Front Review
Front is the shared inbox that grew into a support platform, and it is the most collaborative of the five we have profiled: conversations are things a team works on together rather than tickets assigned to one person.
- From:
- $25/agent/mo billed annually
- Founded:
- 2013
- HQ:
- San Francisco, US
Our verdict
Front is the shared inbox that grew into a support platform, and it is the most collaborative of the five we have profiled: conversations are things a team works on together rather than tickets assigned to one person. Two things should decide it for you. The plans have hard seat caps, so growth moves you up a tier rather than just costing more. And getting your data out is the weakest story in this comparison - there is no self-serve export at all, and what Front does send you leaves several things behind.
Front started as a shared inbox and grew into a support platform, and that origin still shows. Where the other desks in this comparison hand a ticket to an owner, Front treats a conversation as something a team works on together - commenting, drafting and handing off inside the thread. If your support is collaborative rather than queue-driven, that difference is the whole reason to look at it.
Is it right for your team?
Tick what's true for you.
Points for
Points against
Tick what describes you. We'll weigh it against this review.
What it does
- Shared inboxes with comments, shared drafts and assignment inside the conversation
- Omnichannel from the Professional plan; Starter is single-channel
- Rules, message templates, a no-code public knowledge base and analytics
- Autopilot handles customer conversations; Copilot assists agents; Smart QA and Smart CSAT score and survey automatically
- Multiple workspaces, SSO and SCIM from Professional
Pricing at a glance
| Plan | Billed annually | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | $25 | Up to 10 seats, with a single channel type only (Email, chat (Resolve), or SMS) and 1 workspace. |
| Professional | $65 | Up to 50 seats and up to 5 workspaces. |
| Enterprise | $105 | Unlimited workspaces and up to 50 channels per license. |
Prices are an agent a month, in US dollars. Source: front.com/pricing, checked .
- Per seat: Starter $35 and Professional $85 billed monthly, $25 and $65 billed annually; Enterprise $105 a seat billed annually only
- Hard seat caps of 10 on Starter and 50 on Professional, and every seat sits on one plan, so the 11th or 51st hire moves the whole team up a tier
- Autopilot bills per conversation ($0.05 triage, $0.39 handoff, $0.89 resolution), Copilot is $20 a seat a month below Enterprise, and contracts over $25k need a paid onboarding package. Full breakdown with worked totals: Front pricing
AI pricing (per outcome, and stated twice)
- Copilot $20 a seat a month, Smart QA $20, Smart CSAT $10, or the QA and CSAT bundle at $25
- All three are included on Enterprise rather than charged per seat, which is most of the argument for that plan
- Autopilot, the customer-facing agent, is billed per outcome and only when it finishes the job without a human
- Front's own pages give two different figures for it. The pricing page says "starting at $0.05 per conversation"; a Front product announcement says $0.89 per resolution. We are reporting both rather than choosing the flattering one - get the number in writing before you model it
- API rate limits can be raised on any plan at $200 per 100 requests a minute per month
Before you commit
- There is no self-serve data export. You raise a request with Front support, who acknowledge within 72 hours and then process it
- What arrives is CSV folders by inbox, roughly 700MB per file, and excludes attachments, comments, anything in an individual inbox, contact data, message templates and tags
- Getting the excluded material out means writing against the API yourself
- Company admin permission is required even to make the request
- The seat caps are the thing most likely to surprise you at renewal, not the per-seat price
- No uptime percentage is published on the security page
Where it is genuinely strong
- Data residency in the United States or the European Union
- SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, GDPR with a data processing addendum
- AES-256 at rest, TLS 1.2 in transit, daily backups on AWS
- SAML single sign-on, OAuth, two-factor authentication, and SPF, DKIM and DMARC support
- A public bug bounty programme, which is a meaningful signal at this size
Who should buy it, and who should skip it
Who should buy
- Teams whose support is genuinely collaborative rather than one-ticket-one-owner
- Companies needing EU data residency without an enterprise negotiation
- Buyers who want agent-side AI included rather than metered, and will land on Enterprise anyway
Who should skip it
- Anyone who wants to be able to leave without asking permission and waiting
- Teams growing through 10 or 50 seats, where the cap forces a tier change
- Buyers who need month-to-month billing at the top tier
- Anyone modelling AI costs precisely up front, while the published figure is ambiguous
How we checked this
Plan names, prices and seat caps were read from Front's pricing page on 2026-09-23, including the monthly figures, which the page carries in its own rendering data and which also record Enterprise as annual-only. Certifications, hosting regions and encryption come from Front's security page, and the export behaviour from Front's help centre. The two different AI figures come from Front's pricing page and a Front product announcement respectively; both are Front's own, and we have recorded the conflict rather than resolving it. We could not find a published uptime figure. No review-site text was used.
