17 years helping Irish businesses
choose better software
About Front
Front is how companies scale customer support, combining the efficiency of a help desk with the familiarity of email.
I also enjoy the various integrations with other systems that are available (contacts, calendars, proprietary workflow management systems, etc.).
Plugin is a little bit confusing. Sometimes it's hard to differentiate which one is order and subscriptions due to the top down feature and no different color line.
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The Best Team Collaboration Tool!
Comments: My team is able to be more efficient and we all can see past comments and such so it makes our team more cohesive. Many times the client doesn't even know which team member they're speaking to because we are so united...because of Front. We are able to create Asana tasks directly from our Front inbox which saves some time. I am able to stay more organized and keep the cleanest inbox that I've ever had in my entire 20+ years of work experience. I can't believe that I could even live without Front before. I don't see how I can ever go back to the old way of just sending e-mails and losing the collaboration function that Front provides. One problem that many people have is tagging an e-mail as backup for a task or the like. With the permalink feature, we're now able to attach an e-mail string to any Asana task so that the we can quickly refer back to the e-mail without screenshots and the like. It's so much easier now to keep all of our information together without an overload of e-mail messages.
Pros:
I love being able to comment to teammates and to create a client-specific e-mail for our clients to respond to in order for collaboration to be smoother and for communication to be shared. I like being able to share drafts with my team so that they can review and even send if needed. If my direct reports want an e-mail to come from me but want to be sure I say exactly what they want to be heard then they just type up the e-mail, share the draft and @mention me, I edit it, my signature automatically attaches and then I send the e-mail as if I had written it. It's actually quite brilliant instead of sending an e-mail to one person to review, you can share it and everyone can see the edits. I like how you can immediately see at the top the tags of whose folder you're in so that you don't have to search through the e-mail to realize where you may be or which client you're working with. I also like the feature that lets you know if one of your colleagues archive the message that you're currently looking at. It helps to know this so that you know whether or not you need to reply to the message or assume that they're still going to respond. I also love how we can snooze an e-mail until later so they don't junk up the inbox. I am usually terrible at just leaving my inbox full with unnecessary messages that I forget to get back to until it's too late. With Snooze, I now say goodbye for now and get it out of my mind completely and then am reminded of it at the appointed time.
Cons:
I haven't really found anything that I don't like yet. One thing that may improve but is not a big deal is that tagging folders at the top right does not always work but if I drag the message to that folder then it does work. It would be nice if you could add an Asana task from Front without adding it to a project. For example, if it's a private task that I don't want shared with anyone else then I should either be able to make it private or not add it to a shared project. I was going to say that I would love to make reactions to the comments placed in Front but it appears that that option was added 18 hours ago so someone else beat me to the punch. It might be nice to have the option to add a follower to an e-mail thread but make it so that they cannot see any previous comments to when they were added. This would just make it so that you can share current information going forward but not include any past information that you may not have wanted to get into their hands. I'm sure Hillary would have loved that feature. One thing that I would love to add is an @mention to say something like @all or @everyone that tags everyone that is assigned or a follower to a particular e-mail comment thread.
Shared Email Tracking without the need for tickets
Comments: We had extremely too much email for an Outlook mailbox to handle, no SMS integration nor chat functionality. We solved all of that with Front. Now all of our communications are in one place for ease of use and management.
Pros:
Front allows multiple teams within my company to manage massive amounts of email in shared mailboxes, meet or exceed customer SLAs and seamlessly integrate our communications with our management systems. We also like that we get all of the same functionality of email ticket tracking, but without the need for communicating the standard ticket responses and ids to our customers. It allows for a more personal engagement with our clients.
Cons:
Our teams took sometime to get used to the new interface as it was difficult to pry Outlook out of their hands. However, once they got the hang of Front they loved the integration and tracking abilities that Outlook does not have.
Alternatives Considered: Salesforce Sales Cloud and Zendesk Suite
Reasons for Choosing Front: We had extremely too much email for an Outlook mailbox to handle, no SMS integration nor chat functionality.
