Plain
Plain built an autonomous support agent, and has now built the controls to trust it.
A side-by-side editorial comparison of INKY and Richpanel — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
| Feature | INKY | Richpanel |
|---|---|---|
| Sector | Support | Support |
| Velocity score | 6.3 | 5.0 |
| Sparks · 30d | 1 | 0 |
| Top themes | email-security, phishing-detection, msp-channel, llm-assisted-detection | integrations, voice channel, ai agent context, call summaries |
| Last editorial update | 13d ago | 5d ago |
| Website | Visit → | — |
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.
A third phone provider lands, and voice keeps arriving pre-summarized rather than as audio.
Telebroad joins RingCentral and Consio as a connectable phone and SMS channel, with call recording, an AI transcript, and a summary attached to every call and SMS threading into the same ticket. It follows the Medusa.js headless-commerce connector and the Onward, Rivo, and Klaviyo integrations before it — the same sidebar contract applied to one more source each time.
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.
Telebroad joins RingCentral and Consio as a connectable phone and SMS channel, with call recording, an AI transcript, and a summary attached to every call and SMS threading into the same ticket. It follows the Medusa.js headless-commerce connector and the Onward, Rivo, and Klaviyo integrations before it — the same sidebar contract applied to one more source each time.
Richpanel is building a support inbox whose value is the context already sitting next to the conversation, and voice is being normalized into that model rather than treated as a separate medium: agents read a summary instead of replaying a recording. The integration cadence is steady and the shape never varies, which makes breadth the strategy — every new provider is another set of merchants who can adopt without changing their stack.
Expect further phone and commerce providers on the same template, since nothing in these releases suggests a change in what the sidebar or the AI agent does with the context once it arrives.
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 INKY or Richpanel.
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 INKY alternatives → · See all Richpanel 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 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.
Top Richpanel alternatives in Support are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Richpanel alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/richpanel for the full list with editorial commentary on each.