Access & Authentication
Plain gives you full control over who can access your Help Center. You can configure this under Help Center → General.
Access levels
Everyone
Anyone with the URL can access your Help Center, no login required.
Best for public knowledge bases
Search engines can index your content
Authenticated customers
Visitors must log in using their email address before accessing your Help Center. Login is via magic links, so there's no need for a password.
Anyone with an email address can authenticate, not just existing users of your product
Once logged in, customers can seamlessly create and track support requests
Their email is visible in Plain, making it easier to track usage and AI conversations
To restrict access further, you can gate your Help Center by Tier, Tenant, Company, or specific Customers. A visitor only needs to match one rule to be granted access, so if you add both a Tier rule and a Company rule, anyone who satisfies either will get in.
An example use-case could be that you only want to provide access to your Help Center to Premium customers. To do this, you can select your "Premium" option in the "Tiers" select menu:
Your team
Only members of your Plain workspace can access the Help Center. Ideal for internal knowledge bases or documentation you're not ready to publish publicly.
If a visitor authenticates successfully but doesn't match any of your access rules, they'll see an "Access Restricted" page with the message: "This help center is either internal or you do not have the necessary permissions to access it." They're given the option to sign out and try with a different account.
Plain AI access
Independently of your human access settings, you can control whether Plain AI features (Ari, Suggested responses, and Sidekick) can read your Help center articles.
This is useful if your Help Center is set to "Your team only" but you still want AI features to reference your articles when responding to customers
Enable this under Help Center → General → AI access
