Front vs Hiver (2026)

Comparing Front and Hiver? Both are Agent Assist & Copilots and Help Desk & Ticketing tools in the directory, which is why buyers put them on the same shortlist. Below is a side-by-side look at pricing and an estimated monthly bill, channels, compliance claims, and integrations, plus when each is the better fit, so you can pick on the facts rather than either vendor's own sales page.

At a glance

Attribute	Front	Hiver
What it is	Customer operations platform built on shared inboxes, with AI chatbots, drafts, and summaries.	NLP for context identification, and intelligent template suggestions. Intuitive interface.
Pricing	Paid · $25/seat/mo (billed annually)	Paid · $25/user/mo billed annually
Est. monthly cost	$250/mo $25 per seat/mo	$250/mo $25 per seat/mo; Growth plan, annual billing; $35 month-to-month; 7-day free trial
Founded	2013	2011
Categories	Agent Assist & Copilots Help Desk & Ticketing	Agent Assist & Copilots Help Desk & Ticketing
Channels
Chat	✓	✓
Email	✓	✓
Voice	—	✓
SMS	✓	✓
WhatsApp	✓	✓
Social	✓	✓
Compliance (vendor-claimed)
SOC 2	✓	✓
HIPAA	✓	✓
GDPR	✓	✓
ISO 27001	✓	✓
Data residency	US, EU	US
Languages	Not verified	Not verified
What the AI can do
Takes actions	✓	✓
Hands off to a human	✓	✓
Choice of LLM	Not verified	Not verified
Buying
Free trial	14-day free trial	7-day free trial
How you buy	Self-serve signup	Self-serve signup
Minimum commitment	—	2 seats minimum
Company	Independent, venture-backed	Independent, venture-backed
Works with	Salesforce HubSpot Asana Aircall WhatsApp Gainsight	Gmail Slack Salesforce Jira Shopify Asana
Key features	Shared inbox and ticketing Email, SMS, and social channels AI copilot and autopilot Knowledge base publishing Smart QA and CSAT analytics	Gmail-native shared inbox Email, chat, and voice ticketing AI copilot response drafting AI QA conversation scoring Knowledge base and customer portal
Next step	Full listing Visit site →	Full listing Visit site →

Estimates assume 5,000 conversations a month, 60% handled by AI and 10 agent seats, at each vendor's published list price (the cost calculator's model); treat them as a floor, not a quote. Compliance rows are what vendors publicly claim, and “Not verified” means we have not confirmed that fact yet, not that the tool lacks it.

Choose Front or Hiver?

Choose Front if

Best for: Teams whose support lives in email, including logistics, financial services and B2B operations, that want shared inboxes with SLAs and analytics plus AI drafts, summaries and Autopilot chatbots, from a published $25 per seat with a 14-day trial and US or EU hosting.

you want a newer platform built around modern AI agents

Look elsewhere if you need voice, or an AI agent that resolves high volumes of consumer chat: Front's verified channels are chat and email, its AI features sit in the higher tiers, and the per-seat model grows with headcount.

Choose Hiver if

Best for: Teams that want to keep working in Gmail or Outlook and turn it into a help desk with shared inboxes, SLAs, an AI copilot and AI QA, at a published $25 per user billed annually with a 7-day trial, SOC 2, GDPR and ISO 27001 coverage and Salesforce, Jira and Shopify integrations.

you need Voice coverage

Look elsewhere if you want a standalone ticketing system or hosting outside the US: Hiver is a layer on your mail client and its verified residency is US only. The AI QA and insights features sit in the top tier.

About Front

Front rescued the shared inbox from chaos and turned it into a category. Founded in France in 2013 by Mathilde Collin and Laurent Perrin and shaped by Y Combinator, it built the tool for teams whose work actually lives in email: logistics brokers, financial services, B2B operations, anywhere support@ hides real revenue. Everything flows into shared inboxes with assignments, comments, SLAs, and analytics, so nothing gets double-answered or dropped, and modern channels like SMS, social, and live chat fold into the same view.

The AI layer now runs through all of it. AI Copilot drafts on-brand replies from your knowledge, Autopilot chatbots resolve customer questions outright, conversations get summarized and triaged automatically, and Smart QA scores interactions without a sampling program. Knowledge base publishing rounds out a genuinely complete support suite. Front reached a $1.7 billion valuation in 2022, is approaching $100 million in annual revenue near breakeven, and now runs under CEO Dan O'Connell with Collin as executive chair; its 123-integration marketplace includes an unusually deep Salesforce connection.

Pricing is published and per-seat: Starter at $25 per seat per month, Professional at $65, Enterprise at $105 with the AI features included, while Autopilot bills by usage from about five cents a conversation.

Front is the pick for teams that tried to run support from a ticket portal and found their customers just kept emailing. If your customer relationships are conversational and email-heavy, and you want AI woven into that reality rather than a portal bolted beside it, Front remains the reference product.

Read the full Front listing → · See Front alternatives →

About Hiver

Hiver's founding insight was that plenty of teams never wanted a ticketing system at all: they wanted to keep working in Gmail, just without the chaos of forwarded emails and reply-all collisions. It turns Gmail and Outlook into a genuine help desk, with shared inboxes, assignments, SLAs, and analytics layered onto the mail client your team already lives in. Its AI handles the modern expectations: a copilot drafts responses, bots deflect common questions, AI QA scores conversations, and a knowledge base powers self-service, and the newer Hiver Omni adds chat, voice, and WhatsApp for teams that outgrow email alone.

The company has one of the longer backstories in this directory. It began in 2011 as GrexIt, founded by Niraj Ranjan Rout and Nitesh Nandy out of India's Morpheus accelerator, and was renamed Hiver in 2015. Today it runs from San Jose and Bengaluru, took a $22 million Series B led by K1 Capital in 2022, and serves thousands of teams that quietly manage support@ addresses without ever adopting a traditional help desk.

Hiver is also refreshingly transparent commercially, which is rarer in this category than it should be. There is a free-forever plan, paid tiers start at $25 per user per month, and the price of every plan is on the website, though the fancier AI QA and insights features sit in the top Elite tier.

Choose Hiver if your support genuinely runs on email and you want AI leverage without retraining the team on new software. It will not out-muscle a dedicated enterprise platform on autonomous resolution, but for Gmail-first teams it removes almost all the friction of getting started, and the free plan makes trying it a zero-risk exercise.

Read the full Hiver listing → · See Hiver alternatives →

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