Desk365 vs Plain
Side-by-side trajectory, velocity, and editorial themes.
Desk365 ships steady bi-monthly helpdesk updates, with asset management now the throughline.
Desk365 is a Microsoft Teams-centric helpdesk shipping on a predictable bi-monthly cadence. Recent releases center on asset and software management, plus incremental workflow additions — survey response notifications, ticket search, permissions, multilingual agent portal, and two new ticket import API endpoints. Most of what its feed publishes, however, is marketing and educational content rather than product changes.
The product work is trending toward IT asset management and API extensibility, nudging Desk365 beyond basic ticketing into broader ITSM territory. Each release bundles one larger theme — assets this quarter — with several smaller conveniences. Note the low signal-to-noise in the feed: most posts are SEO and thought-leadership, so any cadence-based velocity overstates how much is actually shipping.
The next bi-monthly release will likely deepen asset and software management and extend the import/export API surface, continuing the AI and automation thread flagged in the Q2 roundup.
Plain turns Sidekick from a drafting assistant into an agent that acts
Plain is a customer-support platform building an agentic layer — 'Sidekick' — into the core thread workflow. Recent releases moved Sidekick from suggesting to acting: it can take actions across connected tools, start working proactively the moment a thread matches a workflow, and it now answers in Slack. The surrounding plumbing (scheduled workflows, thread fields via the chat widget, machine-user API links to Linear) is all in service of more automation.
The arc points to autonomous, workflow-driven support: AI that investigates, summarizes, drafts, and executes before a human opens the thread. Each release widens either Sidekick's reach (Slack, connected tools) or the triggers that set it off (workflow conditions, schedules), steadily shifting the human role from doing the work to reviewing it.
Expect deeper Sidekick autonomy — more action types and likely approval or guardrail controls — plus more workflow triggers that launch automation without a human in the loop.
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