A Complete Guide to Atlassian Assist in Slack

Customers want instant answers. 77% expect immediate interaction when contacting a company, and 88% say service quality affects whether they'll buy again. Many companies use Slack with Atlassian Assist (formerly Halp) to handle this. Slack handles the messaging. Atlassian Assist turns those messages into support tickets.

Atlassian acquired Halp in 2020 and rebranded it to Atlassian Assist. Most features survived, but the acquisition did change things. If you're using this integration or considering it, here's what actually works, what breaks down, and what else is out there.

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Atlassian Assist vs. Halp: Are Both the Same?

Atlassian Assist and Halp are closely related but not the same.

• In 2020, Atlassian acquired Halp, a Slack- and Microsoft Teams-based ticketing system, to augment its capabilities.
• The functionality of Halp was incorporated into a new product, Atlassian Assist, a Slack bot that runs with Jira Service Management.
• The old Halp app was completely deprecated in 2022 in favor of Atlassian Assist.
• Atlassian Assist continues to focus on resolving issues faster and supporting customer requests in Slack using Jira Service Management (JSM).

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Key Features of Atlassian Assist (Halp)

Halp’s standout feature was how easy it made ticket creation in Slack. You could turn messages into tickets with emojis, then manage those tickets from triage channels. It also integrated well with Jira Service Management and Zendesk, and it even offered its own ticketing system.

After the migration, Atlassian Assist became part of JSM. It no longer integrates with Zendesk. And its core focus is now on making it easy to create and manage JSM tickets from Slack. Here are some of the notable features:

1. Seamless Ticket Creation and Updates from Slack: Atlassian Assist is tightly integrated with Jira Service Management, making it super easy to create JSM tickets right from Slack. Tickets and Slack threads are synced, and comments can be posted either from JSM or Slack seamlessly.
2. Ticket Management in Slack: Triage channels let agents manage incoming tickets. ie. Agents never have to leave Slack, even as all data is captured in JSM.
3. Private Ticket Creation in Slack: Users can use shortcuts or the Atlassian Assist app in Slack to create private tickets (in JSM). This is a great solution for teams like HR, where many requests have private information.
4. Approval Workflows: Teams can create custom workflows in JSM, like approval workflows. Approvers can take approval actions directly in Slack when JSM Chat integration is enabled.
5. Reporting and Analytics: Keeping an eye on support performance is super important! With Atlassian Assist, you get detailed JSM reporting and analytics that make it easy for managers to track key performance metrics for tickets created in Slack, spot bottlenecks, and improve processes.

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Atlassian Assist (Halp) Pricing

Halp was originally offered as a standalone Slack and Microsoft Teams ticketing application with its own separate pricing tiers (Standard, Premium, Enterprise). As we have noted, Atlassian Assist is now bundled with Jira Service Management, and its pricing is based on JSM:

• Atlassian Assist is not available on free and standard JSM plans
• It is available on the premium plan and above (which starts at a minimum of $51 per agent)

Fundamentally, Atlassian Assist is priced per Agent and limits membership on Slack triage channels to such agents. This can make the pricing very expensive for large teams looking to collaborate on issues.

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What Are the Benefits of Using Atlassian Assist (Halp) With Slack?

Atlassian Assist merges Slack's communication capabilities with the efficient ticketing system of Assist (formerly known as Halp). This Slack and Atlassian integration lets users create, manage, and resolve Jira service tickets directly in Slack. Key benefits include:

1. Improved Workflow for Support Agents and Approvers

• With Assist integrated into Slack, questions from your ticketing systems can be routed directly to support reps and teams within Slack channels. This creates a seamless workflow for providing customer support.
• Support agents don't have to switch platforms or engage in inefficient email back-and-forth. Everything is contained within Slack.
• Managers have visibility into support conversations happening in Slack and can monitor performance to identify areas for improvement. Approvers and others involved in ticketing can take actions right from Slack.

2. Better Collaboration between Support Agents

• Different support teams and agents can collaborate on answers within Slack threads. Experts across departments can chime in to resolve customer issues faster.
• Slack's threaded messaging provides greater context and organization for customer support conversations compared to traditional email ticketing systems.
• Support agents can easily @mention subject matter experts across teams to pull them into a customer conversation in Slack.

