Is Front or Helpwise cheaper?

Front starts at $25/seat/mo (Starter, billed annually) (14 days trial). Helpwise starts at $12 per user per month (Standard, annual billing; $15 monthly) (7 days trial).

Front vs Helpwise

An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.

The short answer

Both sides assessed

Front compared with Helpwise

Helpwise is the budget version of the same idea: a shared inbox with assignment, canned replies, and basic reporting at $12 to $39 a seat, with AI as agent assistance rather than a metered resolution engine. Front is the far more polished customer operations platform, with better collaboration, deeper analytics, a stronger API, and SOC 2 and ISO certification that Helpwise lacks. If your team is small, price-sensitive, and only needs email chaos to stop, Helpwise does that for a third of the money; Front earns its premium once collaboration depth, integrations, or a security review become the real constraint.

Helpwise compared with Front

Front is the premium version of this idea, with far deeper collaboration, better workflow tooling, and an interface people genuinely enjoy, but it is priced accordingly and carries seat minimums that make small deployments expensive. Helpwise does the same core job (shared inboxes, assignment, collision detection, internal notes) at a fraction of the seat price. A well-funded team that lives in its inbox all day should buy Front; a cost-conscious ten-person operations team should buy Helpwise and spend the difference elsewhere.

Choose Front if

Teams of roughly 5 to 50 people whose customer work is relationship-heavy and cross-functional: client services, logistics and freight, travel, professional services, and B2B SaaS support where a single request involves account managers, ops, and engineers rather than a lone agent closing a ticket. It is the strongest choice in the category when collaboration on a conversation, not throughput, is the bottleneck.

Choose Helpwise if

Small businesses and lean operations teams (roughly 2 to 25 users) running several shared addresses across support, sales, billing, and HR, who want predictable flat per-seat pricing, broad channel coverage including WhatsApp and SMS, and no per-conversation or per-AI-resolution meter on the invoice.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Front	Helpwise
Category	Support	Support
Starting price	$25/seat/mo (Starter, billed annually) (14 days trial)	$12 per user per month (Standard, annual billing; $15 monthly) (7 days trial)
Pricing model	Per-seat subscription across three tiers with a 24 percent discount for annual billing, plus separate per-seat AI add-ons (Copilot, Smart QA, Smart CSAT), a usage-metered AI agent (Autopilot, priced per conversation), and channel and API add-ons.	Flat per-user-per-month subscription across three tiers, with seat minimums and a user cap on the entry plan. No per-conversation, per-ticket, or per-AI-resolution metering.
Free plan	No	No
Free trial	14 days with all Professional features, no credit card required	7 days, no credit card required
Best for	Teams of roughly 5 to 50 people whose customer work is relationship-heavy and cross-functional: client services, logistics and freight, travel, professional services, and B2B SaaS support where a single request involves account managers, ops, and engineers rather than a lone agent closing a ticket. It is the strongest choice in the category when collaboration on a conversation, not throughput, is the bottleneck.	Small businesses and lean operations teams (roughly 2 to 25 users) running several shared addresses across support, sales, billing, and HR, who want predictable flat per-seat pricing, broad channel coverage including WhatsApp and SMS, and no per-conversation or per-AI-resolution meter on the invoice.
Setup time	A working shared inbox in an afternoon: connect Gmail or Microsoft 365, invite the team, and conversations start flowing. A complete deployment with omnichannel connected, rules and macros written, SLAs configured, and the knowledge base populated is realistically 2 to 6 weeks, and Autopilot needs longer because it has to be connected to the systems it acts on.	An afternoon for a single inbox. Connect Gmail or Microsoft 365, invite the team, import saved replies, and you are working. Adding channels, rules, and a help center is another day or two of configuration.
Learning curve	Low for agents, moderate for admins. Anyone who uses email is productive on day one, and the collaboration primitives are self-explanatory. The admin side is where the time goes: rules, workspaces, tag taxonomy, assignment limits, and SLA policies all reward planning, and workspaces in particular are hard to restructure once inboxes and analytics are attached to them.	Low. This is a shared inbox that looks like a shared inbox, and agents who have used Gmail need almost no training. The person configuring automation rules and Smart Assign needs an hour with the documentation, and should note that several features they expect to find (SLA rules, custom views) only exist on the Advanced plan.
Platforms	Web app, macOS and Windows desktop apps, iOS and Android apps, Front Chat widget, REST API and webhooks	Web app, Embeddable live chat widget, Gmail and Microsoft 365 connections, Webhooks
Compliance	SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR with a data processing addendum, HackerOne bug bounty program	GDPR compliance stated by the vendor with a dedicated policy page, Periodic third-party penetration testing, No SOC 2, ISO 27001, or HIPAA attestation published
Founded	2013	2016
Headquarters	San Francisco, California, United States	Palo Alto, California, United States
Ownership	Private, venture-backed	Venture-backed, part of SaaS Labs, Inc.

Strengths and limitations

Front

Strengths

Shared drafts and internal comments make Front the best tool in the category for work where a reply needs more than one brain, which is why agencies, logistics teams, and account managers keep choosing it over cheaper help desks.
Free guest accounts let engineers, finance, or a warehouse manager join a conversation without a paid license, which materially lowers the cost of cross-functional escalation.
The API and webhook surface is deep and well documented, available on every plan, and good enough that technical teams build real workflows on it rather than settling for Zapier.
Per-conversation AI metering from $0.05 is more forgiving at volume than the per-resolution meters used by Intercom and Help Scout, and Enterprise bundles the per-seat AI products instead of stacking them.

