Plain
Plain built an autonomous support agent, and has now built the controls to trust it.
A side-by-side editorial comparison of Formbricks and INKY — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
The 5.3 line reached stable and immediately dropped into single-fix patch-RC mode.
Formbricks runs three release branches at once — 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3 — publishing release candidates almost daily, most carrying a single backported fix. The 5.3 line has moved past its feature RCs: 5.3.0-rc.1 through rc.3 delivered MCP scope corrections, Helm volume extension points and an accessibility pass, and the branch is now on 5.3.4-rc.1, a one-line fix stopping no-overlay surveys from blocking the host page they sit on. Workspace and organization scoping remains the recurring thread, with the contact detail page the latest surface re-tied to its authorizing workspace.
INKY is wiring an LLM into email security while binding itself tighter to Kaseya.
INKY ships a dashboard release every one to two weeks, moving from 1.8.5 to 1.9.5 since May. The functional center is the Triage workspace, which pulled detection review, message actions and account-takeover enforcement into one place and made ATO configurable without a SIEM. July added Smart Insights, an LLM second opinion on inbound mail, plus automatic Autotask ticketing. Running alongside the security work, email-signature management has grown from a single page in June into a tabbed editor with per-field styling.
Formbricks runs three release branches at once — 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3 — publishing release candidates almost daily, most carrying a single backported fix. The 5.3 line has moved past its feature RCs: 5.3.0-rc.1 through rc.3 delivered MCP scope corrections, Helm volume extension points and an accessibility pass, and the branch is now on 5.3.4-rc.1, a one-line fix stopping no-overlay surveys from blocking the host page they sit on. Workspace and organization scoping remains the recurring thread, with the contact detail page the latest surface re-tied to its authorizing workspace.
The multi-tenancy audit is still running and still backported everywhere rather than only forward — API keys, surveys, quotas, integrations, response imports and now the contact detail page have each been re-scoped in turn. Alongside it, the agent-facing surface built out in 5.2.0 is being refined rather than extended: the 5.3 MCP work is scope correction, not new capability. With 5.3 now issuing patch RCs a day or two apart, that branch has crossed from feature development into maintenance.
Expect 5.3 to keep issuing single-fix patch release candidates while the next feature drop opens a 5.4 line, and 5.1 and 5.2 to continue receiving only security and billing backports.
INKY ships a dashboard release every one to two weeks, moving from 1.8.5 to 1.9.5 since May. The functional center is the Triage workspace, which pulled detection review, message actions and account-takeover enforcement into one place and made ATO configurable without a SIEM. July added Smart Insights, an LLM second opinion on inbound mail, plus automatic Autotask ticketing. Running alongside the security work, email-signature management has grown from a single page in June into a tabbed editor with per-field styling.
Two threads are pulling in the same direction. Detection is becoming AI-assisted and explainable, with Smart Insights returning a verdict, a trickiness rating and a written rationale rather than a score. And the managed-service channel is being deepened at every layer — Autotask billing, Autotask ticketing, Kaseya-provisioned entitlements, a third-party training platform slotted in as an option. INKY is optimizing for the provider reselling it across many tenants, not the employee reading the mail.
Smart Insights is gated to Pro with a per-team opt-out, which points to it being extended and monetized further rather than made universal. Mesh was added as a recognized upstream provider under an auto-detect setting, so additional relay providers are the obvious continuation of that work.
Other Support products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Each card links to a full editorial trajectory and lets you pivot into a head-to-head comparison with either Formbricks or INKY.
Plain built an autonomous support agent, and has now built the controls to trust it.
Sleekplan rebuilt itself around AI triage, then put the feedback board inside ChatGPT.
Comm100 publishes steadily about AI support — none of it is Comm100 shipping anything.
respond.io is layering an agent-authoring copilot and consumption billing on top of its omnichannel inbox.
Hatz sells through MSPs, and its roadmap has started to serve the partner more than the end user
A teaser-only content feed making one argument: AI in the contact center fails on knowledge, not models.
See all Formbricks alternatives → · See all INKY alternatives →
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. INKY is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 6.3 vs 5.0), with 1 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. INKY is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 6.3 vs 5.0), with 1 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Support products to evaluate alongside.
Top Formbricks alternatives in Support are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Formbricks alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/formbricks for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
Top INKY alternatives in Support are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "INKY alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/inky for the full list with editorial commentary on each.