Hiver vs Front in 2026: Gmail Integration, Features, Price

Search "Hiver vs Front" and you get a wall of comparison pages that mostly agree with each other, which is a sign that none of them are telling you much. They list the same feature checkboxes and stop before the part that actually decides it.

Three things decide this one: whether you are willing to leave the Gmail window, how much collaboration depth you genuinely need, and what the plan you will really be on costs rather than the plan on the pricing page. This page covers those three and skips the rest.

Disclosure: we make InboxPilot, which is a different kind of tool and competes with both. We say where each of these beats us at the end. Prices below come from Front and Hiver's own pricing pages, checked in August 2026.

Key takeaways

• Better Gmail experience: Hiver. It runs inside Gmail as a sidebar, so nobody learns a new app.
• Better product overall: Front. Deeper analytics, shared drafts, omnichannel, and the more mature coordination model.
• Cheaper, and by more than it looks: Hiver. It has a free tier and its realistic paid plan is $25 against Front's $65.
• The trap: comparing Front Starter at $25 with Hiver Growth at $25. Front Starter caps at 10 seats, and most teams that shortlist Front need Professional.
• If your team is on Outlook: Hiver's main product is out. It is a Gmail extension, and Microsoft teams get pushed to a separate app called Omni.
• If your real problem is volume, not coordination: neither of them is aimed at it, and that is worth knowing before you buy either.

The short answer

Pick Hiver if your team lives in Gmail and will resent a new interface, if you want to start free, or if budget is tight. Pick Front if you need real analytics, multiple channels, or the coordination model to hold up past about 20 people, and you can defend $65 a seat.

If you are on Microsoft 365, this comparison mostly resolves itself: Front connects to Outlook and Hiver's Gmail product does not.

Where they actually differ

Gmail integration

This is the difference that survives contact with your team, and it is not really about features.

Hiver is a Gmail extension. It renders as a sidebar and a set of controls inside the Gmail window your team already has open. Nobody logs into anything new, nobody relearns keyboard shortcuts, and adoption is close to automatic because there is nothing to adopt. For a team that has used Gmail for years, that is worth more than most feature comparisons admit.

Front connects to Gmail and then presents its own interface. It is a good interface, better than Gmail's for coordination work. But your team is now working somewhere else, and that is a migration with all the usual costs: training, holdouts who keep drifting back to Gmail, and a period where half the replies happen in the wrong window.

There is a real cost to Hiver's approach too, and it is not a feature gap. Gmail delegation, which Gmail-based shared access is built on, has documented concurrency limits: up to 1,000 delegates on paper, but only around 40 who can be in the account at once under typical use, and Google notes that above-average use by one or more delegates can reduce that further. Browser extensions that poll Gmail are named as a factor. Hiver is exactly such an extension. (Google Workspace admin docs)

In practice this shows up as the most consistent complaint about Hiver in public reviews: slowness under volume, and needing to reload the browser. If you are a five-person team, you will probably never see it. If you are twenty people on a busy address, ask about it on the trial.

Verdict: Hiver, clearly, if you are staying in Gmail. Front's Gmail support is fine, but "connects to Gmail" and "is inside Gmail" are different products.

Collaboration features

Both tools cover what you are nominally buying: assign a conversation to a person, see when someone else is already typing, leave an internal note that the customer never sees. If that list is your requirement, Hiver meets it for less money.

Front goes further in three ways that matter at scale:

• Shared drafts. Two people can work one reply before it goes out. This sounds minor until you have a team where junior agents draft and someone senior approves, at which point it becomes the workflow.
• Analytics. Front's reporting is the deepest in this category, and it is not close. If you need to know team response times by tag, by teammate, by hour, and defend those numbers to someone, this is the reason to pay.
• Omnichannel. SMS, WhatsApp, chat and social alongside email, on Professional and above. Hiver is built around email and does it well, but if your customers reach you five ways, Front is the one that models that.

