Is Hiver or Missive cheaper?

Hiver starts at $25 per user per month (Growth, billed annually; $35 monthly) (free plan available). Missive starts at $0 (unadvertised free plan for 3 users); $14 per user per month for Starter on annual billing (free plan available).

Hiver vs Missive

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

Editorial assessment

Missive compared with Hiver

Hiver's pitch is that nobody changes tools: it lives inside Gmail as an extension, adding assignments, statuses, and shared inboxes to the interface your team already knows, with AI included in its Growth tier at $25 per user. Missive is the opposite bet: a new app that replaces Gmail entirely and rewards the switch with things Hiver structurally cannot do inside Google's chrome, including real-time collaborative drafts, built-in team chat, native Windows and Mac apps, SMS, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger in the same list, and a 1,000-rule engine at a comparable $24. If your team is Google Workspace only, email only, and allergic to new interfaces, Hiver's zero-retraining story is genuinely valuable and Missive's learning curve is a real cost. If you want channels beyond email, chat consolidation, or you are on Microsoft 365 at all (where Hiver's Gmail-native model does not reach), Missive is the more capable product for effectively the same money.

Choose Hiver if

Small and mid-sized teams already standardised on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 whose support is email-led and whose biggest problem is coordination rather than volume. It suits support, finance, IT, and operations teams of roughly three to thirty people who need assignment, SLAs, and real reporting without asking anyone to abandon their inbox.

Choose Missive if

Teams of roughly 2 to 25 people who live in email and want their personal mail, shared inboxes, team chat, and tasks in one app: agencies, bookkeeping and accounting firms, property managers, e-commerce operators, travel planners, and any small business where the same few people handle support, sales, and operations from overlapping mailboxes.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Hiver	Missive
Category	Support	Support
Starting price	$25 per user per month (Growth, billed annually; $35 monthly) (free plan available)	$0 (unadvertised free plan for 3 users); $14 per user per month for Starter on annual billing (free plan available)
Pricing model	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.	Per-user subscription across three published tiers plus an unadvertised free plan, billed monthly or annually with annual saving 20 percent. Tier gating is by capability rather than usage: Starter excludes rules, integrations, AI, and API access, which all arrive at Productive. Each user includes up to 10 personal and 5 shared accounts, with additional shared accounts purchasable. AI costs nothing from Missive; you pay your own OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini API usage directly.
Free plan	None currently advertised on Hiver's pricing page. Several third-party pricing trackers still list a free tier, which appears to be stale; treat the 7-day trial as the evaluation path and confirm at signup.	An unadvertised free plan, removed from the pricing page in 2024 but still available in-product: up to 3 users, 2 shared accounts, and a 15-day conversation history window, which makes it an evaluation environment rather than a permanent home.
Free trial	7 days on the Elite tier, no credit card required	30 days with paid features, no credit card required
Best for	Small and mid-sized teams already standardised on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 whose support is email-led and whose biggest problem is coordination rather than volume. It suits support, finance, IT, and operations teams of roughly three to thirty people who need assignment, SLAs, and real reporting without asking anyone to abandon their inbox.	Teams of roughly 2 to 25 people who live in email and want their personal mail, shared inboxes, team chat, and tasks in one app: agencies, bookkeeping and accounting firms, property managers, e-commerce operators, travel planners, and any small business where the same few people handle support, sales, and operations from overlapping mailboxes.
Setup time	Under an hour for a working setup. Install the extension across the team, connect the shared mailboxes, and the sidebar appears in everyone's Gmail. This is the fastest meaningful deployment in the category precisely because there is no new interface to roll out.	A working shared inbox in under an hour: connect Gmail or Microsoft 365 via OAuth, add a shared account, invite the team. Full deployment with SMS numbers provisioned, social channels connected, rules written, and an AI provider key added is a few days of part-time effort. There is no implementation project and nothing to install server-side.
Learning curve	Close to zero for agents, which is the entire point. The only new concepts are assignment, status, and internal notes, all of which sit visibly in an interface people already know. The administrator has automation rules, SLA policies, and mailbox configuration to learn, which is an afternoon rather than a project.	Moderate, and mostly interface adjustment rather than concepts. Missive is denser than Gmail and more opinionated than a help desk, and reviewers consistently describe a one-to-two-week acclimatization. The payoff structure helps: assignment and comments are learnable in minutes, while rules, AI Rules, and the full keyboard-driven workflow reward a power user who invests. Expect one person to become the internal rules-and-integrations owner.
Platforms	Gmail and Google Workspace browser extension, Outlook and Microsoft 365, Hiver Omni standalone web app, iOS and Android apps	Web application, macOS and Windows native desktop apps, iOS and Android native apps, Live chat widget for websites
Compliance	SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, ISO 27001, HIPAA compliance support on the Elite tier	SOC 2 Type II (included from the Starter tier), GDPR
Founded	2011	2015
Headquarters	San Jose, California, United States, with significant operations in Bangalore, India	Quebec City, Quebec, Canada
Ownership	Venture-backed, privately held. Operates as GrexIt, Inc. doing business as Hiver.	Bootstrapped, founder-owned, profitable; no outside investors

Strengths and limitations

Hiver

Strengths

Adoption is close to free. Agents keep working in Gmail or Outlook, which sidesteps the single biggest failure mode of help desk rollouts.
AI is bundled into the seat price from Growth upward with no per-resolution meter, so the monthly bill is genuinely fixed while competitors scale with volume.
Because Hiver operates on your existing mailboxes, evaluating it carries almost no switching risk: if you stop paying, your mail is exactly where it always was.
Analytics are strong for an inbox product: response time, resolution time, workload distribution, SLA compliance, and CSAT all reported properly.

