Front

Name: Front
Brand: Front
Price: 25 USD

A shared inbox that grew into a customer operations platform, priced like one

Front is a customer communication platform built on a shared inbox model: email, chat, SMS, social, and Slack messages land in one collaborative workspace where teammates assign, comment, and reply as themselves rather than as a ticket queue. It layers ticketing, rules and macros, SLAs, analytics, a knowledge base, and a set of separately priced AI products (Autopilot, Copilot, Smart QA, Smart CSAT) on top, sold per seat across Starter, Professional, and Enterprise tiers.

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Overview

Front is what happens when a shared inbox refuses to stop growing. It began in 2013 as a way for a team to work one mailbox together without losing ownership of individual messages, and the collaboration primitives it invented then (assign a conversation to a person, comment on it internally, draft a reply together before it goes out) are still the reason people pick it. What has changed is scope. Front now describes itself as a customer operations platform, carries ticketing, omnichannel routing, SLAs, custom analytics, a knowledge base, and an AI agent, and quotes $105 per seat per month at the top. It is no longer the scrappy alternative to a help desk; it is a help desk that happens to feel like email.

That matters commercially because the pricing has moved with the positioning. Starter is $25 per seat per month billed annually and is capped at 10 seats and a single channel type, which means email or chat or SMS, not email and chat. Professional at $65 unlocks omnichannel and is capped at 50 seats. Enterprise at $105 removes the caps and, importantly, is the only tier where the agent-facing AI is included rather than sold on top. A four-person team that wants email plus chat is on Professional at $260 a month before a single AI feature is switched on.

The AI story is where a small-business buyer needs to slow down. Front splits AI into four products. Copilot, the drafting and answer assistant, is $20 per seat per month as an add-on. Smart QA is another $20 per seat, Smart CSAT another $10, and the QA plus CSAT bundle is $25 per seat. Autopilot, the customer-facing agent that actually resolves work, is metered at a published floor of $0.05 per conversation, sold through sales rather than a checkout page. That is a genuinely different meter from the per-resolution model used by Intercom and Help Scout: Front charges when Autopilot touches a conversation, not only when it succeeds. Cheaper per unit, broader base, and quoted rather than published, which is the part to negotiate.

The company itself is substantial and no longer founder-run. Front raised roughly $200M across six rounds, including a $65M Series D in 2022 led by Salesforce Ventures and Battery Ventures at a $1.7B valuation, with Sequoia, Threshold, and Uncork participating. Mathilde Collin, who founded it and ran it for a decade, is now Executive Chair; Dan O'Connell became CEO in 2024 and the company reports passing $100M ARR and serving 9,300-plus businesses. For a buyer that means stability and a real roadmap, and also a vendor whose commercial gravity is pulling toward larger accounts every year.

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.

Not the right fit for

Solo founders and two-person teams watching every dollar; at $25 per seat for a single channel and $65 for omnichannel, Front is two to three times the cost of Groove or a Hiver Growth seat for a workload neither would struggle with.
Anyone who assumed AI was included. Copilot at $20 per seat, Smart QA at $20, Smart CSAT at $10, and Autopilot metered per conversation mean a Professional team paying $65 a seat can easily be paying $85 to $110 a seat once the AI they saw in the demo is switched on.
Teams whose main need is a great public help center with SEO-friendly articles; Front's knowledge base is competent and improving but it is a supporting feature, not the product, and dedicated help-desk vendors do it better.
Buyers who want to complete the whole purchase without ever speaking to sales; Starter self-serves and there is a real 14-day Professional trial with no credit card, but Enterprise, Autopilot, and every AI add-on are quoted by a sales rep.
Organizations that want native telephony in the box; voice runs through Aircall or Dialpad integrations, so phone support means a second vendor and a second bill.

