5 Front App alternatives: Overview + Missive Deep Dive

Looking for an affordable Front alternative?

You're in the right place.

Let's break down the differences between Front and some of their popular alternatives. 

We'll group the Front alternatives into two main buckets:

• Shared email inbox tools:
  • Google Collaborative Inbox
  • Missive
• Support ticketing tools:
  • Zendesk and Freshdesk
  • Hiver

Shared email inboxes: Google Collaborative Inbox vs. Front

Google's collaborative inbox, also known as Google Groups, is a common initial choice for Google Workspace teams that are looking to add a very, very light support layer — say a single shared address (i.e. support@yourcompany.com) that one person will be managing.

It uses the same Gmail interface and it's free if you already have Google Workspace. 

The disadvantage of Google's Collaborative Inbox is that it doesn't scale well beyond one person, aka. it doesn't work for teams. If you have multiple people in the same shared inbox, at the same time, you can run into issues of collisions and double sending quite easily because you won't be able to see if someone else is working on your email. 

Shared email inboxes: Missive vs. Front

Since we know Missive the best... we'll give you the most in-depth comparison of Missive vs. Front. 

Front app and Missive share many similarities. First and foremost, they both let you and your teammates comment in between emails.

One difference however is that Missive was built from the ground up to be a full featured email client; whereas Front was built exclusively to be a help desk fueled by emails. This does not mean Missive isn’t suited for customer support use cases, it definitely is! But the different missions of the two apps do bring differences in functionality, user interface, roadmap and user expectations.

One core precept of Missive is that the email part of the application needs to be so good that users want to consume all their emails in it: shared addresses (help@acme.com), personal work inbox (philippe@acme.com) and personal inbox (phil@gmail.com).

This is important because the collaborative part of Missive becomes infinitely more useful when users live and breathe inside Missive. You not only want to collaborate around emails sent to your company help@ address, but also around the really important emails you most likely receive at your personal company address, like that email from a potential high profile partner.

People have really high expecations regarding what an email client needs to offer in terms of functionalities, behavior and look. To reach our objective we invested a lot of time nailing the small details that make Missive a great email client.

User interface (email client VS help desk)

Missive’s user interface is designed to look and feel like an email client. You find the classical 3 column layout where the first column lists unified mailboxes (Inbox, Drafts, Sent, All, etc.) and labels. You can choose which mailboxes or labels stay opened; it’s your way, independent of your teammates.

Front app is fairly opinionated in the way it displays and organizes your emails. Everything is geared towards assignment; it’s mostly focused on the customer support use case of emails (help@, info@) where assignment is an important concept.

According to an analysis by Software Advice, Missive outrank Front in both usability and customer satisfaction.

Conversation assignment

In Missive, every conversation can be assigned to one or multiple people in your team. In Front app a conversation can only be assigned to one person at a time.

In Missive, you can assign conversations from your INBOX or you can activate the assignment flow for shared inboxes (e.g. help@acme.com). This will let people from your team triage the conversations from one or many team Inboxes.

You can learn more about the assignment flow by reading this guide: How to triage and assign emails.

Task management

In Missive you can create an infinite number of tasks per conversation and assign them to yourself, one, or multiple teammates.

A lot of our daily tasks are generated from the interactions we have with the outside world (emails) and the discussions we have internally (chats). In Missive, you can create one or multiple tasks directly in your email conversations.

In Missive, tasks help you organize and track work that needs to be done. A task is an actionable item that can be assigned to one or multiple team members, with attributes like due dates, descriptions, and status tracking. You can create tasks anywhere in the app:

• As standalone items for general to-dos
• By converting entire conversations (e.g. email threads) into tasks
• As subtasks within conversations

This flexibility allows you to manage work efficiently whether it's related to specific communications or independent projects.

In Front app there are no tasks and conversations can be assigned to one teammate only. There is no granularity, meaning you will probably need a third party task tool to manage complex issues.

Front Email history

Missive imports 15 days of email history on the free plan. Upon subscribing to a paid plan, your full email history is imported. This applies no matter what email provider you are using (Gmail, Office 365, regular IMAP, etc).

Front app only imports your last 50,000 emails for Gmail and Microsoft accounts. If you need more history you are out of luck, you can't upgrade like in Missive.

When you connect a Gmail or Office 365 account as a shared inbox or individual inbox in Front, you can choose to import the most recent 50,000 messages.

