Front vs Hiver

Front compared with Hiver

Hiver Growth is $25 per user per month with AI agents and Copilot included, and it can live inside Gmail so nobody changes tools. Front's comparable omnichannel tier is $65 with AI sold separately. Hiver is the better buy for a small team whose support is email-led and whose budget is the binding constraint. Front is worth the premium when you need shared drafts, multiple workspaces, load balancing, a serious API, or EU data residency, none of which Hiver matches. Put crudely: Hiver is cheaper and simpler, Front is deeper and more expensive.

Hiver compared with Front

Both are shared-inbox products rather than ticketing systems, but Front is a standalone application at $25 to $105 a seat with seat minimums, while Hiver layers onto the Gmail or Outlook your team already uses at $25 to $85. Front is the more polished collaboration surface with better cross-team workflows and a stronger API story; Hiver wins decisively on adoption, because nobody has to change where they work. Choose Front if collaborative email across sales, support, and operations is the core problem; choose Hiver if the tool keeps failing because your team will not leave Gmail.

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.

Hiver

Per-user subscription across three paid tiers, billed monthly or annually, with AI bundled into the seat price from Growth upward rather than metered per resolution. Seats are sold in fixed increments rather than one at a time.

• Growth$25
• Pro$55
• Elite$85

Hiver's value case is adoption and predictability rather than raw capability. You are paying so that nobody has to learn a new tool, and so that your support bill stays the same number every month regardless of volume. Both are worth real money. At $25 a seat with AI included, a five-seat team pays $125 a month for coordination, automation, analytics, and AI drafting, which is less than a single Zendesk Suite Professional seat plus Copilot. The weaknesses are structural: the seat increments overcharge teams whose headcount is not a multiple of five, there is no light agent option, API access costs $55 a seat, and the knowledge base and routing are noticeably thinner than a real help desk. If your support is email-led and your problem is coordination, this is excellent value. If your problem is volume, Hiver is the wrong shape and its bundled AI will not save you.