Reasons for Switching to Front: We liked the email integration of front wherein ticket ids and perfunctory auto responses were not required, but we still got all the same functionality of other email / ticket tracking systems.
Great for collab, not so great for the budget
Pros:
We love using this for syncing with Pipedrive - the implementation was easy. The powerful autoresponders are helpful as well. On any given day, we can have a different auto responder, which is great because we're always in a dedicated project on Wednesdays and out of office on Fridays. It's also a bonus that send later is active right out of the box - so when I'm working on emails after my kids are in bed they show up to my clients as sent at 7am the next morning. Set up wasn't too bad since I had already used Support Bee previously. The mobile app is solid as well, though my Android phone tells me it takes a lot of battery power. I wish it was listed as a native email provider on Andoid phones - so right now if I click on a email link in my Pipedrive App, I can't have it open in Front. Front is better than Pipedrive for sending emails since I can drop screenshots inline in emails in Front - something we do on a daily basis. I recommended this to a client who initially liked the idea that it connected with Shopify, showing order information beside each email (see cons for rest of the story). It's normal email stuff works just fine as well - removing formatting, adding bullets, bold, etc all work as expected. As an admin, I like having the ability to make sure my team is keeping on top of shared emails. Additionally, when a teammate needs some help on a message, they can share it with me to help advise them.
Cons:
Buyer beware on the TOS regarding refunds. I set this up for a client and got them paid up as an annual client with several users. However, it wasn't a good fit for them. I was not pleased to find out Front does not offer pro-rated refunds, which is costing my client a lot of money and jeopardizing my relationship with them. Customer services was unsympathetic. For this reason I can't recommend Front anymore. If a user signs up with an annual plan, they will at some point be losing money, not saving it - unless they cancel on the anniversary of when they started. Just because it's in the TOS doesn't mean it's the right thing to do: Front is one of the companies that needs to learn this.
Great software, hard to be without
Pros:
The best part of Front is that it only adds a layer on top of already existing things, such as an e-mail inbox. Other helpdesk software systems tend to be built around their own database structures and add e-mail on top of that instead. The approach that Front uses also means that if one were to ever leave Front, every single correspondence with customers is still sitting in your e-mail account (s).
Cons:
There's not really anything I've ever disliked about the software. My pet peeve is that they've raised the prices quite dramatically over the last years. I'm disappointed that software creators these days seem to lure customers in with low prices to build their base and then raise the prices once they have a big enough customer base. But all in all, the software in itself is great.
Alternatives Considered: Freshdesk and Zendesk Suite
Reasons for Switching to Front: Because Front uses a completely approach which I think is a much more logical one, especially for a company like hours where each "ticket" or correspondence is usually resolved quickly.
Multiplayer email! Can't believe some people don't use this
Comments: Fantastic! We are a team of two, and one of us is the main visionary, the other is the one communicating with customers. We needed a quick and efficient way of having one person write an email, the other person check it and add notes, and both parties okaying it before sending. Also, with customer support, it's nice to be able to store responses I use a lot, and quickly modify them to suit the individual recipient. Front helps us in these two ways, primarily, and that makes it by far worth the money.
Pros:
Being able to chat with coworkers about emails before they send. Being able to take over a draft someone else wrote, and send from my account, and share drafts with colleagues and have them edit, take them over, OR just give them back to me. Basically it's multiplayer mode for email. And I love the canned responses feature.
Cons:
There are issues with the canned responses that make it not 100% efficient. Example: hard to filter canned responses other than by keyword in the title, not easy to make quick edits to them or replace an old one. Maybe because not everyone likes that feature other than me. But it still works and I have confidence it will improve in the future.
If you have multiple teams managing emails daily, Front is for you.
Comments: Overall it was easy enough to set up and configure rules without much technical help. The difference from other systems we used to manage our email was instantly significant and improved efficiency and response times.
Pros:
The internal team chat enhances communication and collaboration. The clarity of who is responding or seeing quickly that someone has responded so you do not waste time on emails that someone has already sent or is working on sending.
Cons:
The integration with WhatsApp that we use to communicate with drivers is really more geared toward communicating with customers and is a bit quirky but we made it work.
