Crisp alternative: PlainAnswer

Crisp is a capable multichannel inbox, and if you want a shared team inbox across chat, email and social, it is a strong choice. But its free plan has no AI, and its AI answers without showing the source to your customer. PlainAnswer answers on the free plan, strictly from your own content, and shows every customer where the answer came from. Free to start, then one predictable price by conversation from GBP 19 a month.

Crisp is a team inbox. PlainAnswer answers on its own

Crisp is built around a team working a shared inbox across many channels, with an AI agent you add on a paid plan. That suits a business with people to staff it. PlainAnswer is the other shape: your website answers by itself, straight from your content, and only brings a real person in when it is genuinely needed, by taking the customer's details into your Inbox. You are not running an inbox, your site is answering for you.

Why small businesses pick PlainAnswer over Crisp

AI that answers on the free planCrisp's free plan is a live chat inbox for your team, with no AI; its AI agent starts on a paid plan. PlainAnswer's free plan is a working AI assistant: 50 whole conversations a month, answered from your content, free forever.
It shows the source to your customerEvery PlainAnswer reply links to the page it came from, so your customer can see and trust where it came from. Crisp's AI answers from your content too, but the view of which sources it used is an internal, admin-side feature, not shown to your customer.
No shared inbox to runCrisp assumes a team answering across channels. PlainAnswer needs none of that. It answers on its own and routes only the hard questions to your Inbox, so a business with no support team is still covered around the clock.
Done for youOur done-for-you setup gets your assistant live and tunes its answers, so a non-technical owner does not have to build and staff a multichannel inbox.
A verifier that refuses to guessEvery answer comes strictly from your own content and is checked by a separate verifier before it is sent. If it cannot be supported, the agent says so and takes the customer's details rather than guessing.
A named UK company you can reachPlainAnswer is built and run by Culture & Clarity Ltd, a UK company registered with the ICO, with a real person who answers your email.

If you want a multichannel shared inbox with your team answering across chat, email and social, Crisp is a capable and unusually generous choice, its free live chat is a real strength, and its AI answers only from your own content with guardrails. Both tools change their features and pricing often, so check each for its current details. The fairest test of PlainAnswer is to try it on your own website, in about a minute, with no signup.

See PlainAnswer answer questions about your own website

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