A comprehensive Front review: Features, pricing, and alternatives in 2025

If your team’s inbox feels like a constant game of "who’s on it?" then you’ve probably heard of Front. It’s a well-known customer communication tool with a loyal fanbase, mostly thanks to its shared inbox. The whole idea is to swap email chaos for one streamlined place for all customer conversations. But with a hefty price tag and more competitors popping up, is it the best choice for your team in 2025?

This in-depth Front review will give you an honest look at its main features, pricing, and the pros and cons you’ll hear from actual users. We’ll explore where Front is great and where it misses the mark, so you can decide if it’s right for you. We’ll also touch on how you can boost platforms like Front with modern AI to patch up some of its weak spots.

What is Front software?

So, what exactly is Front? Think of it as a central hub for every message your company gets, whether it’s an email, SMS, live chat, or social media DM. Instead of everyone working out of their own separate inboxes, the entire team works from the same queue.

The main goal here is to get things done faster and make customers happier. By letting your team assign messages, comment on them internally, and resolve them together, Front helps get rid of those messy internal "fwd: fwd: fwd:" email chains. You don’t have to switch to another app just to ask a colleague for help. It’s built for any team that talks to customers, like support, sales, or account management, who need to give quick and personal service.

What are Front’s key features?

Front’s reputation comes from a few core functions that really change how teams manage customer messages. While it has a lot of bells and whistles, the real magic happens when its collaborative inbox, internal comments, and automation work together. Let’s break down the most important parts.

Shared inbox

The heart of Front is its shared inbox. This is where all your incoming messages, from email to Twitter, land in one place for the whole team to see. This transparency is a huge help for teamwork.

• Assignments: You can hand off any conversation to a specific person, so everyone knows who’s responsible for replying.

• Live Activity: Front cleverly shows you when a coworker is looking at or typing a reply to an email, which is a simple but effective way to stop two people from answering the same customer.

Pro Tip: Getting into the habit of using assignments and statuses (like open, snoozed, or closed) is the quickest way to hit "inbox zero" as a team and make sure no customer message gets lost in the shuffle.

Review of team collaboration tools

This is where Front really helps with teamwork. Instead of jumping over to a chat app to ask a question about an email, you can have that conversation right where the work is happening.

• Internal Comments: You can @mention teammates directly in an email thread. These comments are totally invisible to the customer but keep all the context in one spot.

• Shared Drafts: Need a second pair of eyes on a reply? You can write a draft and share it with a manager or subject matter expert for review before it goes out. This is great for training new team members or handling tricky customer situations.

Automation through rules

Tired of manually sorting and assigning every incoming support request? Front lets you automate these kinds of repetitive tasks with "if-this-then-that" rules. You can set up workflows that will automatically:

• Route messages to the right team or person based on things like keywords in the subject line or who the sender is.

• Tag conversations to keep them organized for later reporting.

• Apply timers for your Service Level Agreements (SLAs) so you can prioritize urgent messages.

• Send automated replies to let customers know you’ve received their message.

It’s worth noting that the power and number of rules you can create are usually tied to which pricing plan you’re on.

Integrations and AI capabilities

Front says it connects with dozens of popular tools like Salesforce, Jira, Slack, and WhatsApp. But when you dig into user reviews, the feedback is a bit mixed. While many integrations work just fine, some important ones, like the HubSpot integration, get called "useless" and "antiquated" by users for not syncing basic information correctly.

Front has also started adding AI features to help summarize long threads or help with writing replies. Again, some users in SoftwareAdvice reviews feel these tools are "pretty limited" when you compare them to what dedicated AI tools can do.

This is where a different approach comes in. While Front offers some basic automation, many teams plug in a tool like eesel AI on top. It connects directly to helpdesks like Front and learns from your actual past tickets and knowledge base articles to provide accurate, autonomous support. Its integrations are built to be deep and reliable, avoiding the syncing headaches some users report with Front’s native options.

A Front review of pricing: Is it worth the cost?

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room: the price. For a lot of teams, the cost per user is a major sticking point. The platform is broken into several tiers, and you have to pay more to unlock the most useful features.

Here’s a quick look at their plans to give you an idea.

Plan	Price (Billed Annually)	Key Features	Best For
Starter	$19/user/month	Shared inboxes for up to 15 channels, basic automation (10 rules), live chat.	Small teams (up to 10 users) that need basic collaboration.
Growth	$59/user/month	All Starter features, plus advanced automation (50 rules), analytics, and key integrations.	Growing teams that need better performance tracking and workflows.
Scale	$99/user/month	All Growth features, plus advanced user permissions, CRM sync, and workload balancing.	Larger teams that require complex, department-specific workflows.
Premier	$229/user/month	All Scale features, plus professional services, dedicated support, and the highest usage caps.	Enterprises with specialized needs and a large budget.

