Hiver vs Front: one lives inside Gmail, the other asks you to move. Which fits your team?

Hiver and Front get compared constantly, and the comparison is usually framed as a feature race. That framing misses the point. The two tools sit at opposite ends of one decision: whether a team should keep working in the mail client it already has, or move into a purpose-built application. Hiver renders shared inbox features inside the Gmail interface. Front is a standalone workspace with its own way of doing things and channels well beyond email. Most of the differences that matter follow from that split, so this comparison starts there.

A note on who is writing. We build Sektra, which takes a third approach to the same problem, so we are not a neutral party in this market. Everything below about Hiver and Front is drawn from their public materials and pricing pages as of September 2026, and where we say what we think, we say so. Where Sektra sits comes at the end, briefly.

What is the difference between Hiver and Front?

Hiver is a shared inbox that lives inside Gmail. Your team keeps the Gmail interface and Hiver adds assignment, statuses, notes, SLAs and reporting on top of it, so a support or operations address can be worked as a queue without anyone learning a new application. Front is a customer operations platform that replaces the mail client: conversations from email, chat, SMS, social and WhatsApp arrive in one app, where routing rules, SLAs, automations and analytics run across teams. Hiver asks for a smaller change and covers a narrower job. Front asks for a bigger change and covers a wider one.

Where the mail lives decides adoption

With Hiver, nobody leaves Gmail. The shared inbox appears as a set of controls in the interface people already use all day, which is why teams running Hiver rarely report the drift back to personal inboxes that undoes so many shared inbox rollouts. The tradeoff is that Hiver inherits Gmail's constraints: it is an email tool first, and the wider channel support sits in a separate product line rather than the core Gmail experience.

With Front, the team moves. Mail still arrives through the connected Google or Microsoft accounts, but the work happens in Front, with Front's concepts and Front's shortcuts. That move is the price of everything Front does beyond email, and it is a real price. A team that fully commits gets one place for every channel. A team where two people quietly keep working in Gmail ends up with context split across two systems, which is worse than either system alone. Before comparing features, be honest about which team you have.

Channels

Hiver is built around Gmail. Email is the core, and chat, WhatsApp and voice are offered through Hiver's omnichannel product rather than as part of the basic Gmail add-on. Front's Starter plan covers a single channel type, whichever one you choose, and the Professional and Enterprise plans are omnichannel: email, SMS, social and WhatsApp in the same inbox. If your customers reach you on three channels and you want one queue, Front's upper tiers are built for exactly that. If your customers write email, the channel question barely matters and the rest of this article does.

Hiver vs Front pricing in 2026

Both vendors publish per-user monthly prices with a discount for annual billing. The list below uses annual rates, since that is what most teams end up on, and rounds where the vendor gives a range. Check the pricing pages before signing anything, because both companies have repriced more than once.

• Front Starter: $25 per seat per month billed annually, capped at 10 seats, one channel type. Professional: $65 per seat, up to 50 seats, omnichannel. Enterprise: $105 per seat, no seat cap. Front quotes a 24 percent saving for annual billing, so monthly rates run noticeably higher.
• Front AI is mostly sold separately below Enterprise: Copilot at $20 per seat per month, Smart QA at $20 per seat per month, Smart CSAT at $10 per seat per month, and Autopilot starting at $0.05 per conversation. Enterprise includes Copilot, QA and CSAT.
• Hiver: a free plan for small teams, then paid tiers that currently run from about $25 to $85 per user per month on annual billing, roughly $35 to $95 monthly, with a two-seat minimum. The entry paid tier caps at 10 users, and SLAs and analytics start at the middle tier. AI features are included in the paid tiers rather than sold as a separate add-on.

Put an eight-person team on each. On Hiver's middle tier at about $55 per user, that is roughly $5,300 a year with SLAs and analytics included. On Front Starter at $25 it is $2,400 a year, but Starter is single-channel and stops at 10 seats, so a team that needs omnichannel or expects to grow past 10 is really looking at Professional: $6,240 a year, plus $1,920 if it wants Copilot. Neither number is wrong. They buy different things, and the mistake is quoting the Starter column for a team that will live in the Professional one.

How AI is billed

This is the line item most likely to move between the quote and the renewal. Hiver bundles its AI into the paid tiers, with the deeper QA and insight features reserved for the top plan. Front sells AI as add-ons on Starter and Professional and bundles it on Enterprise, with Autopilot metered per conversation on top. Bundling gives you a fixed number. Metering ties cost to use, which finance teams sometimes prefer and sometimes hate, depending on how predictable the inbound is. Ask for the AI line in writing before you compare totals, because it can be a quarter of the bill.

Workflow depth

Front is the heavier workflow engine. Routing rules move conversations between teams, SLA policies escalate what is late, automations handle the repetitive moves, and analytics report on all of it. That depth is what operations-heavy teams in logistics, financial services and travel buy it for, and it takes someone senior to configure and maintain. Hiver covers assignment, statuses, SLAs, CSAT surveys and automations for a Gmail queue, which is most of what a support address needs and considerably less to set up.

What both share is the shape of the work. Each treats the conversation as the unit: it arrives, gets assigned, gets resolved, and leaves the queue. That is the right model for support and operations. It is worth naming because it is the model neither tool changes, whichever one you pick.

The two questions that decide it

First: will the whole team leave Gmail? Not should they. Will they. If the answer is no, or if the team includes part-timers and contractors who rotate through, Hiver's stay-in-Gmail design removes the largest risk in the decision. If the answer is a confident yes and the channel list is long, Front's design pays off.

Second: is your inbound a queue or a book of clients? A queue is mostly new people with solvable problems, where resolution is the goal. A book of clients is the same fifty names writing month after month, where the risks are a forgotten promise, a question that aged inside an answered thread, and an account that went quiet. Hiver and Front are both built for the queue. If your mail is a book of clients, the feature comparison above is the wrong comparison, because neither tool keeps a record of the relationship once the thread is closed.

Where Sektra sits

Sektra takes the third option: its own workspace that syncs two-way with Gmail, Outlook and WhatsApp, so mail stays where it is and anyone who has not moved yet keeps working in their mail client. It keeps the shared inbox basics both tools above have, and adds what they do not: a memory of every commitment and open question per client, flags when an account goes quiet, and an assistant that answers from the history and acts on the inbox, with every AI feature included in the plan price at $29 per seat on Standard and $59 on Pro, billed annually. The side-by-side pages, Sektra vs Hiver and Sektra vs Front, show the rows honestly, including the ones where the other tool is larger.

Hiver or Front: a short checklist

• Pick Hiver if the team runs on Gmail, the work is an email queue, and keeping everyone in the interface they already know matters more than channels.
• Pick Front if customers reach you on several channels, requests move between departments, and the team will genuinely move into one application.
• Price the tier that contains the feature you are buying, not the entry column, and get the AI line in writing.
• If the same clients write every week and your worst misses are forgotten promises rather than slow replies, look at a relationship-first tool instead, and run it alongside whichever queue you keep.

Both tools are competent at the job they were built for. The decision is about your team and your inbound, not about which vendor won a feature grid this quarter.