Plain is a new startup aiming to shake up the customer support space. Competing with heavyweights like Zendesk, Plain takes a different approach by focusing on API integrations with a solid developer experience to deliver a snappy and integrated workflow to communicate with customers.

To deliver a top-tier user experience, Co-founder & CTO Matt Vagni knew they needed effective documentation that could evolve alongside their product. After facing challenges with Docusaurus and Nextra, he made the decision to migrate to Mintlify, freeing up the team to focus on customer value instead of managing docs infrastructure.

Great documentation is critical for the user experience

Customer support is nuanced and specific to every company and team. Support teams typically start with Plain’s out-of-the-box experience, then customize their workflows and integrate with their own product using Plain’s API.

This customization means that great documentation is essential for Plain’s success.

“Our documentation is our source of truth,” says Vagni. “It’s critical for us to keep them updates, whether for product updates or when customers struggle to understand something.”

Existing solutions couldn’t fit the bill

Before Mintlify, Plain tried both Docusaurus and Nextra.

Docusaurus proved to be too restrictive. Customizing the look and feel was a time-consuming challenge, search functionality was lacking, and the developer experience was very hit-or-miss. Bugs would regularly force engineers to restart their terminal to get changes to be picked up. The team also struggled with limited optionality for different components or structuring navigation.

Nextra, though slightly ‘prettier,’ didn’t fare much better. It often introduced odd UI and CLI bugs, and the search functionality had its own set of problems.

That’s when Matt and his team made the switch to Mintlify.

Beautiful documentation, better customer experiences

“Mintlify was exactly what we were looking for. It looks very polished out of the box, search works smoothly, and the online editor makes it easy for anyone on the team to contribute without touching code," says Vagni.

Mintlify allows Plain’s team to bypass the technical challenges of maintaining their documentation. Now, they can focus on delivering an excellent customer experience—whether that means building new product features or making sure their documentation is as informative and clear as possible.

“With Mintlify, we spend 0% of our time improving our documentation site. We get to focus on what matters: having the content and structure of our docs be as helpful as possible.” —Matt Vagni, Co-founder & CTO