How it works

1
You connect the mailboxes and channels you already use: Gmail or Microsoft 365, a custom SMTP domain, Front Chat for your website, SMS through Twilio or Dialpad, Slack channels, social accounts, and WhatsApp as a paid add-on. Each becomes a channel inside a workspace, and every inbound message becomes a conversation with an owner, a status, tags, and a full history.
2
The daily work is collaborative rather than queue-shaped. You assign a conversation to a teammate, leave an internal comment that the customer never sees, write a shared draft that someone else can edit before it sends, snooze a thread until Thursday, or invite a colleague as a free guest account to comment without buying them a license. Replies leave as ordinary email from your own address, so the customer experiences a person, not a ticket ID.
3
Repetition moves into rules and macros. Rules match on conditions (inbox, sender, keyword, tag, CRM field pulled through an integration) and take actions: tag, route, reply, escalate, or assign by round robin or by load balancing to whoever has the fewest open conversations. Starter allows up to 10 rules, Professional adds macros and up to 20, Enterprise makes both unlimited and adds smart rules. SLA targets sit on top of that and page you when a clock is about to run out.
4
AI is bolted on deliberately rather than woven in. Every plan gets the light stuff: AI Topics for contact-reason analysis, plus Compose, Translate, and Summarize capped at 200 actions per teammate per day. Copilot, Smart QA, and Smart CSAT are per-seat add-ons included only at Enterprise. Autopilot is the omnichannel agent that runs multi-step work across your connected systems, billed by conversation, and it is the piece Front is now betting the company on.

Feature breakdown

36 features in 6 modules

Shared inbox and collaboration

The original product and still the reason teams switch to Front rather than away from it.

Shared inboxes with clear ownership: Team mailboxes such as support@ or ops@ where every conversation has an assignee, a status, and a visible history, so two people never answer the same customer and nothing sits unowned.
Internal comments: Discussion happens inline on the conversation and is invisible to the customer, which keeps escalation context attached to the thread instead of scattered across Slack messages nobody can find later.
Shared drafts: Two people can compose the same reply, with edits visible in real time before it sends. This is the feature that makes Front work for account management and complex client work, and almost nothing else in the category has it.
Guest accounts: Colleagues outside the support team can be invited to comment on a conversation without consuming a paid license, which is Front's answer to the light-agent question and a real cost saver for engineering escalations.
Workspaces: Inboxes can be divided into separate spaces with their own rules, tags, templates, and analytics. Starter gets 1, Professional up to 5, Enterprise unlimited, which is what multi-brand and multi-department teams should size against.
Views, tags, and message templates: Saved real-time views filtered by inbox, tag, or assignee; a tag taxonomy that drives both routing and reporting; and reusable templates for the replies you retype daily.
Snoozing, scheduling, and individual inbox: Conversations can be snoozed to a future time and messages scheduled to send later, and each teammate can bring their personal work email into Front alongside the shared queues.

Channels

The tier boundary that costs money: Starter is one channel type, full stop.

Email: Gmail, Microsoft 365, or custom domains via SMTP and OAuth, with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC support so replies deliver from your own domain rather than a vendor relay.
Front Chat: Native live chat for a website or app that lands in the same inbox as everything else. On Starter it is available only if chat is your single chosen channel type.
SMS: Delivered through third-party integrations such as Twilio or Dialpad rather than a Front-provisioned number, so there is a second vendor relationship and a second usage bill.
Slack as a channel: Respond to and react to messages in public and private Slack channels from inside Front, which matters for B2B teams whose larger customers live in shared Slack.
Social channels: Facebook, Instagram, and X route into the shared inbox on Professional and above; they are unavailable on Starter unless social is your one channel type.
WhatsApp: A native WhatsApp Business channel is a paid add-on on Professional and Enterprise, billed as the Meta-charged messaging costs plus a 20 percent administration fee, or you can route WhatsApp through Twilio instead.
Voice through partners: There is no native dialer. Calls and voicemails are handled by Aircall or Dialpad integrations that surface in Front, so telephony is a separate subscription.

Front AI

Four separate products, three per-seat add-ons and one metered agent; read the prices before the demo.