3. Easy Ticket Submission and Updates for Employees

The best part of Atlassian Assist (Halp) is that Employees can submit tickets, get updates on them, and view all their tickets very easily. All within Slack.

With Atlassian’s Assist natively embedded in Slack, customer service teams can deliver more human, helpful support. The integration saves time and effort while improving team efficiency and collaboration.

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Why Atlassian Assist Integration Might Not Be Right for You

Atlassian Assist offers a streamlined approach to ticket management that, in theory, should improve support effectiveness within Slack. However, its limitations are important to acknowledge, as they may hinder its promising potential.

1. Expensive Agent-based Licensing: Agent-based licensing is a big drawback for Halp, especially for large engineering teams. Costs can climb fast when many people need to collaborate on tickets, whether that’s internal work on product issues or support with external customers in Slack channels. On top of that, Atlassian now offers Atlassian Assist only in Premium (and higher) tiers, which makes the overall setup much more expensive.
2. Complexity of Configuration: While the close integration with Jira Service Management brings powerful core Helpdesk and Service desk functionalities, users repeatedly note that JSM is complex to configure.
3. Integrates only with JSM: Halp used to integrate with both Jira and Zendesk. After the acquisition, it integrates only with Jira Service Management. That shift leaves teams on other systems, such as Zendesk, ClickUp, and Freshdesk, without a Slack integration as capable. Most ticketing platforms do offer their own Slack apps, but they’re usually nowhere near Halp (now Atlassian Assist) in terms of functionality.
4. Primitive Knowledge-Centered Support: Halp can suggest replies to new inquiries using its internal knowledge bases. But it doesn’t do a good job pulling in information from external docs or other sources. Its responses aren’t driven by advanced AI or vector search. They’re closer to simple keyword matching. Atlassian users can use Rovo now, but that’s a separate product. It’s more complex, and it’s priced separately, too.
5. Not designed for Customer Support: Halp and JSM are mostly built for internal support. But in the last few years, customer support on Slack has taken off. And neither Halp nor Atlassian Assist today is well-suited for managing hundreds of customer channels. They’re missing important capabilities, like:

• Automatically finding, monitoring, and adding customer channels
• Posting welcome messages (and automating them)
• Broadcasting updates across many customer channels
• Syncing customer tickets with external systems like HubSpot

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What Are the Alternatives to Atlassian Assist & Halp?

While Atlassian Assist remains a great solution for current JSM customers who use Slack intensively, its high price, limited integrations, complexity, and inability to support customers in customer support situations are prompting users to consider other solutions. Here are some of the alternatives that are popular:

• Linear Asks: For companies that love using Linear, it's a great solution for internal support on Slack. However, it is not a great fit for providing customer support over Slack. Linear is known for its design and speed and is very popular with modern Engineering and DevOps teams.
• ClearFeed: A modern version of Halp, with deep integrations to Zendesk, ClickUp, Jira, and many other systems, built for both internal and external support on Slack. ClearFeed is easy to set up and use, but still offers advanced AI agents and powerful ticketing workflows in one platform, at an affordable price.
• Slack Apps from Ticketing vendors: Vendors like Zendesk and Freshservice now offer their own Slack apps that cover some of what Halp used to do. But they’re still limited, especially when it comes to forms and managing a large number of customer Slack channels. They also usually don’t let agents fully manage tickets from inside Slack. Instead, key actions still push agents back to the browser-based ticketing app.

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ClearFeed: An Alternative to Atlassian Assist & Halp

ClearFeed is an effective alternative to Halp (Atlassian Assist), offering several key benefits to enhance help desk request management and team collaboration, both internal and external. Here's how ClearFeed helps manage customer requests on Slack and scale support operations:

1. Intelligent Triaging, Prioritization, and Flexible Response Management

ClearFeed's Triage Channel and automated response function effectively manage many customer tickets on Slack. The triage channel sorts through messages, organizing and prioritizing them so every request gets quick attention. It's especially helpful for urgent issues that must be sorted out quickly.

The automated responses provide quick answers to common questions and keep things running, even outside working hours. For more complex or sensitive issues that require a human touch, the team can handle them personally. The automatic and manual response systems work together to provide a flexible and efficient customer service experience.

2. In-Depth Analytics

ClearFeed provides a deep understanding of how your team performs and how your help desk operates, all through detailed analysis. It considers important factors such as how long responses take, how successful solutions are, and how many requests breached the agreed service levels. This data can help businesses improve their services.

