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All four price a shared inbox by the seat, so at a glance the monthly figures look like they belong on the same table. The tier you land on is not comparable at all. Front's cheapest plan carries exactly one kind of channel. Gmelius will not run unless your company is on Gmail or Google Workspace. Hiver stops its entry plan at ten users and sells seats in blocks of five. Missive's first tier has no automation rules of any kind. Four similar prices, four completely different floors.
While the shared inbox is still an idea, and before anyone is routing live mail
Every platform here will gather a shared address, hand each message to a named person, and stop two people answering the same thing at once. That much is settled across all four and none of them does it badly. They separate one tier below the headline price, in what the cheapest plan declines to include. There are three questions worth settling before anybody signs.
1
Front Starter is twenty five dollars a seat and permits a single channel type, meaning email or chat or SMS but not two of them, with ten automation rules and one workspace. Gmelius Growth is also twenty five and gives unlimited shared inboxes, but the product is built into Gmail and every person you invite needs a Gmail or Google Workspace account. Hiver Growth is twenty five as well and allows two shared inboxes and ten users, with voice sold separately at thirty dollars a voice seat on every tier including the most expensive one. Missive Starter is fourteen and carries no rules, no integrations, no analytics and no API. Four entry plans at broadly one price, and four unrelated things absent from them.
2
Front caps Starter at ten seats and Professional at fifty, so hiring alone can force the step from twenty five dollars to sixty five. Hiver caps Growth at ten users and sells seats in blocks, two, then five, then in fives after that, so an eleventh hire is not an eleventh seat but a jump to fifteen. Missive defines its tiers by headcount outright, five on Starter, fifty on Productive, unlimited on Business. Gmelius is the exception here and caps neither Growth nor Pro by user count, though its Enterprise tier will not open a conversation below fifty. Count the people you expect to have a year from now, not the ones logging in this week.
3
The rules are the part that rots. Somebody builds the assignment logic in the first fortnight, it matches how the team worked that month, and then the team changes shape while the rules stay exactly as they were. A year later, mail for a department that was reorganised still lands with somebody who left, a tag created for one campaign sits on four hundred threads, and the round robin is dealing work to a rota with two wrong names in it. Nothing in any of these products will raise its hand about that. The inbox carries on working, which is precisely why nobody looks.
Front, Gmelius, Hiver and Missive each print rates on their own pages, so every figure quoted on this hub came from the vendor and you are welcome to check it. Missive carries one caveat: it states annual rates only, says plainly that monthly costs more, and never renders the monthly number, so we quote the annual figures and estimate nothing. What repays comparison is not the seat rate but whatever sits behind it, the channel type, the mail provider, the seat block, the headcount ceiling. Then there is the question of who maintains the arrangement a year later, and on that one none of the four has anything to say.
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One Channel Type On Starter
Ten Seats Then Fifty
AI Priced Per Seat On Top
Front is the most capable product on this hub, and for a support team living inside it all day that capability is real rather than marketing, so this page will not try to argue you out of it. Starter is twenty five dollars a seat a month on annual billing and carries exactly one channel type, so email or chat or SMS, never two. Professional at sixty five brings omnichannel, macros, twenty rules and up to five workspaces. Enterprise at a hundred and five lifts the rule limits and folds the AI in. The seat ceilings are what people miss: Starter stops at ten seats and Professional at fifty, so it is a hiring run rather than a feature request that moves you up the ladder. Otherwise the AI is bought separately, Copilot and Smart QA at twenty dollars a seat each, Smart CSAT at ten, Autopilot from five cents a conversation.
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Google Workspace Or Nothing
Unlimited Inboxes On Growth
Usage Caps Are The Ladder
Gmelius is the only vendor here that is not a separate application. It lives inside Gmail, which is either the entire reason to buy it or the reason it is disqualified, with very little ground in between. Everyone you invite needs a Gmail or Google Workspace account, stated plainly in their own FAQ, so a company standardised on Microsoft cannot use this at any price. If you are on Workspace it is a genuinely light way to work, because nobody has to learn a second interface. Growth is twenty five dollars a user a month billed annually and thirty three billed monthly, and includes unlimited shared inboxes and labels, automation rules, auto assignments and SLA analytics. Pro at forty adds CRM integrations, webhooks and, revealingly, higher usage caps. That phrase is the meter. What you buy climbing this ladder is headroom, and only Enterprise, which will not quote below fifty users, removes the caps altogether.
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Seats Sold In Blocks Of Five
Two Shared Inboxes On Growth
Voice Costs Extra On Every Tier
Hiver comes in two products and that choice matters before the price does. Hiver in Gmail is an extension that sits inside Gmail, while Hiver Omni is a standalone platform that also handles Outlook and other providers. On Omni, Growth is twenty five dollars a user a month annually and thirty five monthly, and it is tighter than the headline implies: two shared inboxes, ten users, ten automations per inbox and two custom fields. Pro at fifty five raises users to unlimited and inboxes to five, and adds SLAs, CSAT, the customer portal and API access. Elite at eighty five brings AI QA, skill based routing and SSO. Two details are easy to walk past. Seats come in blocks, starting at two, then five, then in fives thereafter, so your eleventh hire buys fifteen seats. And voice is an add on at thirty dollars per voice seat on every plan, Elite included.