Autopilot: The omnichannel AI agent that runs multi-step customer work across connected systems rather than only answering from articles. Published as starting at $0.05 per conversation, quoted by sales, and metered on conversations handled rather than on successful resolutions.
Copilot: The real-time agent assistant that drafts replies, surfaces answers, and suggests next steps. $20 per seat per month as an add-on on Starter and Professional; included in Enterprise.
Smart QA: AI scorecards that review conversations automatically instead of a manager spot-checking ten a week. $20 per seat per month as an add-on, included in Enterprise, or $25 per seat bundled with Smart CSAT.
Smart CSAT: Infers satisfaction from the conversation itself rather than asking the customer to fill in a survey, which fixes the low-response-rate problem that makes most CSAT numbers meaningless. $10 per seat per month as an add-on, included in Enterprise.
AI Topics: Clusters conversation history into contact reasons so you can see why customers are actually writing in. Included on every plan, and the single most useful free AI feature Front ships.
Compose, Translate, and Summarize: Draft polishing, on-the-fly translation, and thread summaries, included on all plans but capped at 200 actions per teammate per day for each. A hard daily ceiling rather than a bill, which is the friendlier failure mode.

Automation, routing, and SLAs

Genuinely capable, and metered by rule count in a way that pushes teams up a tier.

Rules: Condition-and-action automation over conversations: tag, route, reply, escalate, archive. Starter allows up to 10 rules, Professional up to 20 plus macros, Enterprise unlimited with smart rules on top.
Macros: One-click bundles of actions an agent triggers manually, such as apply a tag, insert a template, and reassign. Available from Professional up, which is a common reason Starter teams upgrade.
Round robin assignment: Distributes inbound conversations to available teammates in rotation so the count evens out over a shift rather than landing on whoever refreshes fastest.
Load balancing: Assigns to the teammate with the fewest open conversations up to a configurable per-teammate limit, which is the better model when handle times vary widely. Available on Professional and above.
SLA policies: Response and resolution targets with breach alerting, and rules that ensure an SLA clock always has a name attached to it so unassigned conversations do not quietly expire.
Real-time agent availability: Teammates mark themselves available or away and routing respects it, so conversations are not assigned to someone who logged off twenty minutes ago.

Knowledge base, analytics, and CSAT

Solid self-service and unusually good reporting for a shared-inbox product, with a soft spot on help-center depth.

Public knowledge base: A no-code help center included from Starter, customizable on Professional, and multi-language on Enterprise. Perfectly serviceable, but it is a supporting feature rather than a content platform, and SEO tooling is thinner than a dedicated help desk offers.
Customer portal with ticket forms: A self-service portal with dynamic intake forms so requests arrive structured instead of as free-text email, which is what makes routing rules reliable.
Analytics and reporting: Basic on Starter, advanced on Professional, and custom reports on Enterprise, covering volume, first response and resolution time, team and individual performance, SLA attainment, and CSAT.
CSAT surveys: Conventional satisfaction surveys are available across plans; Smart CSAT is the AI-inferred alternative sold as an add-on for teams whose survey response rate is too low to trust.

Developer surface, security, and administration

The strongest API in the shared-inbox category, and the reason technical teams stay.

Core API: A well-documented REST API covering conversations, messages, contacts, drafts, channels, teammates, tags, comments, and analytics, available on all plans with rate limits that scale by tier.
Webhooks and application channels: Real-time event webhooks plus the ability to connect any messaging platform as a custom channel through the API, which is how teams bring in in-app messaging or a proprietary portal.
API rate limit increases: Sold as an add-on at $200 per additional 100 API requests per minute per month, which is worth pricing in before you architect a high-volume sync.
SSO and SCIM: SAML single sign-on and SCIM provisioning from the Professional tier, with custom roles and permissions added at Enterprise. Two-factor authentication is available on all plans.
US or EU data hosting: Front offers a choice of US or EU data residency, which is unusual at this price point and is a genuine differentiator against most competitors in this category.
Compliance posture: SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and GDPR with a DPA, AES-256 encryption at rest, TLS 1.2 in transit, AWS hosting with daily backups, and a HackerOne bug bounty program.