Limitations

Starter's single-channel-type rule is the most consequential restriction in Front's pricing and it is easy to miss: email plus chat requires Professional at $65 per seat, so the effective entry price is more than double the headline.
AI is unbundled to the point of being confusing. Copilot, Smart QA, and Smart CSAT are three separate per-seat charges and Autopilot is a fourth, metered line, and only Enterprise includes the first three.
Autopilot's price is a floor, not a rate. Everything about the AI agent is sold by a rep, so a small team cannot self-serve its way to a number and has to run a sales cycle to get a budget figure.
No light-agent or read-only paid seat. Every person who replies to a customer costs full price, which is punishing for teams with part-timers or seasonal contractors.

Helpwise

Strengths

Flat per-seat pricing with no per-conversation or per-resolution meter, which in 2026 is a genuine differentiator rather than a lack of ambition.
Channel coverage at the Premium tier is unusually broad for the price: WhatsApp, SMS, Instagram, Facebook, live chat, voice, and email in one queue.
Sized by shared inbox rather than by ticket volume, which suits operations-heavy small businesses running several departmental addresses rather than one support queue.
The collaboration basics are all present and correct: collision detection, internal notes, mentions, shared drafts, and activity logs.

Limitations

No autonomous AI agent. The AI here assists agents and prioritises the queue; it does not resolve conversations without a human, so deflection is not on the table.
The Standard plan's ten-user ceiling and fifteen-saved-reply cap make it a starter tier rather than a viable long-term home for a growing team.
SLA rules, custom views, unlimited automation, and SSO are all locked to the $39 Advanced tier, which more than triples the entry price.
Compliance documentation is thin: GDPR, AWS hosting, encryption, and penetration testing are stated, but no SOC 2 report, ISO 27001, or HIPAA attestation is published.

Pricing compared

Front

Per-seat subscription across three tiers with a 24 percent discount for annual billing, plus separate per-seat AI add-ons (Copilot, Smart QA, Smart CSAT), a usage-metered AI agent (Autopilot, priced per conversation), and channel and API add-ons.

Starter$25
Professional$65
Enterprise$105

Front is expensive for what a small team typically needs and priced correctly for what a mid-sized team actually does. Starter at $25 is not a real starter plan because of the single-channel-type restriction, so the honest entry price is Professional at $65 per seat, which is roughly three times a Hiver Growth seat and two and a half times Help Scout Standard. What you get for the premium is real: shared drafts, guest accounts, load balancing, the best API in the category, US or EU data residency, and a genuine multi-workspace model. Where Front is quietly better value than its competitors is AI at volume. Per-conversation metering from $0.05 punishes you far less than a per-resolution meter as automation improves, and Enterprise at $105 bundles Copilot, Smart QA, and Smart CSAT that would otherwise cost $45 per seat on top of a $65 Professional seat, which makes the top tier the cheapest way to buy the full AI set. The catch is that almost none of the AI is self-serve: you will be talking to a sales rep to find out what you actually pay.

Helpwise

Flat per-user-per-month subscription across three tiers, with seat minimums and a user cap on the entry plan. No per-conversation, per-ticket, or per-AI-resolution metering.

Standard$12
Premium$23
Advanced$39

Judged as capability per dollar, Premium at $23 a seat is strong: ten shared inboxes, WhatsApp, SMS, Instagram, voice, CSAT, and a help center for roughly what Help Scout charges for its Standard plan without any of the extra channels, and with no AI meter attached. Judged as capability in absolute terms, you are paying less because you are getting less: the interface is plainer, the knowledge base is thinner, the reporting is shallower, and there is no autonomous agent taking work off the queue. The honest framing is that Helpwise is the sensible purchase when your support problem is coordination rather than volume. If your problem is volume, a flat per-seat price is not a saving, it is a decision to keep paying humans to answer the same question.

Editorial verdict on each

Front

Front is the best shared inbox in the category and it now charges accordingly. Shared drafts, free guest accounts, load balancing, US or EU data residency, and a genuinely good API add up to something no cheaper competitor matches, and if your customer work is collaborative (agencies, logistics, client services, technical B2B support) the premium buys back real coordination time. Two things should temper the enthusiasm. Starter is not a starter plan because of the single-channel-type rule, so the honest entry price is $65 per seat, not $25. And the AI is unbundled into four separate line items, three of which are per-seat add-ons and the fourth of which is a sales-quoted meter, so nobody can price a Front AI deployment from the website. The consolation is that per-conversation metering at $0.05 ages far better than the per-resolution meters at Intercom and Help Scout as your automation rate climbs, and Enterprise at $105 is arithmetically cheaper than Professional plus the add-ons. Buy Front for the collaboration and the API; do the AI arithmetic with a rep before you commit.

Read the full Front profile

Helpwise

Helpwise is the unfashionable choice, and in 2026 that is close to a recommendation. While the rest of the category moved to charging per AI resolution, it kept a flat per-seat price of $12, $23, or $39 and shipped AI that helps agents rather than replacing them. For a small operations-heavy business running several departmental inboxes, that combination of broad channel coverage at Premium, real collaboration features, and a bill that does not move with traffic is genuinely good value, and cheaper than Help Scout or Front for the same core job. Be clear-eyed about what you are not getting: no autonomous deflection, a thin knowledge base, shallow reporting, no SOC 2, and a top-tier gate on SLAs, custom views, and SSO that triples the entry price. Buy it if your support problem is coordination and predictability. Look elsewhere if your problem is volume, because a flat seat price does not reduce a queue, it just makes the cost of answering it easier to forecast.

Read the full Helpwise profile

Front profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Helpwise last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.