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Cheapest Entry On This Hub
No Rules At All On Starter
The Rule Cap Never Rises
Missive is the least expensive option here by a wide margin, and for a small team that mainly wants a shared inbox with good collaboration inside it, that is a genuine answer rather than a compromise. Each tier is defined first by a headcount ceiling: Starter at fourteen dollars a user a month up to five users, Productive at twenty four up to fifty, Business at thirty six with no limit, all quoted on annual billing against a stated twenty percent yearly discount. The monthly figures never render on their pricing page, so this hub quotes the annual rates and invents nothing. Starter carries team inboxes, tasks and SOC 2 Type II, along with no rules, no integrations, no analytics and no API. The sharpest fact on that page is one nobody advertises: the rule cap is a thousand on Productive and a thousand on Business alike, which makes the top tier a governance purchase, SAML and IP restriction and advanced analytics, rather than more automation.
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What the flat five hundred buys, and what it deliberately leaves out
Five hundred a month, per organization. That covers building the shared inboxes around how the team is actually shaped rather than how the org chart reads, connecting the email routing and the domain records so mail arrives where it should, wiring in the WhatsApp and social channels you genuinely use while leaving out the ones you do not, writing assignment and round robin rules against real volume instead of a guess made in week one, building tags and views so the queue can be read at a glance, setting the automations and scheduled actions, putting response templates where people will actually reach for them, and reading the response time reporting on a fixed cycle so the routing keeps pace with the team rather than describing the one it had a year ago. The Zoho TeamInbox licence is bought in your name, direct from Zoho. We neither resell it nor put a margin on it.
Here is the part that costs us work. Four people sharing one support address should buy Missive Starter at fourteen dollars a seat, which comes to fifty six dollars a month against our five hundred, and no argument we could make survives that arithmetic. Front Starter caps at ten seats and Hiver Growth at ten users, so neither entry plan can even reach five hundred dollars before its ceiling moves you somewhere else. Our fee also sits on top of a Zoho TeamInbox licence you buy separately. If there is already somebody here who owns the routing rules and revisits them unprompted, leave things exactly as they are and spend the money elsewhere. You are paying for the judgement and the upkeep. The software itself is not the product.
A shared inbox that grew by accretion carries a hundred routing decisions that were each made alone and never once compared with one another. Rules written for a team of four still dealing work to a team of eleven, three inboxes where one would do, and a tag list with two words for the same thing. We begin from who answers what in practice, cut back to the fewest inboxes and rules that still describe the work truthfully, and retire the routing that exists only because deleting it felt risky.
Every platform above multiplies by headcount, and three of the four move you to a dearer tier when you hire rather than when you ask for anything at all. Ours holds still. Five hundred a month covers the work whether four people are in the inbox or twenty four, and the licence is still bought from Zoho rather than from us.
A shared inbox goes stale without ever throwing an error. Mail keeps arriving and replies keep sending, while an assignment rule carries on handing a whole category to somebody who changed roles in March, and a channel nobody has watched since the day it was connected fills up quietly behind a tag no one reads. We read the response times every cycle, test the routing against who is genuinely on the team that month, and say out loud when an inbox or a rule has stopped earning its keep.
How do you compare four shared inbox tools that all charge per seat?
You stop looking at the seat rate and read what the entry tier withholds, because that is where they diverge. Front's cheapest plan gives you one channel type. Gmelius requires everyone to be on Gmail or Google Workspace. Hiver's entry plan allows two shared inboxes and ten users and sells seats in blocks of five. Missive's first tier has no rules, no integrations and no API. So write down four of your own facts before opening anybody's pricing page: how many people will be in the inbox in a year, how many channels you actually need, whether your company is on Google or Microsoft, and whether you need automation on day one or can live without it. Those four decide which of these treats you fairly. None of the four will do that arithmetic for you, and for most of them the honest result is one that costs them a customer.
How does a shared inbox decision actually go wrong?
Almost never at the point of purchase. Nearly always about eleven months later. The tool gets chosen carefully, set up well by somebody who cared, and then belongs to nobody. The rules still route by a team structure that was reorganised in spring, a label invented for a single campaign is now attached to six hundred threads, two shared inboxes exist because somebody could not find the first one, and the round robin still includes a person who left. Nothing failed. It simply stopped being anybody's job.
Who holds the account and the licence after you have set this up?
You do, completely. The Zoho TeamInbox subscription is bought by you, in your name, and paid to Zoho directly. We work inside it as administrators and never sit between you and your own account. Stop working with us tomorrow and the conversations, rules, tags and full history all remain untouched. The only exception anywhere on our list is Zoho Assist, where the licence sits with us instead of you.