Great Experience with Front
Comments: I love Front. It's a great tool, very easy to implement, teach and use. The communication between teams is great and we can track and talk to our customers in a great way.
Pros:
The interface and how is easy to teammates collaborate and organize conversations with customers.
Cons:
Language only in English Some features were thought exclusive for emails and we use a lot WhatsApp and Chat channels (custom channels) that not might work that great API Rate Limit for custom channels that we always talked that would be our main channel and after purchasing, we discovered this "limitation"
Alternatives Considered: Octadesk, Freshdesk, Bird, Movidesk, Intercom and Zendesk Suite
Reasons for Choosing Front: We didn't like Zendesk layout and support
Switched From: Zendesk Suite
Reasons for Switching to Front: Layout, features, support, sales proccess, pricing.
Communication Between Departments and Easy Automation
Comments: Experience with Front App has been great. All the way from Pre-Sales, Implementation, Deployment, and ongoing support.
Pros:
The ability to simply @mention someone in an email thread helped smooth out efficiency with our external communications. Before using FrontApp, we would either have to forward email threads or link to email threads in Slack. Now, if our teams need assistance from other departments, they can use an @mention to give immediate context to the helping party. Creating Rules using conditions is a breeze and is powerful using their rules editor.
Cons:
Some of the "Comment" features were lacking--rich text formatting needed to be in markdown format, no pinned comments, closing edited comments. That being said, they had a recent update that completely addressed all those issues.
Alternatives Considered: Zendesk Suite
Reasons for Switching to Front: We really did not enjoy the "type over this line" experience that Zendesk presented to our customers. We're humans and we wanted to make sure that we could preserve that in our customer interactions. It also helped that the User Interface and set up of Front was intuitive.
The best email software I've used
Comments:
It's revolutionised the way we run things.
For a company that interacted with 90% of it's customers on Etsy, it was always a bit of a chore when someone wanted to email. Now with front, I would say we're 80% emails and we encourage even our Etsy customers to email us directly.
Pros:
It's simplifies complex processes, breaks down your work into digestible chunks. It's intuitive, straightforward and has lots of time saving tricks and tips.
Cons:
There's a couple of features that would be really handy, that I've requested a couple of times . For example, dragging and dropping a jpeg into an email, adds it as an inline image. I would like a preference to select to have all files - regardless of format, to be added as an attachment. I'm also unable to change my Download Location in my preferences, it simply doesn't work when I try to change this. Granted, I haven't reported this yet and I'm sure they'd be very helpful in solving this.
A Great App for Unifying and Streamlining your Communication Workflow
Comments: Front has a positive influence on the way I process communication because it allows me to aim for and realistically reach inbox zero. This is possible by allowing me to either respond immediately to a message, snooze it for a later reply or most importantly to me, easily delegate the message to another team member while still being able to follow the conversation. These features allow me to realistically manage multiple inboxes and ensure timely responses to all inbound communication.
Pros:
Front is a beautifully designed app for managing private and team emails as well as your company's other communication channels such as chat widgets, social media platforms and even SMS through a service like Twilio. I appreciate the thoughtfulness that has guided Front's development over the years. The Front team's dedication to optimizing the app based on customer feedback is evident in each iteration, and it's great that the Front app is regularly freshened with feature updates and additions. Today's existing integrations with Front coupled with new regularly added services makes Front the perfect platform for unifying your communication workflow. One "inbox" for all your accounts is awesome!
Cons:
There are a couple of pain points for me when it comes to my daily usage of Front. My chief complaint is that at this time there is not bi-directional sync of archived or permanently-deleted messages. In my case, archives and deletes in my Office 365 account are synced to Front, but when I apply the same actions in Front, they do not sync to Office 365. This behavior is annoying in the context of my personal inbox—messages acrue and clutter the inbox—but counterproductive for a shared inbox with a mix of Front and Office 365 users. The obvious solution is to move all users to Front but in my case it is not realistic to onboard our entire team at once. Front should sync all actions back to Office 365. My second and last complaint is Front's calendar: it's not as robust as it should be if it's intended to be used instead of, say, Office 365. The experience for creating timed versus all-day events is cumbersome and to my knowledge, cannot be toggled between. Additionally, there is no functionality for creating recurring events. Unfortunately, my time is currently wasted switching between Front and Office 365 for simple calendaring tasks. I am looking forward to the Front team addressing both the sync and calendaring issues in an upcoming release. These pain points are partially behind my hesitation to push Front to all team members.