Use cases

4 documented

Freight or logistics operations team

A single shipment exception involves the customer, a carrier, a warehouse, and an account manager, and the thread currently gets forwarded four times until nobody knows who owns it.

One conversation stays in one place with an assignee, internal comments from ops, and a shared draft the account manager edits before it goes out; guest accounts let the warehouse lead comment without buying a seat.

B2B SaaS support team whose big customers live in Slack

Enterprise accounts message in a shared Slack channel, small accounts email support@, and the two queues have separate tools, separate SLAs, and no shared reporting.

Professional brings email, chat, and Slack into one omnichannel workspace with a single SLA policy and one set of analytics, and load balancing keeps the queue even across a small team.

Client services agency of 12 people

Every client email is really a small project, replies need review before they go out, and the current shared Gmail gives no visibility into who is behind.

Shared drafts and assignments give an approval step without a workflow engine, workspaces separate client pods, and advanced analytics finally answer how long each account is waiting.

Support lead evaluating AI deflection at 2,000 tickets a month

Leadership wants AI to absorb repetitive volume, and the competing quotes are all per-resolution meters that get more expensive the better the AI performs.

Autopilot is metered per conversation from $0.05, which at 2,000 conversations is roughly $100 a month rather than the several hundred a per-resolution vendor would charge, but the rate is quoted by sales and the base is broader, so it needs modelling against your own automation rate rather than assumed.

Pricing

from $25/seat/mo (Starter, billed annually)

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.

Plan	Price	Includes
Starter	$25 per seat, per month (billed annually), up to 10 seats	Shared inbox and ticketing A single channel type only: email, Front Chat, or SMS Up to 10 automation rules and 1 workspace Basic analytics and a no-code public knowledge base AI Topics included; Copilot, Smart QA, Smart CSAT, and Autopilot sold as add-ons The single-channel-type restriction is the real limit. If you want email and live chat, Starter is not an option no matter how small you are.
Professional	$65 per seat, per month (billed annually), up to 50 seats	Omnichannel: email, chat, SMS, Slack, and social together Macros and up to 20 automation rules Up to 5 workspaces, SSO, and SCIM Advanced analytics and load balancing Native WhatsApp available as a paid add-on The tier most teams actually need, and a 160 percent jump from Starter. Budget from here, not from the headline price.
Enterprise	$105 per seat, per month (billed annually), unlimited seats	Unlimited rules, macros, and workspaces, plus smart rules AI Copilot, Smart QA, and Smart CSAT included rather than added on Multi-language knowledge base Custom roles and permissions, custom reports Onboarding and success services available Marked most popular by the vendor. Once you want Copilot plus the QA and CSAT bundle, $65 plus $45 in add-ons is $110, so Enterprise at $105 is arithmetically the cheaper route to the same feature set.

Plan

Price

Includes

Starter

$25

per seat, per month (billed annually), up to 10 seats

Shared inbox and ticketing
A single channel type only: email, Front Chat, or SMS
Up to 10 automation rules and 1 workspace
Basic analytics and a no-code public knowledge base
AI Topics included; Copilot, Smart QA, Smart CSAT, and Autopilot sold as add-ons

The single-channel-type restriction is the real limit. If you want email and live chat, Starter is not an option no matter how small you are.

Professional

$65

per seat, per month (billed annually), up to 50 seats

Omnichannel: email, chat, SMS, Slack, and social together
Macros and up to 20 automation rules
Up to 5 workspaces, SSO, and SCIM
Advanced analytics and load balancing
Native WhatsApp available as a paid add-on

The tier most teams actually need, and a 160 percent jump from Starter. Budget from here, not from the headline price.

Enterprise

$105

per seat, per month (billed annually), unlimited seats

Unlimited rules, macros, and workspaces, plus smart rules
AI Copilot, Smart QA, and Smart CSAT included rather than added on
Multi-language knowledge base
Custom roles and permissions, custom reports
Onboarding and success services available

Marked most popular by the vendor. Once you want Copilot plus the QA and CSAT bundle, $65 plus $45 in add-ons is $110, so Enterprise at $105 is arithmetically the cheaper route to the same feature set.