Front's coordination model is also simply more mature. Rules, tags, and routing hold together at a size where Hiver starts to feel like an extension bolted onto Gmail, which is exactly what it is.

Verdict: Front, on the merits, if you need any of the above. If you do not, you are paying $40 more per seat per month for reporting you will not open.

Team pricing

Here is where most comparisons mislead you, usually without meaning to.

Per user per month, from each vendor's pricing page, checked August 2026.

Line the entry tiers up and it looks like a tie at $25. It is not. Front's Starter is capped at 10 seats and limited on the workflow automation that people shortlist Front for in the first place. Teams that get serious about Front end up on Professional. So the honest comparison is Hiver Growth at $25 against Front Professional at $65, and that is a 2.6x difference that compounds with every seat.

What that means in real money:

At list price, billed annually. Hiver's free tier means a small team can also run at $0 for a while, which Front cannot match at any size.

Verdict: Hiver, by a wide margin. Front can be worth $65. It is not accidentally worth it, though, so make it earn the gap.

Where each one breaks

Neither of these is the right answer for everyone, and the failure modes are predictable.

Hiver breaks when volume climbs and the extension model starts showing: slow loads, browser reloads, and reporting that stops answering your questions. It also breaks the moment anyone important moves to Outlook, because the Gmail product simply does not go there.

Front breaks on adoption and on budget. Teams that were happy in Gmail resist the new window, and the ones that resist quietly keep answering from Gmail, which puts you back where you started while paying $65 a seat. On Outlook, Front's own documentation describes conditions on read-status sync, which is the kind of detail that generates confusion rather than outage: two people cannot always tell what the other has read.

A third option worth ruling in or out

This is the part where we are an interested party, so treat it accordingly.

Hiver and Front both solve coordination: who is handling what, and how do we avoid stepping on each other. They are good at it. Neither of them reduces how much email arrives.

If your team's actual complaint is that there is too much email, not that you keep colliding on it, then buying either one gets you a tidier version of the same workload. That is the problem InboxPilot works on: it drafts and triages inside the Gmail or Outlook you already have, so repetitive mail gets handled before a person opens it. It is priced per workspace by draft volume rather than per seat.

Stated plainly, so you can rule it out: InboxPilot has no assignment, no collision detection, no internal notes, and no SLA reporting. If those are what you came for, buy Hiver or Front. Some teams run one of those for coordination and layer drafting on top; plenty of teams only need one of the two.

How to choose, in one paragraph

Start with the platform, because it eliminates the most options fastest: if any meaningful part of your team is on Outlook, Hiver's Gmail product is out and you are comparing Front against something else. If you are all-Gmail, ask whether your team will genuinely move into a new app, and be pessimistic about the answer, because a coordination tool nobody opens is worse than no tool. Then price the plan you will actually be on rather than the one at the top of the pricing page, which almost always means Front Professional at $65 rather than Starter at $25. Hiver wins on adoption and cost, Front wins on depth and analytics, and if the honest diagnosis is that there is simply too much email rather than too much collision, neither of them is aimed at your problem.

Related reading

• Best shared inbox email software: the full ranking, including the free options both of these compete with.
• Front alternatives: the shortlist worth checking when Front's real price lands at $65 a seat.
• Gmail shared inbox and shared mailbox tools: the Gmail-specific version, with Google's free native option.
• Best shared inbox for Outlook: what works with Microsoft 365, where Hiver's Gmail product does not go.
• Hiver vs InboxPilot: our direct comparison with Hiver.

---

Pricing is taken from front.com/pricing and hiverhq.com/pricing, checked August 2026, stated per user per month. Vendors change pricing frequently, so confirm current rates before purchasing. Gmail delegation limits are cited from Google's own administrator documentation. Hiver and Front are not affiliated with InboxPilot and have not endorsed this comparison. InboxPilot is the publisher of this article and competes with both tools.