Looking closely at how the team performs can help tweak how work is done, clarify who's responsible for what, and improve how everyone works together. This powerful analysis provides businesses with the details they need to tailor their support methods, ensuring their services remain focused on the customer.

3. Customization

ClearFeed lets you set up ticket rules and workflows, making it adaptable to your business's operations. This means you can sort incoming requests however you want, decide which issues are most significant, and route tickets to the right team members. By matching the automatic sorting and priority setting with your business's specific needs, you can ensure things run smoothly and cater to varied needs effectively.

4. Comprehensive Integrations

ClearFeed offers comprehensive integration capabilities, enabling Slack to seamlessly interface with leading ticketing and issue management systems. These include Salesforce Service Cloud, Atlassian's Jira Service Management, Zendesk, Freshdesk, GitHub, ClickUp, Intercom, and more. Beyond ticketing systems, ClearFeed can also assimilate knowledge from various enterprise know-how sources such as Confluence Wikis, Notion, PDF files, Google Drive, Dropbox, Gitbook documentation portals, and any public website.

The standout feature of ClearFeed's integration is its extensive customizability. It ensures flexible interfacing through options for both one-way and two-way synchronization of messages and fields across different platforms. This flexibility allows Slack users to collaborate seamlessly with users on other platforms, such as Zendesk, enhancing cross-platform productivity.

5. Flexible Pricing

ClearFeed is built with the diverse needs of various teams in mind, offering unique pricing models for each:

1. Customer Support and Engineering Teams: Teams collaborating with customers have access to per-channel pricing. This plan allows larger groups to communicate and collaborate without being held back by high costs.
2. Internal IT, HR, and Sales Ops Teams: Teams more familiar with a per-agent pricing model can use ClearFeed in a way that aligns most closely with their established workflow.
3. Teams Using ClearFeed for Integrations: For those who use ClearFeed for its integration abilities, a usage-based plan is the best fit. This approach calculates pricing based on the number of tickets filed or synced, offering unrestricted collaboration across the organization.‍

With these various pricing options, ClearFeed allows each team within an organization to select the model that best suits their operations and budget.‍

Here’s a quick side-by-side comparison of Slack integration of ClearFeed and Halp:

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The Effectiveness of Assist, Slack, and Beyond

Using Atlassian Assist and Slack together is still a great solution. It helps businesses improve communication and customer support in a straightforward, easy-to-use way. These tools work together to manage customer requests, interact with team members, and resolve issues quickly and easily.

However, companies today have changing needs and should always be looking at their tools and how they operate. Even though Assist and Slack work well together, keeping an eye on new options like ClearFeed is a good idea. Want to know more about our integration with Slack? Get in touch with our team here.

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Frequently Asked Questions About Atlassian Assist in Slack

What Is Atlassian Assist in Slack?

Atlassian Assist in Slack is the app that connects Jira Service Management to Slack so teams can create, manage, and respond to service requests without leaving Slack. Atlassian describes it as the chat app that powers conversational request management in Slack and Microsoft Teams, including two-way sync between Slack conversations and Jira Service Management.

What Can You Do With Atlassian Assist in Slack?

The main use cases include turning messages into trackable requests, routing tickets, prioritizing work, responding from Slack, and reporting on support activity through Jira Service Management. Atlassian and Slack also highlight emoji-based ticket creation, slash commands, workflow automation, and Slack-first request handling as core parts of the experience.

Is Atlassian Assist in Slack Free?

The answer depends on which capability you mean. Atlassian Assist is tied to Jira Service Management Cloud rather than being a separate, standalone purchase for new customers, while the AI-powered virtual service agent is positioned on higher-tier Jira Service Management plans, specifically Premium and Enterprise offerings.

Can Atlassian Assist Create Jira Tickets From Slack Messages?

Yes. Atlassian Assist can turn Slack conversations into Jira Service Management requests via emoji reactions or slash command flows. Once the request is created, it appears in the linked Jira Service Management project and can continue to sync with the Slack conversation.

Can Atlassian Assist Use AI To Answer Questions in Slack?

Yes, through Jira Service Management’s virtual service agent. Atlassian says the virtual service agent can answer common questions, resolve routine requests, gather information for agents, and use AI plus knowledge sources to automate tier-one support interactions.