Add-ons

Autopilot (AI agent) (Starting at $0.05 per conversation): Metered on conversations the agent handles rather than on resolutions, and quoted through sales rather than published as a final rate.
Copilot ($20 per seat per month): Included in Enterprise.
Smart QA ($20 per seat per month): Included in Enterprise.
Smart CSAT ($10 per seat per month): Included in Enterprise.
Smart QA plus Smart CSAT bundle ($25 per seat per month)
Native WhatsApp channel (Meta-billed WhatsApp costs plus a 20 percent administration fee): Available on Professional and Enterprise only.
API rate limit increase ($200 per 100 API requests per minute per month): Available on all plans.
Onboarding and success services (Quoted; required for contracts over $25k): Three packages exist: Professional Onboarding, Enterprise Onboarding, and project hours.

Billing notes

Annual billing saves 24 percent against monthly, and the prices quoted on the pricing page ($25, $65, $105) are the annual rates.
Seat caps run in the opposite direction from most vendors: Starter is capped at 10 seats and Professional at 50, so growth pushes you up a tier rather than just adding lines to an invoice. Front's published plans do not state a hard minimum seat count, although older Front plan structures did carry a 2-seat minimum and it is worth confirming at checkout.
Every seat is a full seat. There is no discounted light-agent or read-only license, which means a contractor who answers ten emails a week costs the same as a full-time agent. The mitigation is guest accounts, which are free but can only comment internally, never reply to a customer.
Channel count scales with licenses: up to 10 channels per license on Starter, 30 on Professional, and 50 on Enterprise, so a five-person Professional team can connect up to 150 channels.
A worked example at 500 tickets a month, four agents on Professional annual: 4 x $65 = $260 in seats. Add Copilot for all four at $20 and that is $340. If Autopilot handles every one of those 500 conversations at the published $0.05 floor, add $25, for $365 a month all in.
The same team at 2,000 tickets a month: seats do not move, so $260, or $340 with Copilot, plus $100 of Autopilot at 2,000 conversations, for $440 a month. The AI meter scales but it scales gently, because Front charges per conversation touched rather than per resolution achieved.
Contrast that with a per-resolution vendor. Help Scout charges $0.75 per AI resolution, so a 40 percent automation rate on 2,000 tickets is 800 resolutions and $600 of AI in a single month. Front's meter has a lower unit price on a broader base, which favours Front at high volume and is roughly neutral at low volume.
Autopilot's rate is published only as starting at $0.05, so the number in your contract may be higher and depends on the complexity of the work the agent performs. Ask for the effective rate on your ticket mix rather than accepting the floor as the price.
Wire transfer or ACH is available only on annual contracts over $12k; below that it is card payment.
Prices are as of August 2026, quoted in USD.

Value assessment: 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.

Strengths & limitations

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.
US or EU data residency, SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and a HackerOne bug bounty give it a compliance posture most shared-inbox tools cannot match.
Routing is properly built out: round robin, load balancing with per-teammate limits, real-time availability, and SLA rules that guarantee a clock always has an owner.
The company is stable and well capitalised, past $100M ARR with 9,300-plus customers and roughly $200M raised, so the roadmap risk is low.

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.
The knowledge base is adequate rather than excellent. It exists on every plan, but it is not a content platform, and teams whose deflection strategy depends on ranking help articles in search will find it thin.
No native telephony, so voice means Aircall or Dialpad and a second bill, and SMS runs through Twilio or Dialpad rather than a Front-provisioned number.
Seat caps of 10 on Starter and 50 on Professional mean growth forces tier changes with large step increases rather than a smooth cost curve.

