Front Alternatives for Customer Support in 2026, Compared

The Front alternatives worth comparing in 2026 are Plain, Zendesk, Missive, Pylon, Freshdesk, and Hiver, and the choice between them mostly comes down to one design question: should your support work be organized by inbox, the way Front organizes it, or by customer? If the same customer reaches you in a Slack channel, an email thread, and an in-app form, and what you care about is who they are and which tier they're on, you want customer-centric routing; if your work really is a set of shared addresses, an inbox-first tool, or Front itself, will usually fit better. Plain is the agentic infrastructure for customer work. It's a B2B customer support platform (help desk) built around the customer rather than the inbox: every thread is tied to the customer, their company, and their tier, across Slack, Microsoft Teams (Horizon+), Discord (Frontier), email, and chat. Plain publishes this page. Every competitor fact comes from that vendor's own published page, checked October 2026.

Inbox or customer: how does Front organize support work, and what changes when you leave it?

Front organizes work by inbox; Plain organizes it by customer. In Front, a conversation's place is the inbox it sits in, and escalating it means moving it to another inbox. In Plain, a thread belongs to a customer and their company, and the company's tier travels with the thread into routing and SLAs, whatever channel it arrived on.

Front's own help center is clear about its model. Front's explanation of inboxes and channels calls an inbox "an organizational container" for messages, and a channel (an email address, an SMS number, a social account) connects to one inbox at a time. Its worked example has the support@ and help@ addresses feeding a shared Support inbox, and escalation as a move: a rule called "Escalate to Tier 2" sends conversations into an empty "Tier 2 Support" inbox. Front also has Accounts, which group contacts by company, match them by email domain, and can be used in rules. Per Front's accounts article, a contact belongs to one account, and Front doesn't create account records automatically from the people you email, so the company layer is something you build and maintain on top of the inboxes.

In Plain, the company is the starting point. A customer's company is a tenant, and per Plain's tiers documentation, tiers such as Enterprise, Pro, or Free are assigned to tenants, "the tier shows on every thread from that tenant," and workflows can route on it. Routing uses labels, tiers, and workflows rather than shared inboxes. On Horizon and above, tier SLAs measure every thread from a tenant in that tier against the same response and resolution targets. Tinybird is a public example of measuring support that way: resolution time for its enterprise tier fell from 6 days to 2 hours after it moved to Plain (source).

This matters most for teams already on Front. In 45 conversations with B2B teams that were running support on Front (21 companies, June 2025 to September 2026), 30 of the 43 conversations with channel data described supporting customers on two or more channels, 28 named Slack, and 26 named both Slack and email. When one customer writes in from several places, inbox-first routing asks which container each channel lands in; customer-first routing asks who the customer is and what they're entitled to.

The trade-off is real. If you're migrating from Front, every inbox has to become a label or a workflow, and Plain's Front importer tells you to add each inbox name as a label if you want to keep that grouping. Teams whose inboxes already match how they think about customers, for example one inbox per product or per region, will feel this as a step backwards before it's a step forwards. And Front's accounts plus rules can approximate customer-level routing, at the cost of keeping those account records current.

Front is an inbox-first platform with three plans. As of October 2026, Front's pricing page lists Starter at $25/seat/mo for up to 10 seats, Professional at $65/seat/mo for up to 50 seats, and Enterprise at $105/seat/mo, billed annually. The page advertises Save 24% for annual billing. A 14-day free trial includes Professional features and needs no credit card.

The plan boundaries are where most evaluations start. Starter supports a single channel type (email, chat, or SMS); Professional and Enterprise are omnichannel. Workflow rules are capped at up to 10 on Starter and up to 20 on Professional, and are unlimited on Enterprise; analytics run Basic, then Advanced, then Custom reports.

That single-channel limit sets the real entry price for a multichannel team. A 5-person team answering on email and chat is on Professional: 5 × $65 = $325 a month on annual billing, before Copilot. For comparison, Plain's Foundation for the same 5 repliers is 5 × $45 = $225 a month on annual billing, before any credit top-ups, with viewer seats free.

