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Should I use the Help Center or a headless support portal?

Start with the Help Center unless you have a specific need for custom authentication, your own domain or deep product embedding. Plain offers both as ways to give your customers self-service support.

Help Center

The Help Center is a fully hosted support site that connects directly to your Plain workspace. It combines a knowledge base, Ask AI and a customer inbox in one place, with no engineering setup required.

  • Domain: hosted on support.site
  • Authentication: managed by Plain
  • Best for: teams that want a fast, fully integrated support experience out of the box

    See an example at plain.support.site.

Headless support portal

A headless portal lets you build a fully custom support experience hosted on your own domain. You control the branding, the authentication and how deeply the customer inbox is embedded in your product.

  • Domain: your own
  • Authentication: fully controlled by you
  • Best for: teams that need deep product embedding or custom branding beyond what the Help Center offers

Which should you use?

The headless portal requires meaningful engineering investment. It is only worth it if the Help Center's constraints are a blocker for you. For what the build involves, see What does building a headless support portal on Plain involve?.