Head-to-head comparisons

5 alternatives

Front vs Intercom

from $29 per seat per month (Essential), plus $0.99 per Fin resolution

Intercom is AI-first and sells the Fin agent on a per-resolution meter, which is the cleanest story if your goal is to deflect a large share of repetitive consumer questions and you are happy to pay more the better the agent gets. Front is collaboration-first: shared drafts, assignments, and guest accounts for work that several people touch, with Autopilot metered per conversation instead of per resolution. Choose Intercom when support is high-volume and the win is automation percentage. Choose Front when a single customer request routinely involves three colleagues and the reply itself is the deliverable.

Full Front vs Intercom comparison

Front vs Hiver

from $25 per user per month (Growth, billed annually; $35 monthly)

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.

Full Front vs Hiver comparison

Front vs Helpwise

from $12 per user per month (Standard, annual billing; $15 monthly)

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.

Full Front vs Helpwise comparison

Front vs Help Scout

from $21/user/mo (Standard, billed annually; $25 monthly)

Help Scout is the closer competitor on philosophy: both keep the customer experience email-shaped rather than ticket-shaped. Help Scout is cheaper ($25 to $75 per seat versus $25 to $105), has a genuine free tier for 5 users, and a stronger knowledge base in Docs. Front counters with shared drafts, guest accounts, workspaces, EU hosting, and a much better API, and its AI meter is per conversation rather than Help Scout's $0.75 per resolution. Small teams with straightforward email support should start with Help Scout; teams whose conversations are collaborative projects should pay the Front premium.

Full Front vs Help Scout comparison

Front vs Plain

from $35/mo (Foundation, 1 seat included; $35 per additional seat)

Plain is built for B2B technical support teams who want support modelled in code: a GraphQL API, customers reachable in Slack, Discord, or Teams, and an AI agent included rather than metered. Front is broader, easier for a non-technical support lead to own, and covers social, SMS, and WhatsApp that Plain does not chase. Pick Plain if your customers are developers and your support team would rather write a webhook than configure a rule. Pick Front if a general-purpose ops or client-services team has to run the tool without engineering help.

Full Front vs Plain comparison

Implementation & onboarding

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.
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.
Onboarding: Self-serve on Starter with a 14-day full-feature Professional trial that needs no credit card. Professional can be bought through the trial, but Enterprise, Autopilot, and all AI add-ons go through sales. Front sells three Success Services packages (Professional Onboarding, Enterprise Onboarding, and project hours) and requires an onboarding package on contracts over $25k.
Migration notes: Importing from Gmail, Outlook, Zendesk, Help Scout, or Intercom is well-trodden, and the API makes bulk conversation and contact import practical. Getting data out is equally practical through the API and export endpoints, though exports are rate limited to roughly 1 request per second, so a large historical extract is a scripted job rather than a button. The harder migration is behavioural: teams arriving from a ticketing tool have to unlearn ticket IDs, and teams arriving from a plain shared mailbox have to learn to assign rather than reply-all.

Platform, API & security

Platforms: Web appmacOS and Windows desktop appsiOS and Android appsFront Chat widgetREST API and webhooks
API: A well-documented REST Core API covering conversations, messages, contacts, drafts, channels, teammates, tags, comments, and analytics, plus webhooks and custom application channels. Available on all plans, with rate limits scaling by tier and increases sold at $200 per 100 requests per minute per month.
Compliance: SOC 2 Type IIISO 27001GDPR with a data processing addendumHackerOne bug bounty program
Data residency: Choice of US or EU data hosting, which is rare at this price point in the customer support category.
SSO: SAML single sign-on and SCIM provisioning from the Professional tier; custom roles and permissions on Enterprise; two-factor authentication on all plans.
Security notes: AES-256 encryption at rest and TLS 1.2 in transit, AWS hosting with daily backups and dedicated enterprise identifiers per customer, and SPF, DKIM, and DMARC support for outbound mail. Front states that AI providers (OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, and AWS) do not train foundation models on customer data, but also that Front itself may use your data to further train your own model, which is a distinction worth reading carefully during a security review.