Channels
How each channel is delivered, and the plan it starts on. Native, through an integration, or absent.
'Customer portal with ticket forms' under communication channels; not available on single-channel Starter, exact lowest plan not stated.
Native (Office 365, Gmail, custom). Starter is limited to a single channel type (email, Front Chat, or SMS).
Native Front Chat widget; on Starter only if chat is the chosen single channel type.
Via integrations (Aircall, Dialpad) only; not a Starter channel option.
Via third-party integrations (Twilio, Dialpad); SMS is one of Starter's allowed single channel types.
Facebook, Instagram and X channels on the omnichannel plans.
Native WhatsApp is a paid add-on on Professional/Enterprise (Meta-billed costs plus 20% admin fee); third-party WhatsApp via Twilio on omnichannel plans.
Checked on the vendor’s own pages, .
AI and automation
What the AI does, what it costs, and what the desk automates without it.
Copilot is $20/seat/month on Starter and Professional, included in Enterprise; basic AI compose/translate/summarize (200/day caps) listed separately.
Autopilot add-on on all subscription plans, including legacy. Billed once per conversation at the highest level reached: Triage $0.05, Handoff $0.39, Resolution $0.89 (no teammate follow-up within 24h on chat/SMS/WhatsApp, 72h on email/portal). The pricing page shows only 'starting at $0.05 per conversation'.
Autopilot 'takes action in your systems' via Playbooks; no-code Connectors make external API calls. Gated with the Autopilot add-on.
Published in the help centre: Autopilot Triage $0.05, Handoff $0.39, Resolution $0.89 per conversation, each conversation charged once at its highest level. Copilot $20/seat/month on the pricing page.
Tiered: up to 10 rules on Starter, 20 on Professional, unlimited plus Smart Rules on Enterprise.
AI Topics categorize contact reasons from Starter; ticketing page markets AI-powered ticket triage and topic routing.
'Macros and up to 20 automation rules' from Professional; a separate ungated 'message templates' row also exists — the two rows differ.
Checked on the vendor’s own pages, .
Strengths
- Built around collaboration: comments, drafts and assignments on a conversation, rather than one owner per ticket.
- Data residency in the United States or the European Union, chosen by the customer.
- AI is sold per outcome rather than per seat, and the top plan bundles the agent-side tools instead of metering them.
- The AI add-ons are priced openly per seat: Copilot $20, Smart QA $20, Smart CSAT $10, or $25 for the QA and CSAT bundle.
- API rate limits can be raised on any plan at a published price, rather than being an enterprise-only negotiation.
- SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, with SAML SSO, two-factor authentication and a public bug bounty programme.
Trade-offs
- **You cannot export your own data.** There is no in-app export; you raise a request with Front support and wait up to 72 hours for acknowledgement.
- That export leaves out attachments, comments, anything in an individual inbox, contact data, message templates and tags.
- Hard seat caps: 10 on Starter and 50 on Professional. Hiring past the cap forces a plan change, not a bigger invoice.
- The Enterprise plan cannot be bought monthly at all - Front states it is available on annual billing only.
- Front's own pages disagree on what its AI agent costs, so budget from a quote rather than the published figure.
- Contracts over $25k require a paid onboarding package.
- No uptime percentage is published anywhere we could find.
Compare Front
What’s new in Front
The latest from Front’s own changelog, linked to each post.
- Put AI agents to work with your team for seamless collaboration
community.front.com
- Press: News & media resources
front.com