Front sells AI in two parts. Copilot, which drafts replies and suggests next steps, is a $20/seat/month add-on on Starter and Professional and is included on Enterprise. Autopilot, Front's AI agent, is an add-on starting at $0.05 per conversation. Front also lists External AI agents, which let agents built with Claude, Codex, Sierra, and others collaborate with your team in Front, and an MCP server.

A few other line items are worth noting from the same page. An onboarding package is required on contracts over $25k. An API rate limit increase costs $200 per 100 API requests/min per month. Guest accounts let colleagues comment on a conversation without a license. Native WhatsApp is a paid add-on on Professional and Enterprise.

Front also deserves credit for its channel list. Its pricing page lists Slack, where you can respond and react to Slack messages from public and private channels, plus a customer portal with ticket forms. The comparison table marks Slack on Starter as available "if single channel type," and the page text doesn't spell out the other tiers, so check that for your own plan before you decide.

What are the best Front alternatives for customer support in 2026?

The best Front alternatives for customer support in 2026 are Plain for customer-centric routing, Zendesk and Freshdesk for structured ticketing, Missive and Hiver for staying close to the shared-inbox model, and Pylon for account-centric support bought through sales. Prices below are list prices on annual billing, as of October 2026, from each vendor's own page.

1. Plain. Best for B2B SaaS teams that want support organized around the customer and their tier, and want an API to build on. Slack (25 channels on Foundation, unlimited on Horizon), email, chat, and contact forms on every plan; Microsoft Teams and a headless portal on Horizon+; Discord on Frontier.

2. Zendesk. Best for teams that want large-scale ticketing and a big integration ecosystem. Zendesk's own page lists 1,500+ apps in the Zendesk Marketplace, and Support Team at $19 per agent/month.

3. Missive. Best for teams whose work is collaborating on email. Missive's plans run $14 to $36 per user/month, with the AI Assistant on Productive.

4. Pylon. Best for B2B teams that want account-centric support and AI agents, bought on a sales-led annual contract. Pylon lists Professional at $89 per seat and Advanced at $139 per seat on annual contracts, with AI features on credits from a 5,000-credit minimum.

5. Freshdesk. Best for teams that want structured ticketing with SLA policies and an AI agent priced per session. Growth is $19/agent/month, with Freddy AI Agent's first 500 sessions included and additional sessions at $49 per 100.

6. Hiver. Best for teams that want a shared inbox and ticketing across email, Slack, and voice, or support run inside Gmail. Hiver Omni Growth is $25/user/month, the Slack channel is listed on Pro ($55/user/month), and all plans start at 2 seats.

Only six alternatives appear here because this page includes a vendor only when that vendor's own published page supports the facts stated about it.

What should B2B support teams look for in a Front alternative?

Six checks separate these tools. The first is the one this page is built around.

1. What a conversation is attached to. Ask whether the tool organizes work by inbox or by customer and company, and whether a customer's tier follows the conversation into routing and SLAs. Across 2,500+ conversations with B2B support leaders and engineers (June 2025 to September 2026), 82% of those with channel data described supporting customers on two or more channels, which is the situation where an inbox-per-address model starts to split one customer across several places.

2. Slack as a support channel. Slack came up in 48% of 2,500+ conversations with B2B support leaders and engineers (June 2025 – September 2026). Check whether a tool treats shared and external Slack channels as a support channel or only as an integration that mirrors notifications, and how many channels each plan allows. The table below records what each vendor's own page says about Slack.

3. Reporting. Reporting, analytics and dashboards come up regularly in those conversations. Check which plan tier holds the reporting you need. Front, Freshdesk, Hiver, Missive, and Plain all place some reporting on higher tiers, so the entry price often isn't the price of the plan you'll use.

4. The seat model for people who read but don't reply. Seats, licenses, or per-user pricing came up on evaluation calls with 51 of 245 B2B companies (July 30 to October 14, 2026), and 29 raised it as a concern. Count your repliers separately from the engineers, product managers, and account managers who only need visibility. The table's "access for teammates who don't reply" column shows how each vendor prices that.