Front: your home base for email communication with customers
Comments: Using Front, I am able to reach many customers on a daily basis. Front helps me solve their problems by allowing me to communicate quickly and effectively. I can't praise this software enough.
Pros:
I use Front daily to communicate with customers. Overall, Front is a powerful and accessible email client with a very pleasing UI. What I like in particular is the template functionality. Templates for emails can be stored, changed at any time, and are lighting-quick to access. I also like Front's internal messaging system for writing notes to colleagues (using the @ system). This means I can leave notes for colleagues, for customer cases that require more time or team input. Front's search functionality is also unparalleled. If my organisation has ever had any contact with a customer, I can find it using the barest of search strings. To give an example: Front will pull up alternative email adresses that customers have, by cross-referncing known information such as customer name. Lastly, the UI uses colors that aid readability, but are also visually very pleasing. All in all this software is critical to my daily work, and is the most pleasant and easy-to-use email client I've ever used.
Cons:
I personally find very few faults or things that could be improved, that would have a direct effect on the work I do. Having said that, I find the conversation tracking function ever so slightly redundant. This is because I keep track of conversations myself, by having multiple Front tabs open. On the alternate tabs, I use search strings to keep all prior conversation with a customer open. I am aware however that this is my personal style of working, so it doesn't say much about the tracking function itself.
Front App - Reading, Writing and Assigning emails in a team oriented way.
Comments: I am extremely satisfied of this app. It's super easy to use and perfect when working in team. It's basically impossible to miss any email with this software and super nice the way it looks like when using it on a daily basis. Plus it takes all the rules and marks of your main inbox provider (gmail, outlook etc.). Highly recommended even for all its features and possibility to integrate it with the main useful app: Aircall, Google Cal etc.
Pros:
What I definitely like the most is the way you can assign emails to your team mates - especially when reviewing the same inbox. Generally with other provider is always difficult to organize your workflow and dividing email by forwarding them all. In this way, by using a super simple and well designed app, you can simple go through the object of the email, even read it if needed and then directly assign it to your colleagues. Moreover, you can even assign the email to more than one people - keeping everyone posted about important issue. Last but not least, you can use this app even to comment and share plus information about email or work to do with that email/costumer directly using the chat below the main inbox (this is something that can be shown just between team mates - avoiding the possibly of sending personal information to the direct costumer while forwarding the email to your colleagues).
Cons:
I think that the app version could be improved, especially in the way it shows notifications. Each time I open it - I can see the amount of my entire inbox and it always seems you still have work to do even if you are up to date with all your daily emails.
A Great Software to Communicate With Customers
Pros:
I've used Zendesk for years, which is a really popular customer ticket support software, and this software is way better than it! The UI is already familiar as its set up like the main inbox to your Gmail or Outlook account and you can actually see when a customer has 'Seen' your message! The software has its own Desktop app unlike a lot of others, but I mostly use it through the web to sift through multiple tickets easily. A great benefit, as well, is how easily you can integrate other software into their plug in feature. So you can connect it with your business' Shopify, Salesforce, WhatsApp, Google drive and many many other apps! There's a comment section on each conversation that you can use to communicate with team members and because it's a true emailing software, you can CC and BCC other people on your customer's messages, if necessary. You can set a time limit for how long you have to cancel a sending response and you can create templates for canned responses/macros that you will have to use on a regular. It's a really great software and I wish I could use it for every email/ticket customer support role I'm ever in.
Cons:
The only dislike I have is when I was first given access to it, I selected the option to log in with my work's Google account to make the process easier. I then realized that my work emails were actually coming into the main Front's inbox and all the other teams could see those messages. I found the option to turn off all personal incoming messages but I could not unlink my Google account from it so I can still see all my old messages in my inbox and have no way of removing them without them being deleted from my actual work account's email.
