Front alternatives for a small team, with prices

Front, the shared inbox, charges by the seat, and its cheapest plan connects only one kind of channel. Starter is $25 a seat a month billed yearly, for one of email, Front Chat or SMS, and Autopilot, its AI agent, is billed on top for each conversation it works on. If that’s what has you looking for Front alternatives, the six below each answer part of it: Help Scout, Missive, Gmelius, Hiver, Zendesk and Crisp. We read every price on the vendor’s own pricing page on 8 October 2026, in US dollars, and each one links to where we read it.

Deacon, which we make, takes a different route. It’s an AI customer support agent, made for a founder who handles support alone. Rather than giving you a better inbox, it answers your customers on your website in seconds, from your own docs, and shows you what they keep asking for. It has a free plan with no card.

Front and its alternatives in one table

Front sits in the last row, so you can read each tool against it. Prices are for the cheapest paid plan, a person a month, unless the row says otherwise.

Where Front’s bill grows

Front is priced for a team that hands conversations around all day. For a small company the cost climbs in a few places, all of them on its pricing page.

• Every person is a seat. Starter is $25 a seat billed yearly and Professional $65, so three people on Professional pay $195 a month before any AI. The sum is ours.
• A second channel means Professional. Starter takes a single channel type, so email and website chat together in Front start at $65 a seat billed yearly, or $85 monthly.
• Starter’s chat carries Front’s name. The page’s note on the chat widget says Starter customers “will have non-removable Front branding on their chat widget.”
• The AI agent is metered. Autopilot is an add-on on every plan. Front’s Autopilot article charges each conversation once, at the highest level reached, $0.05 for triage, $0.39 for a handoff and $0.89 for a resolution.
• Nothing is free for long. There’s no free plan, only a 14-day trial with Professional’s features and no card.

If you’d rather stay and budget for it, Front pricing works through every plan and add-on, and what one to five seats cost.

Help Scout, more channels on the first plan

Help Scout works much as Front does, as a shared inbox built around email, and its first paid plan takes in far more channels. Standard is $25 a user a month billed yearly, the same as Front’s Starter, and its card lists live chat, SMS, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger alongside email. Plus is $45 and adds round robin routing, and Pro is $75 with 10 users at least. The page opens on yearly billing at 16% off.

The free plan covers up to 5 users, 1 inbox and 1 Docs site, with a limit of 100 contacts a month. Help Scout counts a contact as anyone your team replied to or its AI resolved. AI Answers, its AI agent, costs $0.75 a resolution on every paid plan once a 3-month free trial ends. Pick Help Scout if you like working the way Front works but want chat and social messages without moving up a plan. Help Scout pricing has the whole bill for one, three and five people.

Missive, shared email from $14 a user

Missive is built for a few people working email together, with internal chat and tasks on each conversation. Of the tools here that charge per user, it charges least. Starter is $14 a user a month billed yearly, or $18 monthly, for up to 5 users, and its card lists email, SMS and social accounts. Productive is $24 or $30, for up to 50 users, and adds integrations, rules, basic analytics and API access. Business is $36 or $45, with SAML single sign-on and no user limit.

Its AI works for your team rather than your customers. It drafts replies, translates, summarises and runs AI rules, on Missive’s AI credits or an API key of your own, and the plan table starts it on Productive. Every new team gets 30 days of Productive free, with no card and nothing charged at the end, and Missive’s FAQ points to a guide for moving over from Front. Pick Missive if a handful of you want Front’s shared email at a lower seat price.

Gmelius, a shared inbox without leaving Gmail

Gmelius suits a team that wants to stay in Gmail. It adds shared inboxes and shared labels to Gmail itself, and each user is a Gmail or Google Workspace account. Growth, the first plan with shared inboxes, is $25 a user a month billed yearly, or $33 monthly, for up to 50 users and up to 10,000 email conversations a month. Pro is $40 or $50, with no user limit, AI dispatching, CRM integrations and webhooks. Meli, at $19 billed yearly, is its AI assistant on its own, without the shared inbox.

