Overview
How you set up your workspace shapes how your team operates in Plain, and by extension your customers experience interacting with your Support team.
Roles + permissions
Control what each member of your team can see and do in Plain. Plain offers four built-in roles: Owner, Admin, Support, and a free Viewer role. As well as fully custom roles for granular, filter-based access control.
Learn more about roles + permissions →
Single sign-on (SSO) and Directory sync (SCIM)
Connect Plain to your identity provider: Okta, Azure AD, Google Workspace, or OneLogin. SSO enforces a single login method for your whole workspace. Directory sync (SCIM) keeps team membership in sync automatically so you never need to manually invite or remove users.
Learn more about SSO or Directory sync →
Notifications
Stay on top of SLAs and support activity with notifications via Slack, Discord, email, and in-app. Workspace notifications keep your whole team informed of important activity; personal notifications handle individual assignments and follow-ups.
Learn more about notifications →
Snippets
Create reusable message templates to speed up replies and keep responses consistent. Press [ in any thread to open the snippet menu, and use dynamic variables like {{ customer.fullName }} and {{ thread.ref }} to personalise messages automatically.
Views
Build customized support queue views to focus on what matters. Saved Views are shared across your workspace and display threads as a Board or Table. Favorites pin the pages and views you use most to your sidebar for quick access.
Companies
Plain automatically identifies which company a customer belongs to based on their email domain, giving your team instant context when a thread arrives. Use company pages to track open requests, contract value, account owners, linked issues and associate companies with tiers to manage SLAs.
Tenants
If your product is structured around teams, organizations, or accounts, tenants let you mirror that in Plain. Tenants are set via the API and give you a per-tenant view of tier, support volume, and open requests. Particularly useful for headless support portals and tier-based SLAs!
Tenant Fields
Bring data from your CRM or database directly into Plain by attaching custom fields to each tenant. Tenant Fields are a one-way sync from your external systems, read-only in the UI and let you filter queues, build reports, and trigger workflows based on real customer data without switching tabs.
Learn more about tenant fields →
Customer groups
Organize customers into flexible groups when company, tenant, or tier doesn’t capture the relationship. For example: beta testers or design partners. Groups can be assigned manually in Plain or via the API, and you can filter your thread queue by group to prioritize accordingly.
Learn more about customer groups →
Customer Surveys (CSAT)
Collect real-time feedback at the end of every support thread. When a thread is marked as Done, Plain automatically sends a brief survey asking customers to rate their experience. Positive, Neutral, or Negative, with an optional comment field.
Learn more about customer surveys →
Customer cards
Surface live data from your own backend directly inside Plain threads using Customer Cards and give your team all the context they need without switching tools. Cards pull from your API on demand and can include buttons that trigger Plain workflows directly from the card.
Learn more about customer cards →
Events
Log key product activity directly onto a customer’s thread timeline: plan upgrades, errors, feature flag changes, or any signal from your system. When a customer gets in touch, your team sees everything that happened in their account alongside the conversation.
Creating API Keys
Authenticate with Plain’s API using Machine Users and API Keys. Each Machine User can have multiple keys for easy rotation, and every key has fine-grained permissions so you can scope access precisely to what each integration needs.