Support & resources

Channels: In-app and email supportHelp centerFront Academy trainingPaid onboarding and success services packages
Documentation: help.front.com is thorough, with a workspace rule library, assignment and load-balancing guides, and rate-limit documentation; developer documentation lives separately at dev.frontapp.com.
Community: An official Front Community plus an Academy with structured courses; the developer portal is the more active surface for technical questions.

Company

Founded: 2013
Headquarters: San Francisco, California, United States
Ownership: Private, venture-backed
Founders: Mathilde Collin, Laurent Perrin
Employees: Roughly 250 to 500 (third-party estimate, 2026)
Funding: Over $200M raised across six rounds, most recently a $65M Series D in June 2022 led by Salesforce Ventures and Battery Ventures at a $1.7B valuation.

Funding history

Round	Amount	Year	Notes
Series A	$10M	2016	Led by Social Capital.
Series B	$66M	2018	Led by Sequoia Capital, reportedly closed in five days.
Series C	$59M	2020	Included executives from Atlassian, Okta, Qualtrics, and Zoom as investors.
Series D	$65M	2022	Led by Salesforce Ventures and Battery Ventures at a $1.7B valuation, with Sequoia, Threshold Ventures, and Uncork Capital participating.

Timeline

2013Founded by Mathilde Collin and Laurent Perrin around a single idea: a shared inbox where conversations have owners, comments, and collaborative drafts.
2015Adds assignments, comments, and routing as the collaboration layer, establishing the model that later competitors copy.
2018Raises a $66M Series B led by Sequoia Capital and expands from email into a multi-channel communication hub.
2020Raises a $59M Series C backed by operating executives from Atlassian, Okta, Qualtrics, and Zoom.
2022Raises a $65M Series D at a $1.7B valuation led by Salesforce Ventures and Battery Ventures, becoming one of a small group of women-founded SaaS unicorns.
2024Dan O'Connell succeeds Mathilde Collin as CEO; she becomes Executive Chair and Laurent Perrin continues as CTO.
2026Repositions as an AI customer operations platform past $100M ARR with 9,300-plus customers, consolidating to three tiers ($25, $65, $105) and selling Autopilot, Copilot, Smart QA, and Smart CSAT as separately priced AI products.

Integrations

Gmail and Google Workspace
Microsoft 365 and Outlook
Slack (as a support channel and for notifications)
Salesforce and HubSpot
Jira, Asana, and Linear
Shopify
Twilio and Dialpad (SMS and voice)
Aircall (voice)
WhatsApp Business (native add-on or via Twilio)
Facebook, Instagram, and X
Zapier
REST API, webhooks, and custom application channels

Frequently asked questions

12 questions

What is Front?

Front is a customer communication platform built on a shared inbox. Email, live chat, SMS, Slack, social messages, and WhatsApp land in one collaborative workspace where teammates assign conversations, comment internally, and co-write replies that go out as ordinary email from your own domain. On top of that it adds ticketing, rules and macros, SLAs, routing, analytics, a knowledge base, and a set of separately priced AI products.

How much does Front cost?

Front has three plans, quoted at annual rates: Starter at $25 per seat per month for up to 10 seats and a single channel type, Professional at $65 for up to 50 seats with full omnichannel, and Enterprise at $105 with no seat cap. Annual billing saves 24 percent against monthly. AI is priced separately: Copilot is $20 per seat, Smart QA $20, Smart CSAT $10 (or $25 for the QA and CSAT bundle), and Autopilot starts at $0.05 per conversation. All three per-seat AI products are included at Enterprise.

Is there a Front free plan or free trial?

There is no free plan. Front offers a 14-day free trial with all Professional features and no credit card required, and you can upgrade at any point during it. If you need a permanently free option, Help Scout's 5-user free tier or Chatwoot's self-hosted community edition are the realistic alternatives in this category.

What is the catch with Front's Starter plan?

Starter supports only one channel type: email, or Front Chat, or SMS, but not two of them together. That single restriction is what pushes most teams to Professional at $65 per seat, since almost any support team that wants a chat widget alongside its support address needs the higher tier. Starter is also capped at 10 seats, 1 workspace, and 10 automation rules, with macros unavailable.