5. Programmability. Ask whether everything a person can do in the tool can also be done through an API, webhooks, or MCP. If the answer is "most things," ask for the list of exceptions, because that list is where your custom workflow will break.

6. Migration. Ask whether the vendor documents an importer from Front and what it carries over: contacts, conversation history, internal comments, tags, and timestamps. A migration that drops comments or resets timestamps loses the context you paid Front to keep.

How do Front alternatives compare on price, seats, channels and AI?

The table below lists published list prices on annual billing, as of October 2026, from each vendor's own page. Front appears as the baseline row.

Published list prices, annual billing, from each vendor's pricing page as of October 2026. Add-ons and usage charges are listed separately.

The structural differences matter more than the headline numbers. Front's Starter is single-channel, so a team on email and chat is on Professional from day one; Plain's viewer seats are free and its AI is metered in credits rather than per seat; Missive puts its AI on the mid tier; Pylon sells on an annual contract with a 5,000-credit minimum; Freshdesk prices its AI agent per session and sells day passes for occasional agents; and Hiver has a 2-seat minimum with the Slack channel on Pro. Beyond the 5-person example above, we haven't totalled these up into a cost model, because the right comparison depends on how many people reply, how many only watch, and which channels you actually run.

Is Plain a good Front alternative for B2B SaaS support?

Plain is a good fit when you want support organized around the customer, as the first section describes, and you want to build on it. The second thing that separates it from Front is API-first design: Plain's developer platform includes an API, webhooks, events, and MCP, with custom channels on Frontier, and anything you can do in the app can also be done programmatically. If you've ever hit the edge of a tool's rules engine and had to wait for the vendor, that's the design decision to read about in why Plain is built to be programmable.

The proof is in what teams build on it. Fly.io migrated from Help Scout to Plain and built a custom support portal using Plain's API, streamlining workflows for its 9-engineer support team and rotating on-call engineers. Fly.io saves 200+ hours of engineering time per year with Plain (source).

What it does well

Plain supports Slack, email, chat, and contact forms on every plan, Microsoft Teams and a headless portal on Horizon+, and Discord on Frontier. Foundation includes 25 Slack channels and Horizon includes unlimited Slack channels. Slack came up in 48% of the 2,500+ conversations with B2B support leaders and engineers mentioned above (June 2025 to September 2026), which is why channel capacity per plan is worth checking. See Slack support in Plain for how channels connect.

Sourcegraph is the scale reference. The team migrated 26,000 tickets from their ticketing tool, brought roughly 100 Slack channels into Plain, and had email and Slack running within days. Sourcegraph saw a 67% improvement in median first response time (source).

Plain's AI has two named capabilities, and they sit on either side of an architectural boundary. The Customer Agent is the customer-facing agent: it reads full customer threads and replies with citations back to your knowledge base. You set tone, escalation rules, and assignments, and on Horizon+ you can see suggested responses on real traffic before it replies to a customer.

Sidekick is the agent-facing assistant: it investigates alongside your team, querying tools such as Linear, Sentry, and Datadog and searching your knowledge base, and it has no channel to the customer. It hands off to a human or to the Customer Agent, which sends the reply under its own guardrails. Sidekick also uses credits, 15 to 300+ per request depending on effort. External Agents let you bring your own agent onto the same queue.

Reporting themes sit on Horizon, alongside SLAs, business hours, escalation paths, and CRM integrations. If reporting is one of your checks, that's the tier to price. At Sourcegraph, the quarterly spreadsheets maintained by hand were replaced by labels that fed directly into Plain's reporting, giving Sourcegraph ticket trends, workload distribution, and resolution data without exporting anything (source).

Pricing

Plain meters AI in credits, and the rules are on Plain's pricing and credit allowances page and in the credits documentation. Foundation includes 1,000 credits a month on annual billing (500 on monthly billing) and Horizon includes 2,500. A Customer Agent resolution uses 100 credits. A connected agent of your own uses 15 credits per assignment and 15 per discussion.