Would we be better off simply running one of these in house?
A good number of teams would be, and far better to read it on this page than discover it once a contract is signed. If four of you share one address and the whole thing fits in your heads, Missive Starter at fourteen dollars a seat is the right answer and we are not. If you already have an operations person who owns the routing and revisits it unprompted, Front or Hiver plus that person will beat any retainer. It starts being worth paying for on the day no one on the premises can say who last touched an assignment rule.
Which of these four ends up cheapest for us?
That turns on your headcount more than anything else, and the method is more use to you than a verdict. Under five people: Missive Starter at fourteen dollars a seat is very hard to beat, and four seats comes to fifty six dollars a month. On Google Workspace with a lot of shared addresses: Gmelius Growth gives unlimited shared inboxes at twenty five where Hiver Growth gives two. Needing more than one channel from day one: Front Starter cannot do it at all, so Professional at sixty five is your real entry price. Growing past ten people: Front Starter and Hiver Growth both stop there, so price the tier above the one you are reading. And against a team of four, Missive beats us by roughly nine to one, which we will say on the phone as readily as we say it here.
What actually happens when nobody looks at the inbox setup after launch?
Nobody is alerted, and that is exactly what makes it hard to catch, because a shared inbox in decline never once reports a fault. No support tier covers this either. Hiver puts round the clock email and chat support on every plan. Front runs support across its plans and sells onboarding packages on top. All of it helps your team run the software, which is a different question entirely from whether anyone will warn you that the software has stopped describing the team it was built around. With us, reading the response time reporting on a fixed cycle is inside the fee, which puts the noticing on our side of the line.
Do we have to move every inbox at once?
No, and teams that phase it settle faster than the ones that switch everything over on a single Monday. What usually works is to start with the address carrying the most traffic, then anything attached to a live campaign, then the quiet aliases nobody has checked in months. Nearly all the volume sits in that first group and nearly all the cleanup sits in the last, and a fair number of those quiet aliases prove not to need a home anywhere.
Can you take over a shared inbox somebody else set up?
Yes, though in practice it becomes a rebuild rather than a clean up. We go through what is currently configured, surface the three rules that overlap and the one that has been failing quietly, find the tags that mean the same thing under two names, and decide which routing wins wherever they conflict. That last part is normally the bulk of the work. An inherited setup will tell you precisely what came in and nothing whatsoever about why any of it was routed the way it was.
Realistically, how long does all this take?
Four to six weeks covers most of them, and it runs longer wherever the team is mid reorganisation and nobody can yet say who owns what. Configuring Zoho TeamInbox itself takes days. What consumes the calendar is agreeing who actually answers which kind of message, building routing that reflects that rather than the org chart, and then the first month of live mail, which has to run through a full cycle before anyone calls it finished.
Somebody here already owns this. What would you genuinely add?
Quite possibly nothing, and arriving at that on a first call suits us perfectly well. Anyone who truly owns it will outperform a retainer every time, since they are in the queue daily and know which threads carry weight. The only real question is whether it is genuinely on their list. Reviewing assignment rules during a quarter when every message got answered and no one complained is precisely the task that keeps looking safe to push to the next quarter, and then the one after that.
When would you tell us not to bother hiring you?
Two situations, and both arrive often enough that the answer is ready before the question finishes. If you are a handful of people sharing one address and the operation genuinely fits in your own heads, Missive will do it for the price of a lunch and the money belongs elsewhere. And if you are running a real support function with an operations lead already on the payroll, Front and your own team will beat us, and we would rather tell you that on the first call than after paperwork exists.
What if the tool turns out not to be the problem?
We will tell you so before any invoice is raised, since flushing that out is what the fit review is for. Often the real problem is that nobody has agreed what a reasonable reply time actually is, or that two teams each believe the other one owns a category, or that the volume is high because a page elsewhere on the site is confusing people. Those are worth facing first, and no amount of routing touches any of them.
What does this cost through you, in plain numbers?
Five hundred dollars a month, per organization. The figure is published on the Managed Zoho TeamInbox service page, and it holds regardless of headcount, channel count or message volume. The Zoho TeamInbox licence is bought from Zoho and held in your own name.
What happens if we decide to stop?
Thirty days notice and we are done. Nothing moves, because the subscription was always yours. The administrator seat reverts to you, and we leave behind a written account of what each inbox and rule is for and why the routing is shaped as it is, so nobody has to work it out backwards. We also list what we would have tackled next.
What do you need from us to get going?
The addresses you want shared and roughly what arrives at each, who currently answers what and who is meant to, your present tool bill and which tier you are on, and an honest account of which categories keep going wrong. Both of those lists always turn up half finished, which is entirely normal. They give us the shape of the problem, and the fit review fills in the rest.
