Tenants allow you to structure your customers in Plain in the same way as they are structured in your product. For example if within your product customers are organised in a ‘team’ then you would create one tenant per team in your product. A tenant has an externalId so that you can map it back to an entity in your database. Customers can belong to multiple tenants. For advanced integrations with Plain you can specify a tenant when creating a thread. This is useful when building a support portal in your product as it allows you to fetch threads specific to a team in your product. Additionally tiers and SLAs can be associated with a tenant.

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What's the difference between companies and tenants?

Companies are typically a human concept which although useful for support has no corresponding entity in your database. Tenants on the other hand should 1:1 correspond with your tenants in your product/database. So, for example, if within your product a user can be part of multiple workspaces then a customer could have the company "Acme" and also be part of two tenants such as: "acme_prod" and "acme_dev" (or "acme_marketing" and "acme_sales" etc.).