A thread counts as resolved only when the Customer Agent replied on it, no team member got involved, and the thread moved to Done and stayed there for 7 days. A customer reply inside that window moves it out of Done, and the 7 days start over. Top-ups start at 1,000 credits for $10 and don't expire; included credits reset monthly. If a workspace runs out of credits, the features that use credits stop until more are added.

Seats work like this. Foundation is $45/user/month billed annually ($55 monthly), up to 5 user seats. Horizon is $99/user/month billed annually, minimum 3 and up to 10 user seats. Frontier is custom. Viewer seats are free and unlimited on every plan, and a member seat is needed only to reply. There's a 7-day free trial with no credit card, and the startup program gives 50% off.

Northflank is an example of what wider team visibility looks like in practice, though its page doesn't say which seat types it uses. Northflank consolidated enterprise Slack channels, email, and in-app support into Plain. With Plain, Northflank improved its first response time by 50%, and its page reports 2x increased visibility into support (source).

Who it fits

Plain tends to suit B2B SaaS teams whose customers live in Slack, Teams, or Discord, who think about support by customer and tier, and whose engineers want to build on the support layer rather than configure it. The awkward parts: Foundation caps at 5 user seats, Microsoft Teams and the headless portal need Horizon, Discord needs Frontier, and Plain's AI is metered in credits rather than included without limit. If your support is email-only, organized well by inbox, and nobody on your team will ever call the API, you're paying for infrastructure you won't use.

Is Zendesk a good Front alternative?

Zendesk is the alternative if what you want from a Front replacement is more ticketing, not less. The facts below come from Zendesk's own Front alternatives page, as of October 2026.

Pricing

Billed annually, Support Team is $19 per agent/month, Suite Team is $55/agent/month, Suite Professional is $115/agent/month, and Suite Enterprise + Copilot is contact sales. The free trial is 14 days. The gap between the first two tiers is the number to price: for 5 agents, Support Team is $95 a month and Suite Team is $275.

What it does well

Zendesk's page names an email and ticketing system, prebuilt analytics dashboards, pre-written responses, an AI agent builder, support for 80+ languages, and 1,500+ apps in the Zendesk Marketplace. Its Agent Workspace is described as a unified omnichannel interface with customer context alongside the conversation.

Who it fits

Zendesk tends to suit teams that want a mature ticketing model and a large app ecosystem. Where its page is silent, the table above says "Not stated on vendor page", so verify those items against your own requirements. For a closer look at how it compares with Plain, see Plain vs Zendesk.

Is Missive a good Front alternative?

Missive is the alternative for teams whose work is mostly collaborating on email rather than working a ticket queue, which makes it the closest of these tools to Front's inbox model. Everything below comes from Missive's own Front comparison page, as of October 2026.

Pricing

Billed annually, Starter is $14/user/month for up to 5 users; Productive is $24/user/month for up to 50 users, with integrations, rules, API access, and the AI Assistant; Business is $36/user/month with unlimited users, advanced analytics, and SAML SSO. The free trial is 30 days with no credit card. The 5-user cap on Starter is the limit to plan around: a sixth person moves the whole team to Productive, so 5 users on Starter cost $70 a month and 6 users on Productive cost $144.

What it does well

Conversations can be assigned to one or several people, and you can create unlimited tasks with due dates inside a conversation. For AI, you choose Claude, OpenAI, or Gemini, using Missive AI Credits or your own API key, and there's an MCP server. Channels are email, SMS, WhatsApp, live chat, Messenger, Instagram, and custom channels via API.

Missive documents its own Front migration path: once your team is running in Missive, you request a data export from Front and Missive imports your Front comments and Front-only emails. That's Missive's claim, and the mechanics are on its page.

Who it fits

Missive tends to suit smaller teams that want email to stay email, with the AI Assistant available from the $24 Productive tier. The limitations Missive states about itself are that it has no customer-facing knowledge base and that Front's reporting is deeper and more configurable.

Is Pylon a good Front alternative?