–Front app FAQ

Mailboxes / Labels

Missive fully supports Office 365 folders, Gmail labels and IMAP folders on the free and paid plans. All your folders/labels are synced. Every conversation labeled in Missive will be labeled in Gmail/Office 365/IMAP. Every conversation starred in Gmail/Office 365/IMAP will be starred in Missive. Missive can be used side by side with Gmail/Office 365/IMAP or any other email client. It means you can keep your label nomenclature. When you switch to Missive, most things your were doing in Gmail/Office 365/IMAP are still possible.

Front app won't sync your folders/labels:

Tag actions will not be synced between Front and Gmail. Whenever you apply a label in Gmail, a private tag will not be created for that label and applied to the message in Front. When you tag a message with a private tag or a shared tag in Front, the message will not be labeled in Gmail with a matching label. When you remove these labels or shared tags in one system, the corresponding label or shared tag will not sync between systems.

–Front app FAQ

Mobile app

We are always on-the-go, so the tools we use to get work done should be able to follow us around, seamlessly.

Missive offers a fully featured mobile app on both iOS and Android. This means all features you find in the desktop app, are available on your phone or tablet.

Front's mobile app does not support all features that the desktop app.

The iOS app does not support some advanced features that the desktop app supports, including but not limited to:

• Onboarding for new users
• Full set of personal settings
• Sending images inline
• Settings for message templates, signatures, inboxes, or rules
• Analytics
• Sequences
• Full contact manager
• Changing the default send button
• Edit/rename/delete/archive private and shared tags

–Front app FAQ

Aliases

In Missive you manage aliases like you do in any other email client. For each of your email accounts you can easily setup new aliases. You need to make sure that those aliases have been verified in your Gmail settings.

This makes it possible to manage multiple domain addresses from a single Gmail account (phil@companyA.com, phil@companyB.com, …)

You also get the ability to share aliases from personal accounts to let people reply as yourself.

You will always have access to all emails sent by a delegated user.

Front app lets you change the From address for your inboxes but does not support using multiple aliases per inbox. You need to create one channel per alias.

When you change the Send As, you will be replacing the ability to send from the original address, so you will not be able to send from the original address in Front anymore.

When you change the Send As, you will be replacing the ability to send from the original address, so you will not be able to send from the original address in Front anymore. If you need to send from the original address, then you should not use this process but simply add a new channel instead.

–Front app FAQ

Draft collaboration

In Missive, you live edit drafts with your teammates. Writing a draft with a colleague feels like writing a Google Doc.

In Front app, when you reply to a conversation shared with teammates, they are only warned that you are replying. You cannot help them write it.

Analytics & reporting

Both Missive and Front come with integrated analytics and comprehensive reporting features.

Shared conversations

In Missive, each shared conversation shows an overview of who has access and what’s their respective state (seen/unseen, inbox/archived, snoozed, viewing, etc.)

Shared and private conversations live alongside in your unified inbox or labels.

The Front app UI doesn’t have a unified inbox, so conversations are spread in many places.

Before being assigned to someone, a conversation is located in a team inbox. When it gets assigned, it’s moved to the Assigned to me mailbox for the asssignee and in the Following mailbox for everyone else. If you are not following a conversation that is not assigned to you, you can find it back in the assignee’s mailbox.

Since there is no unified inbox, Front app offers an Activities view where you can see what is happening. In Missive, you follow what’s going on in your inbox.

Instagram, Facebook, SMS mailboxes

In Front, emails, SMS and Messenger messages pretty much all look the same. This makes it difficult to quickly differentiate between each of them. In Missive, each message type has a unique styling that reflects the original platform’s design:

Messenger

Instagram

SMS

Integrations

Both Missive and Front offer integrations with third-party apps and also give you the ability to build a custom one for your business.

Browse all the integrations Missive offers.

Pricing

Let's be honest, no one likes to commit to a software solution for a year before trying it out.

This is where Missive comes in, offering a no-commitment and money-back guarantee trial that makes it easier for businesses to try out the software and determine if it's the right fit for their needs. And best of all, it's affordable!

Missive

Missive offers straightforward and affordable pricing options.

A free plan is available with basic functionalities to get started. Pricing starts at $18 per user/month for the Starter plan for organizations with 5 or less users.

For more advanced features like integrations, rules, and API access, the Productive plan starts at $30 per user/month. The Business plan is also available for $45 per user/month and includes advanced features like Analytics, SAML Single Sign-On (SSO) and IP restriction.

