Front
A shared team inbox for email and other channels, with AI drafting replies, tagging conversations and summarising long threads for anyone on the team.
What you'd use it for
Handling a team's shared support inbox across email, and SMS or social once you're on Professional or above, with automation rules doing the routing and tagging instead of a person opening every message first.
- Auto-tag every inbound conversation by topic with AI Topics, included on every tier
- Draft AI-assisted replies and summarise long threads with AI Compose, included on every tier at 200 AI actions a day
- Get a context-aware Copilot that answers from your team's past conversations, bundled free only on Enterprise and a paid add-on below it
- Route, tag or escalate a conversation automatically the moment it matches a rule, from up to 10 rules on Starter to unlimited on Enterprise
- Bring email, SMS and social messages into one shared inbox once you're on Professional or above
The verdict
Front is genuinely good at pushing routing and tagging into the background - automation rules run continuously once set up, and AI Topics tagging works on every tier including Starter. The AI most people picture when they hear an 'AI shared inbox', though, is Copilot, the context-aware assistant that drafts from your team's own conversation history, and that only ships free at Enterprise ($105/seat/month); below that it is a further $20/seat/month add-on, so the tier card price understates what a Copilot-equipped team actually pays. It suits a support team with real multichannel volume that wants one inbox and a genuine rules engine; a small team fielding email alone is paying for channels and seat capacity it will not use.
What it costs
| Tier | Price | For | Includes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $25/seat/month (up to 10 seats) | Teams getting started with a single support channel. | Shared inbox and ticketing, AI Topics, up to 10 automation rules, basic analytics, and a no-code public knowledge base. |
| Professional | $65/seat/month (up to 50 seats) | Teams needing omnichannel support and deeper automation. | Everything in Starter, plus omnichannel support (email, SMS, social), macros, up to 20 automation rules, advanced analytics, multiple workspaces, SSO and SCIM. |
| Enterprise | $105/seat/month | Organisations wanting AI tools to accelerate resolution at scale. | Everything in Professional, plus smart rules and unlimited macros/rules, a multi-language knowledge base, custom roles and permissions, and AI Copilot, QA and CSAT tools included. |
Read from Front's own pricing page on 25 Sep 2026. Vendors change prices without notice.
What you need to start
- An email account (Gmail, Microsoft 365 or another provider) to connect as your first channel
- A Professional plan ($65/seat/month) or higher to add SMS and social channels beyond email
Your first run Signing up with a Google, Microsoft or work email address walks you through a short set of onboarding screens, and Front auto-creates your first inbox and channel from that same login address, so you land on a working shared inbox before you've configured anything yourself.
Where it breaks
Browser-based, with desktop and mobile apps. Annual billing offers roughly 24% savings across all tiers versus month-to-month.
First entry in this reference. There is no previous check to compare it against.
When not to use it
Not for a solo operator or small team handling only email - Help Scout or a plain shared inbox does that job for less, since Front's Professional and Enterprise tiers are priced for omnichannel volume you are not generating. Also not for anyone budgeting the sticker price for AI drafting from conversation history: Copilot is a $20/seat/month add-on unless you are already paying for Enterprise, a gap that is easy to miss reading the tier cards alone.
Front is a shared inbox built for teams whose customer conversations arrive across more than one channel — email, SMS, social — and need one place to see and answer all of it without agents working from separate tools. The AI layer drafts replies, tags conversations by topic automatically, and summarises threads that have gotten long enough that nobody wants to scroll back through them.
The automation rules are what push this toward genuinely unsupervised work: Starter allows up to 10 rules, Professional up to 20, and Enterprise unlimited — each rule can route, tag or escalate a conversation the moment it matches a condition, running continuously in the background rather than only when someone opens the inbox.
What actually separates the tiers
Starter is single-channel-shaped even though the platform supports more — the omnichannel routing (SMS, social, alongside email) only unlocks at Professional. A support team fielding questions purely by email might genuinely be fine on Starter; anyone juggling a Twitter/X account, SMS and email as separate inboxes today is the target buyer for Professional.
Against the alternatives
Against Help Scout, the two compete closely at similar price points, and the honest difference is emphasis: Front leans further into automation rules and true omnichannel routing, while Help Scout keeps a lighter, more email-native feel even as it adds AI features. A team that wants a dedicated automation-rules engine tends to prefer Front; one that wants support to feel like personal email tends to prefer Help Scout. Try both against a real week of your actual support volume before committing — the difference matters more in daily use than in a feature comparison chart.
Alternatives
Support & inboxAgentsHelp Scout
A shared support inbox that looks and feels like email, with AI drafting replies and summarising long threads, built for small teams who dislike ticket software.
Zendesk AI
Auto-resolves customer support tickets, drafts replies, and routes by intent inside the most widely used help desk.
Support & inboxAgentsIntercom Fin
A support agent that answers customer questions straight from your help docs, handing off to a human only what it cannot resolve.
Support & inboxAgentsCrisp
A live chat widget, shared inbox and knowledge base with an AI agent that answers from your docs, priced flat per workspace rather than per agent seat.
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