Pylon is the alternative that shares this page's premise: it organizes support around the customer's account, not around an inbox. That makes it the closest of these tools to Plain's model, so the differences to check are how you buy it and where each feature is gated. The facts come from Pylon's pricing page, its ticketing page and its Front comparison page, as of October 28, 2026.

Pricing

Pylon lists Professional at $89 per seat and Advanced at $139 per seat, both on an annual contract, and Enterprise as a custom quote; standard contracts are annual, and monthly billing is offered. Its AI features, including its support, assist and Slack agents and its automations, run on credits rather than being sold as add-ons, with a minimum commitment of 5,000 credits. Pylon says a seat minimum applies to new customers but doesn't publish the number, and trials are set up through its sales team rather than by self-serve sign-up. View-only seats are on every tier, and the number is agreed with sales. Paid add-ons include Account Intelligence at $10 per customer account per month and phone at $35 per seat per month.

What it does well

Routing and SLAs follow the account. Per Pylon's ticketing page, routing rules can use the account's tier as well as product area, language, region or custom conditions, and response and resolution SLAs can be set per tier or priority. Slack Connect, community Slack, Discord, Telegram, WhatsApp, SMS, email and a chat widget are on every tier; Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, the customer portal, team SLAs and custom dashboards start on Advanced. A REST API, webhooks, an MCP server and bring-your-own-agent are listed on every tier. The Account Intelligence add-on builds account summaries, health scores and AI-filled fields from conversations, calls, CRM records and product usage. On its Front page, Pylon draws the same line this page does, describing Front as inbox-centred and its own agents as starting work on an issue, with the account's context, before a person opens it.

Who it fits

Pylon tends to suit B2B teams that want account-level context and AI agents, and that are comfortable buying through sales on an annual contract with a committed credit purchase. Against Plain, the model is similar; the buying is not. Plain publishes a $45/user/month entry price, a 7-day trial with no credit card, and free, unlimited viewer seats, while Pylon agrees its seat minimum, trial and viewer-seat count with sales. Gates differ in both directions: Discord is on every Pylon tier and on Plain's Frontier, while Microsoft Teams sits on Pylon's Advanced and on Plain's Horizon.

Is Freshdesk a good Front alternative?

Freshdesk is the alternative for structured ticketing with SLA policies. The facts come from Freshdesk's pricing page, as of October 2026.

Pricing

Billed annually, Growth is $19/agent/month, Pro is $55/agent/month, and Enterprise is $89/agent/month. The page advertises Save 20% for annual billing. The 14-day free trial gives access to the Enterprise plan.

AI is priced in sessions. Freddy AI Agent is on all three plans with the first 500 sessions included, once per account, then $49 per 100 sessions; an Email AI Agent session is a 72-hour window starting from the customer's first email, and all AI responses within that window count as one session. As arithmetic, 1,500 sessions in total means 1,000 beyond the included 500, or $490. Freddy AI Copilot is a $29/agent/month add-on on Pro and Enterprise. Freddy AI Insights is on Enterprise.

What it does well

Ticketing, a shared inbox, threads and tasks, a customer portal, a knowledge base, and SAML SSO are on all plans. Pro and Enterprise add a multilingual helpdesk, custom dashboards, multiple SLA policies, round-robin assignment, and business hours. Enterprise adds skill-based routing, audit logs, and a sandbox.

For people who aren't full-time agents, day passes give occasional agents a day of access instead of a full license, at $2, $7, and $12 per pass on Growth, Pro, and Enterprise, and Pro and Enterprise include 5,000 external collaborators. MCP use is metered in actions: 1,200, 6,000, and 12,000 a year on Growth, Pro, and Enterprise, then $15 per 1,000. Connector app tasks cost $80 per 5,000 tasks.

Who it fits

Freshdesk tends to suit teams that want structured ticketing with multiple SLA policies and are comfortable paying for an AI agent by session. Where its pages are silent, the table above says "Not stated on vendor page", so check those items separately.

Is Hiver a good Front alternative?

Hiver is the alternative if you want a shared inbox and ticketing that covers Slack, voice, and email, or if your team wants to keep running support inside Gmail. The facts come from Hiver's pricing page and its home page, as of October 2026.

