ClearFeed alternative: BotFerry vs ClearFeed on price and scope
ClearFeed bridges Slack to the help desk you already pay for. Starter is $24 per agent a month, Professional $49, and a usage tier starts at $40 a month for 10 channels and 100 tickets. BotFerry bridges nothing and costs 9€ for the workspace.
Prices checked 28 July 2026. Written by the BotFerry team, so read the ClearFeed column as a competitor's account of a competitor and follow the source link before you decide.
The short version
Pick ClearFeed if the Slack conversation has to end up in Zendesk or Jira. That handoff is the point of the product, and no amount of price difference substitutes for it.
Pick BotFerry if the conversation starts and finishes in Slack. A mention reaches your ops channel, an operator answers, the reply lands back in the requester's thread, and nothing needs to be synced anywhere.
BotFerry vs ClearFeed, side by side
Swipe the table sideways for the other columns.
| BotFerry This is us | ClearFeed | |
|---|---|---|
| Billing unit | Flat monthly, whole workspace | Per agent, or per channel and ticket |
| Entry price | 9€ / mo Starter: 3 bots, unlimited operators | $24 / agent / mo Starter, 1 to 15 agents; usage tier from $40 / mo |
| Five operators, one month | 9€ / mo | $120 / mo |
| Volume on the entry plan | 5,000 messages | 100 tickets on the $40 usage tier |
| Operator replies land back in the original thread | Yes | Yes |
| Flat price, operators not billed per seat | Yes | Usage tier is per channel |
| You create the Slack app and hold the token | Yes | No |
| Relay vendor keeps no message content | Yes | No |
| Several separate front doors on one plan | Yes | Yes |
| One private thread per request | Yes | Yes |
| Attachments relay both directions | Yes | Yes |
| Internal notes the requester never sees | Yes | Yes |
| Ticket statuses, assignment, queues | No | Yes |
| SLA timers and escalation | No | Yes |
| Reporting and analytics | Activity log only | Yes |
| AI drafting or AI agents | No | Priced separately |
| Email or web chat intake | No | Yes |
| One-click install, no app to build | No | Yes |
Prices read 28 July 2026 from each vendor's own pricing page, linked below. BotFerry bills in euro, the others list dollars, so treat the two currencies as separate numbers rather than a converted total.
The volume row does not compare like with like. One BotFerry message is a single hop across the ferry, either a mention carried into your ops channel or a reply carried back. A ticket, conversation, or credit elsewhere covers a whole exchange. Seat prices in the rows above are directly comparable.
Sources: ClearFeed
Two price lists, and which one to compare
ClearFeed prices its help desk two ways. Agent-based runs $24 per agent a month on Starter and $49 on Professional, both sized for 1 to 15 agents, with anything above that quoted by sales. Usage-based starts at $40 a month for 10 channels and 100 tickets on Starter, $80 for the same allowance on Professional, and climbs to $600 a month at 250 channels and 2,500 tickets. Annual billing takes 15% off either.
The usage tier is the fair comparison, since it is the only ClearFeed option that stops charging per person. At $40 a month for 100 tickets it is over four times BotFerry Starter, and the ticket ceiling comes with it. Five operators on the agent-based Starter is $120 a month.
BotFerry Starter is 9€ a month: three bots, unlimited operators, 5,000 relayed messages pooled across every bot. Channels are not metered at all. Invite the app to forty channels on Starter and the bill does not move, because what we count is messages crossing the ferry.
ClearFeed's real job is the handoff
Most Slack support tools want to become your help desk. ClearFeed wants to sit between Slack and the help desk you already run, which is why it shows up on shortlists at companies with Zendesk or Jira Service Management in place and a support team that refuses to leave Slack. Requests raised in a channel land as tickets in the system your auditors already read, with statuses, SLAs and reporting following from that system rather than from Slack.
BotFerry has no integration with Zendesk, Jira, or anything else. If you need the ticket to exist in another system, an operator files it by hand and pastes the link into the thread. On a team fielding thirty requests a day that is a real cost, and ClearFeed removes it.
Where BotFerry is the smaller, stranger option
You create the Slack app and hold its token. The wizard writes the manifest, you paste it into your own workspace, and cutting the relay off is a click in your Slack admin rather than a request to us. ClearFeed installs as ClearFeed's app in one click, faster to start and one owner removed from you.
We store no message content. A relay leaves behind a thread mapping and a log row carrying a type, a reason and a timestamp. Ask for the transcript and there is none. For a security questionnaire that removes a processor from the diagram, and for a support lead who wants to search last month's threads it removes the feature.
Several front doors also come free. Three Slack apps, @Support and @IT Help and @Feedback, each with its own private operator channel, all drawing on one message pool under one plan. ClearFeed charges per channel on its usage tier, so breadth costs money there.
Moving across, or running both
Setup takes an afternoon: create the app from the manifest, add it to the channels ClearFeed watches, choose your operator channel, send a test mention and watch the wizard confirm the round trip. Your ClearFeed tickets and their history stay where they are, because BotFerry has nothing to import them into.
Some teams keep both and split by channel. ClearFeed stays on the customer channels where every request needs a Zendesk record. BotFerry takes the internal channels where somebody asks a question and wants an answer, with no record needed beyond the thread it happened in.