Gmelius puts its AI in the seat price. Its page says “Every plan is a seat price plus the agent work included in it,” and Growth includes Meli, which drafts replies and sorts and classifies email. The 7-day trial opens on Growth, and if you don’t choose a plan when it ends, the account is suspended. Pick Gmelius if your team already lives in Gmail and wants the shared inbox there rather than in another app.

Hiver, with AI agents on every plan

Hiver sells two products. Its pricing page opens on Hiver Omni, a standalone platform that works with Gmail, Outlook and other email providers, and Hiver in Gmail runs shared inboxes like info@ from inside Gmail. Omni’s Growth plan is $25 a user a month billed yearly, or $35 monthly, and already brings AI Agents, AI Copilot, a shared inbox with ticketing, and email, live chat and self-service in one workspace. Pro is $55 or $65 and adds SLAs, CSAT surveys, a customer portal and Slack as a channel. Elite is $85 or $95.

The page lists AI Agents on all plans with no separate price, and says they can look up orders, issue refunds and update records across your systems. Voice is an add-on at $30 a voice seat a month. The 7-day trial starts on Elite and needs no card. Pick Hiver if you’d rather your AI agent came with the plan than billed by the conversation, as Autopilot is.

Zendesk, when support becomes a team

Zendesk is the move when you’re hiring people to work support all day. Its pricing page pitches Support Team at teams “that have outgrown a shared inbox”, at $19 an agent a month billed yearly or $25 monthly, with email, ticketing, routing and prebuilt dashboards. Messaging and live chat on your site start on Suite Team, at $55 or $69. Suite Professional is $115 or $149.

AI agents come with every plan, billed by the automated resolution. Support Team and Suite Team include 5 a month for each agent and Suite Professional 10, and past that each one costs $1.50 committed in advance or $2.00 pay as you go. The 14-day trial gives you Suite Professional. Zendesk pricing sets out every plan and add-on, and Zendesk competitors looks at it from the other side. Pick Zendesk if you’re building a support team and need queues and routing made for one.

Crisp, one flat price per workspace

Crisp charges the workspace, not the person, which changes the sums for a small team. Its free plan, marked Free Forever, gives 2 seats, a website chat widget and a shared inbox, with no AI credits. Mini is $45 a month for 4 seats, a shared email inbox and $5 of AI credits, which Crisp puts at around 90 automated conversations. Essentials is $95 for 10 seats and $25 of credits, and connects WhatsApp, Instagram and SMS.

Those credits pay for Hugo, Crisp’s AI agent. Plus, at $295, is the plan that removes the “We run on Crisp” mark. Any plan can be tried free for 14 days. Crisp chat pricing shows how the credits get spent. Pick Crisp if chat on your website matters more to you than email and you want one bill for everyone.

Deacon, set against Front’s three sticking points

Deacon isn’t an inbox with AI added. It’s an AI customer support agent that answers the questions people ask on your website, and it meets each of the three things that push Front’s bill up with a different approach.

Answers counted on the plan, not each conversation metered. Autopilot charges for every conversation it works on, at the highest level it reaches, on top of the seats. Each Deacon plan comes with a fixed number of answers a month instead. Every reply it writes on your live site uses one of them, and nothing is billed past them. Chats in the Playground and from a development address such as localhost never count, and no plan upgrades itself. If a month’s answers do run out, visitors are asked for their email, unless they already left it in that conversation, and you can still reply to every conversation from the dashboard.

The free plan holds 50 answers a month and 1 seat, needs no card, never expires and deletes nothing for inactivity. Starter costs $50 a month, or $40 a month billed yearly, with 1,000 answers a month and 3 seats. Growth costs $150 a month, or $120 a month billed yearly, with 4,000 answers a month and 10 seats. The seats are part of the plan, and so is every feature.

One channel, chosen on purpose. Front’s Starter makes you pick a single channel type. Deacon has one by design, the chat on your website, and it goes on with one script tag. Give it your pages, a PDF or Word file, or some pasted text, and its website chat widget answers in seconds, at any hour, in the language each visitor writes in. On the free plan it reads your home page and main pages, and a paid plan can crawl the site, up to a hundred pages a crawl. There are no flows to draw before it starts.