Pricing

Hiver describes itself as an agentic omnichannel customer service platform for complex support, sold as Hiver Omni, a dedicated omnichannel platform, and Hiver in Gmail, which lives inside your existing Gmail. The prices here are for Hiver Omni. Growth is $25, Pro is $55, and Elite is $85 per user/month on annual billing ($35, $65, and $95 monthly). All plans start at 2 seats, grow from 2 to 5, then move in increments of 5; the 7-day free trial gives access to Elite and needs no credit card. Voice is an add-on at $30 per voice seat/month with 1,000 pooled minutes per voice seat and $0.03 per additional minute.

The seat steps change the arithmetic for a team between sizes. A 6-person team buys 10 seats, so Pro for that team is 10 × $55 = $550 a month on annual billing.

What it does well

Growth includes email, live chat, and self-service, plus basic integrations that connect tools like Slack to the shared inbox. Pro adds a Slack channel, where you manage customer conversations from private and public Slack channels, and a customer portal. Hiver Omni as a platform covers email, live chat, Slack, voice, WhatsApp, and socials, and Hiver says higher tiers unlock more channels.

AI Agents are listed on all plans and AI Copilot on Growth; the Elite card lists AI QA, AI Insights, and Customer Intelligence, though the feature table marks AI Insights and Customer Intelligence as coming soon, and the page doesn't state separate AI usage pricing. API access, SLAs, CSAT surveys, and advanced analytics are on Pro; skill-based routing, SSO, HIPAA, and custom roles are on Elite, and Hiver lists GDPR, SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, CCPA, and HIPAA compliance. On migration, Hiver says it helps teams moving from another help desk migrate their data at no extra cost; it doesn't name Front.

Who it fits

Hiver tends to suit teams that want Slack, voice, and email in one shared-inbox queue, or Gmail-based teams that want support without leaving the inbox. The 2-seat minimum, the seat steps, and the Slack channel sitting on Pro are the things to price before you compare it with Front's Starter.

How do you migrate from Front to Plain?

Plain's Front importer is documented step by step. Here's what happens, in order.

1. Contacts become Customers. Every Front contact arrives as a Customer in Plain, and Plain sets each customer's Tenant from their email domain automatically.

2. Conversations become Threads, and you choose their status. You decide which conversations land as Done and which stay Todo, so your open queue in Plain matches your open queue in Front.

3. All messages and comments come across. Comments arrive as internal comments, so the reasoning behind a reply stays attached to the thread.

4. Tags become Labels. This is where you make the inbox-to-customer mapping decision from the first section: add each Front inbox name as a label if you want to keep that grouping.

5. Timestamps and links are preserved. Original timestamps stay on every thread and message, and each thread links back to the original Front conversation.

6. The import is safe to re-run. Front conversation IDs become the external reference in Plain, so running the importer twice won't create duplicates.

7. You map Front users to Plain members. You decide how each Front user maps to the people already invited to Plain.

The importer doc is also clear about what doesn't come across: CSAT ratings and custom fields on conversations are not imported.

For a sense of how a lean migration can go, Tinybird migrated from JIRA to Plain in 2 days, reducing enterprise resolution time from 6 days to 2 hours and gaining real-time SLA visibility across Slack Connect, community Slack, and email. The team migrated only what was still active, keeping its setup lean (source). That was a JIRA migration, not a Front one, and it didn't use the Front importer, so don't read it as a typical timeline. The place to test your own import is the 7-day free trial, which needs no credit card.

Which Front alternative should you choose?

Start with how you organize work, then work from your blocker.

• If you think about support by customer and tier, and your customers live in shared or external Slack channels: Plain. The mechanism is tenants and tiers on every thread, Slack channel coverage (25 channels on Foundation, unlimited on Horizon), and free, unlimited viewer seats.

• If you need a large ticketing ecosystem with many prebuilt apps: Zendesk, with its 1,500+ marketplace apps and Support Team at $19 per agent/month.

