Richpanel vs Plain
Side-by-side trajectory, velocity, and editorial themes.
Richpanel is folding the ecommerce support stack into one inbox, integration by integration
Richpanel is a support inbox for ecommerce brands, and nearly every recent release adds another external system to it: phone (RingCentral, JustCall), SMS (Klaviyo), post-purchase ops (AfterShip tracking, returns, warranty), and order platforms (SellerCloud, BigCommerce). The consistent design is that each system's data and actions land on the customer conversation, so agents resolve issues without leaving the ticket. SLA Management is the rare non-integration release, adding response and resolution tracking.
The bet is breadth: become the single console where an agent sees and acts on every downstream system — call recordings, warranty claims, return labels, order replacements — with no tab-switching. AfterShip Tracking hints at a second layer, feeding that live operational data to Richpanel's AI agent so it can answer 'where's my order?' on its own. Depth in any one integration matters less right now than covering the whole ecommerce stack.
Expect the integration cadence to continue — more phone, shipping, and marketplace connectors — with growing emphasis on letting the AI agent read and act on that integrated data, not just surface it to human agents.
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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