Front app

Front app pricing works monthly but is billed annually, which may not be suitable for all users.

The Starter plan starts at $19 per user/month but requires a minimum of 2 users and a maximum of 10. The Growth plan starts at $59 per user/month and requires a minimum of 2 users, offering more advanced features such as automations.

Front also offers a Scale and Premier plan with pricing starting at $99 per user/month and $229 per user/month respectively.

Switched from Front to Missive

Switched from Front to Missive, and are very happy with the results. Simple pricing tiers with good functionality and no constant buffing up against blocked features that require an expensive upgrade.

If you're looking for a great solution to manage team inboxes, with great functionality I would strongly recommend Missive.

Mark Lamb

Multi-organizations

Missive offers the ability to be part of multiple organizations in a single account. This means you can be part of many projects at the same time.

In the above image the user is part of four organizations, letting them collaborate instantly from a single app on many projects. Being part of many projects doesn’t change the fact that you still have only one unified inbox to manage.

Front app doesn’t support multiple organizations. This feature is marked as planned in their roadmap.

Front email forwarding

In Front, unless you have a Google or Office 365 account you will need to set up a forwarding generic inbox (@in.frontapp.com). This seems inoffensive at first, but it's a significant disadvantage because this locks you to Front. Mainly because the only backup copy of your emails will reside in Front.

We simply don’t believe this is how email should be handled. A dedicated email server that hosts the main copy of your emails should be the backbone of an organization’s email setup, then collaborative apps like Missive and Front should be a layer on top and they should not lock you in forever.

Front app alternative

What is the difference between Front app VS Missive?

To us, Front app is a help desk. It cannot replace your email client or team chat app. It’s a ticketing app for your shared mailboxes. The user interface assumes emails are tickets that need to be assigned to people.

Better than Front -- and also better value.

I switched my team from Front. Front is flashier but Missive is just.. better. Better features, better value overall.

This obviates the need for Slack and helps my team keep internal and external communications in order and in motion. Highly recommend.

Benny Rubin

Missive offers a the perfect communication app for small and medium businesses where you communicate with your team internally, orchestrate tasks and collaborate over the communication you have with the outside world.

In Missive, emails are emails; they are first-class citizens. You don’t lose much going from your previous email client to Missive but you gain the tremendous ability to coordinate with your team. Our solution is also more affordable, the mobile app is full-featured and your emails won't be locked in* with us.

*If using anything other than Google or Office 365, Front keeps the only copy of your emails on their servers.

Now that we've covered shared inbox solutions, let's move onto the more traditional support platforms.

Support Ticketing: Zendesk and Freshdesk vs. Front

Zendesk and Freshdesk offers a full suite of customer support tools.

They have a strong tracking and ticketing system, reporting and analytics, automations and rules, and deep integrations (like to Salesforce or Hubspot CRM) to save you time. 

They also have out-of-the-box knowledge bases, live AI agents, and help centers that you can launch, giving potential customers a way to self service any issues they're running into. 

If you want to offer support across multiple channels, both Freshdesk and Zendesk the ability to turn on live chat and social media messaging as support channels. 

Think about them as an end-to-end, scalable customer service software, designed for support centers and larger teams that deal with a high volume of inbound tickets everyday.

If you're a flatter organization that's looking for more collaboration between team members around support, Zendesk or Freshdesk is probably not a good fit.

If you're looking for robust ticketing management, CSAT reporting and analytics — either of these solutions will better suited to you than Front. 

Support Ticketing: Hiver vs. Front

Hiver is light-weight customer service software.

They offer some of the functionality that you would expect in a ticketing-first tool like shared inboxes, live chat, CSAT reporting, and an out-of-the-box knowledge base. 

Compared to Zendesk, they lack in terms of depth of integrations, workflows, and automations — Hiver has 22 integration partners compared to Zendesk's 949. 

Hiver is unique in it's interface design because it is built into your Google workspace and Gmail. 

So if you're married to Google Workspace's interface and you want only want a few features of a traditional support tool, Hiver might be a good choice.

If Hiver isn't quite a fit but you like the Gmail interface, a very close alternative is Gmelius.

Check out how Missive compares to Outpost, Missive compares to Slack, Missive compares to Spark, Missive compares to Help Scout and Missive compares to Shortwave.

If Front gets an update and this article becomes outdated, email us and we will update it.