No “powered by” line, on any plan. Front’s own note says Starter’s chat widget keeps Front’s branding. Deacon’s widget carries no “powered by” line on any plan, the free one included. You set its colours, corners, position and button label against a live preview of your own site, and you can hide the button and open the chat from a link of your own with Deacon.open().

Deacon doesn’t guess, either. When your content doesn’t cover a question, it says it doesn’t know and asks the visitor for their email. Anyone who leaves an address or asks for a person turns up in your dashboard at once, and if nobody on your team has the dashboard open, the owners get an email about three minutes later. Reply there and your words arrive in the visitor’s chat while it’s open, under your first name and your company’s, as human handoff shows step by step.

Those misses are also how Deacon improves. A question it couldn’t answer sits in Conversations with an Answer this button. Save your answer with Save & check, and Deacon is asked the question again and shows you its new reply. If that reply answers it, you also see the other open questions your answer covers. Across every conversation, Topics gathers what people ask into groups, counts how many asked each one, and tags a group as a feature ask, a bug report or a how-to when one kind leads, which points you at what to fix or build next.

What Front does that Deacon won’t

Front is where a team works through email together, and Deacon doesn’t try to be that. Before you move, check which of these you lean on.

• Front gathers your support email into one shared inbox. Deacon has no support inbox for email, so customers who email you still reach your own mail.
• Front assigns and routes conversations between teammates. Deacon has no tickets, assignment, routing or rota.
• Front connects SMS, WhatsApp and social channels on Professional. Deacon answers on your website only, with no WhatsApp, Instagram, SMS or phone.
• Front’s AI agent can work on email and in a customer portal. Deacon answers on your website, connects to no helpdesk and takes no actions in other systems.
• Deacon always declines a question about a visitor’s own account, invoice or data, whatever your content covers.

The cleanest split is by channel. Email that several of you answer belongs in Front or one of the inboxes above. Deacon can take the chat on your website at the same time, as a separate tool, since nothing connects the two.

Picking a Front alternative

Start with who answers your customers today, and where those customers write from.

If a few of you pass email between you, Missive does Front’s job at the lowest per-user price here, and Gmelius does it without leaving Gmail. If you want chat and social messages on the first paid plan, Help Scout’s Standard brings them in at the same seat price as Front’s Starter. If you’d like the AI agent included rather than metered, Hiver lists it on every plan. If you’re hiring a support team, Zendesk gives them queues, routing and reports. If chat on your site comes first and you want one price for everyone, Crisp charges the workspace. Help Scout alternatives weighs several of the same tools from Help Scout’s side, and the best customer service software for startups ranks eleven if this is your first support tool. For the AI alone, AI help desks sets out how eleven helpdesks charge for theirs.

If you answer support yourself and most questions come from your website, start on Deacon’s free plan. It answers your visitors from your docs, brings you the ones who need a person, and shows you what they’re asking for, with no card.

Front alternatives, answered

Which Front alternative suits a small team?

It depends on what you use Front for. For shared email, Missive costs least of the tools that charge per user, at $14 a user a month billed yearly for up to 5 users. For email plus chat and social messages on one plan, Help Scout’s Standard is $25 a user billed yearly. If what you want is your website’s questions answered without anyone working an inbox, Deacon does that, on a free plan.

Is there a free alternative to Front?

Yes, three of the tools here have free plans. Help Scout’s covers up to 5 users and 1 inbox, with 100 contacts a month. Crisp’s gives 2 seats, a chat widget and a shared inbox, with no AI credits. Deacon’s includes its AI, with 50 answers a month and 1 seat, though it isn’t a shared inbox. Missive, Gmelius, Hiver and Zendesk offer trials of between 7 and 30 days.

Which Front alternatives work inside Gmail?

Gmelius adds shared inboxes and shared labels to Gmail itself, and Hiver sells a version called Hiver in Gmail, for teams whose home base is Gmail. Missive connects Gmail and Google Workspace accounts, but you work in Missive’s own web, desktop and mobile apps.

Can Deacon replace Front?

For a founder whose customers mostly ask on the website, Deacon can take over the questions that keep coming back, and bring you the ones that need a person. It can’t replace an email inbox that several people share. It has no support inbox for email, no tickets or assignment, and no WhatsApp, SMS or phone, so a team working email together still needs Front or one of the tools above.