Hidden costs and limitations of pricing

Digging into what users actually say, a few frustrations with Front’s pricing model pop up again and again:

• High Per-User Cost: The price is per person, which can get really expensive, really fast as your team gets bigger.

• Minimum Seat Requirements: The more expensive plans, like Scale and Premier, often make you pay for a minimum number of users, which puts them out of reach for smaller teams.

• Gated Features: Many of the features you probably want, like good analytics, powerful automation, and solid CRM integrations, are locked away in the priciest plans.

This "per-agent" pricing is pretty common, but it can feel like you’re being penalized for growing your support team. This is a different way of thinking compared to newer AI tools. A platform like eesel AI, for instance, has usage-based pricing. You pay for the number of AI interactions, not the number of human agents on your team. This model scales more predictably and can be much more cost-effective as you start automating more of your support volume.

What are Front’s pros and cons?

Alright, let’s put it all together. After combing through what real users are saying on sites like Capterra, SoftwareAdvice, and TrustRadius, here’s the good, the bad, and the buggy.

What users love about Front (Pros)

• It’s fantastic for team collaboration: It really does cut down on messy internal emails and makes working together a breeze with features like internal comments and shared drafts.

• All your messages are in one place: Having every channel flow into a single shared inbox saves a ton of time and gives you a complete picture of a "customer’s history.

• The interface is clean and easy to use: Most people agree that the design is a huge step up from clunky old email clients like Outlook or Gmail.

• There’s clear accountability: When you assign a conversation, everyone knows who owns it. This prevents messages from being forgotten or ignored.

Where Front falls short (Cons)

• The pricing is expensive and restrictive: This is, by far, the biggest complaint. The high per-user cost is a major hurdle for many small and medium-sized businesses.

• Integrations can be hit-or-miss: While there’s a long list of integrations, some of the most important ones (like HubSpot) are poorly rated and don’t work reliably, forcing teams to do manual data entry.

• The built-in AI feels basic: Many users find the native AI tools to be pretty lightweight and not nearly as capable as dedicated, third-party AI platforms.

• It can be buggy: Users often report technical glitches, like emails being threaded together incorrectly, long conversations causing crashes, or automation rules that just don’t fire when they’re supposed to.

A Front review of top alternatives and how they compare

So, what if Front isn’t checking all your boxes, especially when it comes to cost and AI? You’ve got a couple of paths you can take. You can either look at a direct competitor or think about adding an AI layer on top of what you already have.

What are Front’s direct competitors: Zendesk, Intercom, and Freshdesk

Platforms like Zendesk, Intercom, and Freshdesk are the usual suspects when people look for Front alternatives.

• Zendesk is a beast when it comes to traditional, ticket-based customer support.

• Intercom is excellent for proactive customer chats and marketing automation.

• Freshdesk is a solid all-in-one option that’s generally considered more affordable.

The catch? Switching to any of these means a full-blown migration project. And let’s be honest, nobody really enjoys those. It’s a massive undertaking that can disrupt your entire team.

Enhancing Front with AI

But what if you didn’t have to ditch Front to fix its shortcomings? Instead of ripping out your entire system, many teams are now choosing to supercharge it. An AI platform like eesel AI works right on top of your existing tools, including Front. It integrates directly to give you a powerful AI automation layer without forcing you through a painful migration.

This kind of setup directly tackles the main complaints about Front:

• Powerful, Accurate AI: By training on your past tickets, help docs, and other internal knowledge, eesel AI can accurately resolve over 50% of your common support questions on its own.

• Reliable, Deep Integrations: It connects smoothly to your entire knowledge stack to pull real-time, accurate answers for customers.

• Cost-Effective, Scalable Pricing: Its usage-based pricing model is typically more affordable and scales much better than Front’s per-agent costs.

• Easy, Self-Serve Setup: You can connect your accounts and get it running in minutes, without needing a sales call or a team of engineers.

Is Front the right tool for your team?

So, what’s the final verdict on this Front review? It’s a genuinely great tool for what it does best: helping teams collaborate smoothly inside a shared inbox. It brings a sense of order to communication chaos and is loved by the teams who can stomach the premium price.

But that price tag is steep, and the built-in AI and some key integrations can feel a bit behind the times. For many teams trying to be as efficient as possible, it’s getting harder to justify the cost.

If you like Front’s collaborative feel but need smarter, more affordable automation, the best move might be to pair it with a dedicated AI layer. A tool built for AI can handle the repetitive work of resolving common tickets, freeing up your team to use Front for what it’s best at: collaborating on the complex conversations that truly need a human touch.

Ready to see how AI can transform your customer support? You can start a free trial or book a demo to discover how easy it is to automate your support without having to switch helpdesks.