• If your team mainly collaborates on email and wants AI on a lower-priced tier: Missive, whose AI Assistant sits on Productive at $24/user/month.

• If you want account-centric support with AI agents and are happy to buy through sales on an annual contract: Pylon. The mechanism is routing and SLAs by account tier, Discord on every tier, and AI on credits from a 5,000-credit minimum.

• If you want structured ticketing with multiple SLA policies and prefer to pay for an AI agent by session: Freshdesk. The mechanism is Freddy AI Agent's 500 included sessions, then $49 per 100, plus day passes for occasional agents.

• If you want Slack, voice, and email in one shared inbox, or your team runs support from Gmail: Hiver. The mechanism is the Slack channel on Pro, the voice add-on, and the Hiver in Gmail option.

• If Front's inbox model fits you, for example your inboxes already map to how you serve customers, your channel mix and seat count sit comfortably within one tier, and its AI add-ons cover what you need, staying on Front is a reasonable call. Switching costs are real, and none of the alternatives above is better on every row of the table.

If you're moving off Front and your support runs in Slack and email, book a demo of Plain and see your own channels running on it before you commit to an import.

Frequently asked questions about Front alternatives

What is the best Front alternative for B2B SaaS teams that support customers in Slack?

Plain supports Slack as a support channel, with 25 Slack channels on Foundation and unlimited on Horizon, alongside email on every plan, Microsoft Teams on Horizon+, and Discord on Frontier. It organizes those conversations by customer and company rather than by inbox. Slack came up in 48% of 2,500+ conversations with B2B support leaders and engineers (June 2025 to September 2026). Front also lists Slack as a channel, and Hiver lists a Slack channel on its Pro plan, so compare how each tool handles shared and external channels on the plan you'd actually buy.

How much does Front cost compared with its alternatives?

Front is $25, $65, and $105 per seat per month billed annually, with Copilot as an add-on below Enterprise and Autopilot as an add-on. Plain's Foundation is $45/user/month (billed annually) and Horizon is $99/user/month; Missive is $14 to $36; Zendesk Support Team is $19 per agent per month; Pylon is $89 and $139 per seat on annual contracts; Freshdesk is $19, $55, and $89 per agent per month; and Hiver Omni is $25, $55, and $85 per user per month. These are published list prices on annual billing, as of October 2026, not totals.

Is there a Front alternative with free seats for teammates who don't reply to customers?

Plain's viewer seats are free and unlimited on every plan; a member seat is needed only to reply. Front's guest accounts can comment on conversations without a license, and Freshdesk sells day passes for occasional agents ($2 to $12 per day by plan) and includes 5,000 external collaborators on Pro and Enterprise. Seats, licenses, or per-user pricing came up in conversations with 51 of 245 B2B companies (July 30 to October 14, 2026), and 29 raised it as a concern.

Can you migrate your conversation history from Front to Plain?

Yes. Plain's Front importer brings over contacts as customers, conversations as threads (you choose Done or Todo), all messages and comments (comments become internal comments), tags as labels, and original timestamps on every thread and message. Each thread links back to the original Front conversation, Front conversation IDs make re-runs safe, and you add each Front inbox name as a label to keep that grouping; CSAT ratings and custom fields on conversations are not imported.

Which Front alternatives can you build on with an API?

Plain's developer platform includes an API, webhooks, events, and MCP, with custom channels on Frontier, so anything you can do in the app can be done programmatically. Front offers an API, with a paid rate-limit increase, and an MCP server. Missive includes API access on Productive and an MCP server; Hiver includes API access on Pro and names MCP and API connectors; and Freshdesk meters MCP actions against a yearly plan allowance.

How does Plain charge for AI compared with Front?

Plain meters AI in credits: 1,000 included monthly on Foundation (annual billing) and 2,500 on Horizon, a Customer Agent resolution uses 100 credits, and top-ups start at 1,000 credits for $10. Front sells Copilot at $20/seat/month on Starter and Professional (included on Enterprise) and Autopilot from $0.05 per conversation. The two models aren't directly convertible, so price them against your own thread volume rather than against each other.