A Shared Work Model DREAM!
Pros:
My team uses Front daily for our customer communication, as well as internal communication. The ability to tag an internal user and comment on the threads without having to reply to the email is a game-changer when it comes to problem-solving and communication regarding more complex emails. We used multiple inboxes, separated into different inbox groups, with different permissions. It was easy to track and manage despite having so many inboxes. In a shared work model, the ability to assign emails to yourself or other members of the team was extremely useful, to ensure we were not doing double-work or responding to emails at the same time. On top of that, you would be able to see when a teammate was replying or typing under the email, which was a good way to know who was working on what.
Cons:
Front tended to have quite a few outages and crashes that impacted our workflow heavily. Fortunately these were able to be resolved quickly and communication was reliable and fast! However, the number of times we experienced an outage was frustrating.
Front is a lifesaver
Pros:
For several years, our administrative team used Front and it improved our internal workflow and customer communications significantly. Now our entire office is using Front and the combination of client and internal emails with internal comments and discussions is indispensable. We have never been so efficient, and I can't imagine work life without Front.
Cons:
When we have an issue, the support team is very responsive. Bugs are addressed quickly and our ideas for improvement are often implemented.
Make email your superpower.
Pros:
it's very convenient to have ALL of your company's communication in ONE place. Nothing slips through the cracks - from emails/facebook messages/tweets and text messages you name it it's all there. It's very intuitive to talk with the team and get back to customers/prospects with an answer. A win win and great investment for company that works digitally.
Cons:
It takes a while to onboard the whole team and get them to understand all the features. Also it's quite pricey per user per month.
Alternatives Considered: Zendesk Suite
Best Collaborative Shared Inbox Tool out there
Pros:
The key feature that differentiates Front is that it has collaborative shared inboxes that enable us to create shared drafts, comment/communicate on threads, and manage email communications super effectively. Previously, we attempted to use Gmail to accomplish this, but Front does a great job of managing the workflow of sharing one email and collaborating effectively.
Cons:
I wish there were more productivity / super-user oriented features that were more robust. There are some quirks about the workflows that make it slower for us to use. This is not a deal-breaker, but I wish it could be better.
Alternatives Considered: Superhuman
Best email collaboration software
Pros:
Our support team first migrated over to Front from a traditional ticketing software a couple of years ago, and we were blown away by how easy it was to use. We've since added other use cases and teams to Front, and most of our team members also use it as their main email client for their personal work emails. I also personally love the ability to automate parts of our workflow using Zapier and the Front API — it's a real game-changer.
Cons:
There have been significant price increases over the last few years since we've started using the software. While we'd like to have more team members using Front, the pricing is just not feasible for us at this point. The other small thing would be very specific missing features we would love to see that just aren't supported at the moment. But that's totally understandable as our use case may not be very common.
excellent app for mail and teams
Pros:
very easy to transfer mail and add internal comments on them. This app is done for BtoC startup that want to manage lots of daily mails from customers.More over it's very easy to integrate other products through Apis
Cons:
a bit expensive, but the value added is very high. Should have better prices for small companies
Alternatives Considered: Gmail
Front is the best tool we ever added to our team!
Pros:
Front is an amazingly powerful tool backed by a team of professionals who provide us with the ability to manage our email as a team. We work together to help our customers succeed and share an email account — with Front we're able to assign out emails, have thread-specific chats by mentioning team members and use the Sequences feature to send personalized messages to our customers. Using Front has increased our communication internally and has dramatically improved our efficiency when addressing customer requests. Sequences allow us to stay personal and deliver proactive outreach without sacrificing time.
Cons:
Front is a growing company which means they roll out updates from time-to-time — anytime there are bugs they are quick to address the concerns. The CSM team and technical support have been super helpful anytime we've run into issues.
