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Core concepts
A plain-language guide to the building blocks of OrbitBase, from organisations and workspaces to conversations, leads and cases.
A handful of ideas come up everywhere in OrbitBase. This page explains each one in plain language and how they fit together.
Organisation
Your organisation is your account with OrbitBase. It holds your subscription, and your plan's limits — AI replies, messaging channels, team members, actions and knowledge storage — belong to the organisation as a whole. Everyone on your team is a member of it.
Each person has a role:
| Role | What they can do |
|---|---|
| Owner | Everything, including billing and deleting the organisation. Set when the account is created. |
| Admin | Manage the workspace, team, agent settings and billing alongside the owner. |
| Member | Work conversations, leads and cases. Can see settings but not change how the agent behaves. |
See Team and roles.
Workspace
A workspace is where the work happens. It holds your connected channels, knowledge sources, actions, agent settings, inbox, leads and cases. You create your first workspace during setup, and its name appears in the address of every page in the app.
Agent
Your agent is the AI that answers your customers. Each workspace has one. You shape it in Settings → AI with written instructions, a tone, and how strictly it sticks to your knowledge, then test it in the Playground. See AI settings.
Knowledge sources
Sources are what your agent knows. There are four kinds: Documents, Websites, Free text and Notion. OrbitBase reads each source and trains your agent on it, so when a customer asks a question, the agent finds the most relevant passages and answers from them. See Knowledge sources.
Actions
Actions are what your agent can do beyond answering. Every workspace starts with three system actions — Collect Leads, Escalate to Human and Wrap up conversation — and you can add more, such as booking a Calendly or Cal.com meeting, showing Shopify products, posting a Slack alert, filing an Intercom ticket, opening a case or calling your own system. See Actions overview.
Channels
A channel is one connected messaging account: an Instagram professional account, a Facebook Page on Messenger, a WhatsApp number, a Telegram bot, a Slack app, or your website widget. You can connect several accounts on the same platform; each is its own channel. Every workspace has one website widget, and it never counts toward your plan's channel limit. See Channels overview.
Conversations
A conversation is one thread with one customer on one channel. Every conversation has a status:
- Open — the agent is handling it.
- Escalated — a person needs to answer. The agent stays quiet on it unless a teammate hands it back to the agent.
- Closed — finished. If the customer writes again later, OrbitBase starts a new conversation and keeps the closed one's history alongside it.
Inbox
The Inbox is where your team sees and works every conversation. It's organised into views — Mine, Queue, All and Closed. Queue holds escalated conversations nobody has picked up yet, so it's the first place to look when the agent hands over. See Inbox overview.
Contacts and leads
Every person who messages you becomes a contact automatically — the agent never has to work out who it's talking to. When a customer shows interest and shares their details, the Collect Leads action saves them (email, phone, company and what they want) and flags the contact as a lead. Both live in Leads, where you can filter between leads and contacts. See Leads overview.
Cases
A case tracks customer work that outlives a chat — a refund, a replacement, an investigation. Each case has a number, a requestor, a state, a priority, an assignee and a history, and can be linked to the conversations it came from. Your team creates cases by hand or from the inbox, and the agent can open one with the Create case action. See Cases overview.
Escalating and opening a case solve different problems. Escalation means "a person must answer this chat now". A case means "this work continues after the chat ends".
How it fits together
A customer messages one of your channels. OrbitBase records them as a contact and opens a conversation in your workspace. Your agent answers from your knowledge sources and uses actions when needed — saving a lead, opening a case, or escalating to your team in the inbox. Your organisation's plan sets how much of each you can use.