How does Front charge for AI, and how does that compare to per-resolution pricing?

Front splits AI into four products. Copilot, Smart QA, and Smart CSAT are per-seat add-ons at $20, $20, and $10 per seat per month, included at Enterprise. Autopilot, the customer-facing agent, is metered starting at $0.05 per conversation. That is a per-conversation meter, not a per-resolution one, so Front charges when the agent touches a conversation rather than only when it succeeds. The unit price is far lower than a per-resolution vendor: 2,000 conversations of Autopilot is roughly $100 a month at the published floor, whereas 800 resolutions at Help Scout's $0.75 rate is $600. The trade is that Autopilot's rate is quoted by sales rather than published, so the floor is a starting point rather than your price.

What would a four-person team actually pay?

Assume four agents on Professional billed annually. Seats are 4 x $65 = $260 a month. At 500 tickets a month with Autopilot on every conversation at the published $0.05 floor, add $25, for $285. Add Copilot for all four seats and it is $365. At 2,000 tickets a month the seat cost does not move and Autopilot rises to about $100, so the same team lands around $360 without Copilot or $440 with it. Enterprise at $105 per seat would be $420 for the four seats, but it includes Copilot, Smart QA, and Smart CSAT, so it is cheaper than Professional plus those three add-ons.

Does Front charge for part-time agents and contractors?

Yes, at full price. There is no light-agent, read-only, or discounted seat type on any tier, so a contractor answering ten emails a week costs the same as a full-time agent. The partial workaround is guest accounts, which are free and let a colleague comment on a conversation without a license, but a guest cannot reply to a customer. If cheap light seats matter, Help Scout's light users on its top tier are the closer fit.

Which channels are included and which cost extra?

Email, Front Chat, SMS through Twilio or Dialpad, Slack, and social channels including Facebook, Instagram, and X are covered by the Professional and Enterprise plans, with Starter limited to one of them. Native WhatsApp is a paid add-on on Professional and Enterprise, billed as the Meta messaging costs plus a 20 percent administration fee. Voice is not native at all: calls run through Aircall or Dialpad integrations, so telephony is a separate subscription.

Does Front have a knowledge base and can it use a custom domain?

Yes, Front includes a no-code public knowledge base on every plan, customizable on Professional and multi-language on Enterprise, plus a customer portal with dynamic ticket forms. It is competent for deflection and for feeding Autopilot, but it is a supporting feature rather than a content platform. If ranking help articles in organic search is central to your strategy, a dedicated help desk with a stronger docs product will serve you better.

Is Front better than just running a shared Gmail mailbox?

For a team of two answering a few emails a day, probably not, and Front is honest enough about its target that it does not really try. What a shared mailbox cannot give you is ownership (who is answering this), collision avoidance, internal discussion attached to the thread, shared drafts, load-balanced routing, SLA clocks, and reporting on response time. The moment two people are unsure whether a message has been handled, the shared mailbox has already failed and the $65 per seat is buying back real hours. Below that threshold, Gmail plus labels genuinely is enough.

Can I get my data out of Front?

Yes. The Core API exposes conversations, messages, contacts, tags, and analytics on every plan, and there are export endpoints for bulk extraction. The practical constraint is throughput: export calls are rate limited to roughly one request per second and general limits scale by tier (with increases sold at $200 per 100 requests per minute per month), so a full historical export is a scripted job that runs for a while rather than a one-click download.

Who owns Front and is the company stable?

Front is a private, venture-backed company founded in 2013 by Mathilde Collin and Laurent Perrin, headquartered in San Francisco. It has raised over $200M across six rounds, including a $65M Series D in 2022 led by Salesforce Ventures and Battery Ventures at a $1.7B valuation. Dan O'Connell became CEO in 2024 with Collin moving to Executive Chair, and the company reports passing $100M ARR with more than 9,300 customers.

Editorial verdict

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.

Written by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Awards, when shown, are judged against the published criteria in our methodology.