, automation, analytics, and AI drafting, which is less than a single Zendesk Suite Professional seat plus Copilot. The weaknesses are structural: the seat increments overcharge teams whose headcount is not a multiple of five, there is no light agent option, API access costs $55 a seat, and the knowledge base and routing are noticeably thinner than a real help desk. If your support is email-led and your problem is coordination, this is excellent value. If your problem is volume, Hiver is the wrong shape and its bundled AI will not save you.

Plain

Tiered subscription with a base price that includes a block of seats, per-additional-seat pricing on top, and a monthly Sidekick credit allowance per tier. Ari, the customer-facing AI agent, is included at no per-resolution charge. Monthly or annual billing, with unlimited free viewer seats on every plan.

Foundation$35
Horizon$299
FrontierCustom

Plain is not cheap per seat, and it is not trying to be. Foundation at $35 a seat is above Help Scout's $21 annual Standard rate and far above Chatwoot's $19, and Horizon's $99 additional seats are the highest published in this comparison set. What you get for it is a different set of economics: free unlimited viewers, a customer-facing AI agent with no resolution meter, and an API deep enough that engineering can build rather than request. For a fifteen-person B2B software company where five people answer and ten need to read, Plain frequently comes out cheaper in total than a $25-per-seat platform charging for all fifteen plus $0.75 per AI resolution. For a non-technical team of five doing email support, it is simply expensive. The startup programme's 50% discount materially changes the calculation for early-stage companies and is worth asking about before comparing list prices.

Editorial verdict on each

Hiver

Hiver solves a real and underrated problem: help desks fail not because they lack features but because agents quietly keep working in Gmail. By putting assignment, SLAs, analytics, and AI inside the mail client people already use, Hiver gets adoption almost for free, and it is one of very few vendors in this category that has refused to attach a per-resolution meter to its AI. A five-seat team pays $125 a month at any volume, which is a genuinely differentiated offer in 2026. The reservations are concrete rather than philosophical: the two-then-five-then-fives seat structure overcharges most teams, there is no light agent seat, API access costs $55 per user, and the knowledge base and routing are thinner than a real ticketing platform. Buy Hiver if your support is email-led, your team is on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, and coordination rather than volume is your problem. If you need deflection at scale or a configurable ticket model, buy something else.

Read the full Hiver profile

Plain

Plain 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 including Ari with no per-resolution charge is a genuinely pro-customer stance while the rest of the category moves toward metering. The reservations are the brutal $35 to $299 tier gap, Sidekick credits that are hard to forecast because they meter effort rather than volume, no voice channel, and 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 profile

Hiver profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Plain last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.