Front Response
6 years ago
Hi Matt, thanks for taking the time to review Front! We love helping the Instructure team be so efficient :)
Use of Front
Comments: Front has become an absolute essential to my work and my co-workers' work. It is to the point that it has surpassed other mail tools such as Gmail. It is a perfect mix between Gmail, Messenger and Dropbox. Likewise, it is very simple to use, and it has a real added value : it enables us, as a team work, to chat in real time and to share files very quickly and in a very organized manner. I truly believe I will definitely have a hard time doing without Front in my next jobs.
Pros:
Front has become an absolute essential to my work and my co-workers' work. It is to the point that it has surpassed other mail tools such as Gmail. It is a perfect mix between Gmail, Messenger and Dropbox. Likewise, it is very simple to use, and it has a real added value : it enables us, as a team work, to chat in real time and to share files very quickly and in a very organized manner. I truly believe I will definitely have a hard time doing without Front in my next jobs.
Cons:
I have nothing to dislike about this software, except for the fact that I had difficulties in the beginning to correctly see my number of emails in my Inbox.
Front Review
Comments: Overall I've had a nice experience with Front. Previously I used Zedesk to manage incoming emails with my team and the functionalities are very similar. Perhaps Front design is more appealing and seems more like a gmail/outlook email inbox.
Pros:
- Assigning emails to coworkers- Dividing work between colleagues- Delegating tasks- Organising work in a cross-functional team
Cons:
- As an admin user, tracking the performance of the team is not practical and we still need to do it outside the platform. It would be good to apply more filters and functionalities for the tracking part. For instance, I'm trying to understand the SLA of the team when replying to messages, but the data is inaccurate because it also calculates when there's a reply again to the message
Organize all the emails your teams receive in a flexible way with Front.
Comments: We use this software in the teams that are mainly dedicated to sales that are executed in our business facilities, especially to keep track and organize each of our potential customers that come from various points, when we refer to various websites, especially when doing business from emails, which are multiple, this system determines them in order of arrival, and attends them remotely, facilitating our work in large proportions.
Pros:
It is an incredible software in its main functionalities, because once it is implemented, it automatically organizes complex or chaotic emails, in a very fast and sophisticated way, giving amazing impressions, due to its extraordinary operation, without excluding that it is a A very useful tool, especially when we go to business scales, which require attention to their outgoing and incoming messages that they have in a multiple way, covering all these needs in a very successful and smooth way, being one of my systems favorites.
Cons:
As a significant disadvantage, regarding the functionalities that this software maintains, we can mention that its exports are not very large that can be described in a considerable scope, where they should normally comply and operate without interruptions, highlighting that they are totally difficult to select , since it is a complex software, according to its programming, due to its extensive tools that it offers for its options of use that it commonly executes.
Excellent tool for a team that has a number of email accounts!
Comments: Centralized mail management was the main reason for choosing Front. It is a great tool indeed.
Pros:
Front if used correctly can be a powerful service. We use it for our company. Everyone has access to Front with their personal account (after they get invited) and they can manage themselves which inboxes to receive emails from. The main features that I see are the following: - User friendly interface - Customization - Excellent support All in all I would recommend it for anyone searching for such a service. We are very pleased so far.
Cons:
Front hasn't got many things going the wrong way. If I should say something that would be that at first glance it might be a bit too much and intimidating to have all those inboxes and emails coming in but after you find your way around Front you realize that it was just wedding jitters! Everything turns out fine in the end :)
Great value, good product, but could still use some improvements
Comments: It has been helpful for our company to have the ability to sort our emails by market and then assign each email to the appropriate team member. It is also helpful to be able to see the number of emails in team member inboxes and when they are online, in order to better determine who may need help. Having the ability to at mention a team member or share a draft with another member of the team is helpful for the company as well.
Pros:
I really like the ability to set timers for emails to reappear in my inbox, and having the ability to assign and @mention team members are also helpful features that use daily.
Cons:
I still miss having actual folders. I feel like it gets confusing using tags and having my emails sometimes auto-archive. I actually missed including some invoices on my month-end statements last month, because those emails archived and I didn't see them in my open tab in under that tag. I also recently discovered that we can't use our mail merge app with Front. In our industry having the ability to use a mass-mailout software or app is very important.