Limitations

The seat increment structure is user-hostile. Two, then five, then multiples of five means teams routinely pay for one to four seats they do not use.
No light agent or read-only seat, so every engineer, contractor, or stakeholder who needs visibility costs a full licence.
It is an inbox, not a ticketing engine. There are no custom ticket fields, conditional forms, skills-based routing, or multi-brand help centers, and a growing support operation will hit that ceiling.
The knowledge base is functional but noticeably weaker than Zendesk's or Freshdesk's on theming, multi-brand support, and SEO control.

Missive

Strengths

The only product in the category that fully replaces your email client: up to 10 personal and 5 shared accounts per user in one app, so there is no second inbox to check and adoption is easier because people live there anyway.
Real-time collaborative drafts with live presence, matched only by Front and at roughly a third of Front's comparable price.
Built-in team chat with rooms and DMs that small teams genuinely use instead of Slack, which turns the subscription into a consolidation rather than an addition.
Bring-your-own-key AI (OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, or Google Gemini) with AI Rules for auto-labeling, summarizing, task extraction, and pre-drafted replies, at your own API cost rather than a $20-plus per-seat add-on or a per-resolution meter.

Limitations

No public knowledge base, help center, or customer portal, and no plans for one: deflection through self-service articles is simply not part of the product, which rules Missive out for support strategies built on it.
No CSAT surveys, no QA scorecards, and no SLA engine with breach alerting. A metrics-driven support manager will find the reporting layer thin: basic analytics arrive at $24 and even advanced analytics at $36 trail what Zendesk or Front provide.
The Starter tier is close to decorative: at $14 it excludes rules, integrations, AI, and API access and caps at 5 users, so the honest entry price for a working setup is Productive at $24.
AI requires connecting your own OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini API key. This is cheaper and more transparent than vendor meters, but it is a setup step involving a developer account and separate usage billing that some non-technical teams will stumble on.

Pricing compared

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.

Missive

Per-user subscription across three published tiers plus an unadvertised free plan, billed monthly or annually with annual saving 20 percent. Tier gating is by capability rather than usage: Starter excludes rules, integrations, AI, and API access, which all arrive at Productive. Each user includes up to 10 personal and 5 shared accounts, with additional shared accounts purchasable. AI costs nothing from Missive; you pay your own OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini API usage directly.

Free$0
Starter$14
Productive$24
Business$36

Judged on capability per dollar for a team of 2 to 25, Missive's Productive tier at $24 is one of the strongest buys in the shared inbox category. It bundles omnichannel (email, SMS, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, live chat), a 1,000-rule automation engine, real-time collaborative drafts, native apps on every platform, and a team chat product that can genuinely replace Slack, against Front's $65 Professional tier and Help Scout's mid pricing, and its AI model of bring-your-own-key means the number on the pricing page is close to the number on the invoice. The honest counterweights: Starter at $14 is not a usable tier for most teams, so compare at $24, not $14; there is no knowledge base, CSAT, or SLA engine, so if you need those the comparison is invalid and a help desk is the right purchase; and analytics are modest. For a team that lives in email and wants collaboration rather than a support department in a box, the value is excellent. Cancel the Slack bill it replaces and Productive can come close to paying for itself.

Editorial verdict on each

Hiver

Ease of Use

Hiver solves a real and underrated problem: help desks fail not because they lack features but because agents quietly keep working in Gmail. By putting assignment, SLAs, analytics, and AI inside the mail client people already use, Hiver gets adoption almost for free, and it is one of very few vendors in this category that has refused to attach a per-resolution meter to its AI. A five-seat team pays $125 a month at any volume, which is a genuinely differentiated offer in 2026. The reservations are concrete rather than philosophical: the two-then-five-then-fives seat structure overcharges most teams, there is no light agent seat, API access costs $55 per user, and the knowledge base and routing are thinner than a real ticketing platform. Buy Hiver if your support is email-led, your team is on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, and coordination rather than volume is your problem. If you need deflection at scale or a configurable ticket model, buy something else.

Read the full Hiver profile

Missive

Missive is the best shared inbox for small teams who want their whole communication life in one app and do not need a support department in a box. The combination it offers at $24 on the Productive tier (personal and shared email together, SMS, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, live chat, real-time collaborative drafts, native team chat, tasks, a 1,000-rule engine, and AI on your own API key with no meter) is not matched at anywhere near the price; Front charges $65 before AI for its comparable tier, and neither Hiver nor Helpwise reaches the same depth. The company is the other half of the appeal: bootstrapped in Quebec City since 2015, profitable at $8 million-plus ARR with no investors, which means no acquisition roulette and pricing that has moved slowly and predictably. Be equally clear about what it is not. There is no knowledge base, no CSAT, no SLA engine, and modest analytics, so a metrics-driven or deflection-led support operation should buy Help Scout, Front, or Zendesk instead; the Starter tier is too stripped to count, so budget $24 a seat; and the small team behind it ships deliberately, not fast. For an agency, e-commerce operator, or services firm of 2 to 25 people drowning in overlapping mailboxes, Missive is the first product to trial, and for many of them the last.

Read the full Missive profile

Hiver profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Missive last reviewed 2026-08-31. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.