Front is an excellent platform to manage your customer communication. It’s packed with features, and has various pricing plans to fit most company’s financial needs.
But, it’s not for everyone, which is why many businesses are exploring Front alternatives.
It requires you to switch your entire company’s email activity onto the platform, which can be a time-consuming process. The primary focus of the platform is to help customer service teams, so if you need Front alternatives for sales or other business email activity, it may not be a perfect fit.
In this Front review, we’ll take a look at the pros and cons of Front and show you the best Front alternatives if you decide it’s not the best platform for your email management needs.
Let’s jump in.
Front pitches itself as a customer communication hub that combines an email inbox with a CRM.
You connect it with your email inbox, and all of your team’s emails will be brought into Front where anyone on the team can jump in and handle a conversation for quick customer replies.
You can even bring in other communication channels by integrating Front with your website live chat, WhatsApp, Facebook messages, X, and more. Whenever a customer has a query, your team can easily get back to them, no matter which channel they reached out on.
Front lets you build custom workflows to fit almost any scenario you need, such as adding tags to segment customer service emails, or auto-archiving conversations when they meet certain rules.
As well as that, you can track email analytics and metrics to help you understand your team’s email performance.
All in all, Front is a robust platform that can support a wide range of email management needs.
There are various benefits to using Front.
Firstly, it’s scalable. It’s designed for companies with 5 to 5,000 users, so as your company grows it will adapt.
It’s also ideal for companies relying on shared inboxes, as you can quickly give everyone access to that inbox inside Front. Whenever a new customer email lands in the inbox, anyone on your team can jump in and reply, ensuring a customer is never left waiting.
Because Front is made for large teams, there are useful real-time collaboration features included. For example, if another team member is already replying to an email, anyone else using Front will see that. There won’t be any awkward situations where a customer receives multiple identical, or worse, conflicting emails from your team.
Another collaboration feature included is the ability to leave notes and tags on conversations to help other members of your team get up to speed on a support ticket or sales lead.
Clearly, Front is a powerful platform. But, is it missing anything?
Front’s main USPs are the collaborative aspects of the platform and how it acts as a replacement for your day-to-day email inbox.
However, that isn’t for everyone. Here are some of the reasons why Front may not be the best fit for your company.
Firstly, it requires migrating your email activity to the platform rather than using your team’s usual Gmail or Outlook inbox.
That requires a significant shift in how your business operates. Even though Front’s UX is well designed, onboarding your entire team to a new email management platform will require time and investment in training.
Another factor worth mentioning is that Front isn’t designed for sales teams. The main focus is customer service and success, so if your sales process relies on emails with customers, the features won’t be designed to make that process significantly better.
Finally, Front quickly becomes expensive if you need access to the majority of features compared to some Front alternatives.
If you need access to email analytics, CRM integrations, and custom workflows, you’ll need to sign up to a higher-tier plan. As it’s billed on a per-user basis, it can quickly become expensive.
It’s worth considering Front alternatives for a few reasons:
The primary differentiator between Front and a platform like timetoreply is that Front is an email management platform to help you receive and organise your emails, whereas timetoreply is an email response management platform that helps you actively improve how you use your team mailboxes.
It’s always worth looking at the alternatives before making a decision.
In the next section, we’ll show you how to choose some of the best Front alternatives.
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Front users often love the shared mailbox experience, so you chosen alternatives should match or improve on that functionality.
However the Front alternatives differ, so your priorities might include integrations, automation, or pricing flexibility.
To make the right decision, you’ll need to evaluate several key factors before making the switch. Here are some essential things to consider when exploring Front alternatives:
There are a variety of Front alternatives on the market, such as timetoreply, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Gorgias, Email Meter, Helpmonks, EmailAnalytics, and more.
Each one has different strengths and the best one for you will depend on your needs.
Here’s a breakdown of their features to help you choose.
Image via timetoreply
Timetoreply is one of the Front alternatives offering specialized email analytics solution for improving email response time and SLA compliance.
It provides managers with real-time visibility into team inbox behaviors, helping them spot slow response trends before they escalate.
Even better, the tool integrates smoothly with Gmail and Office 365, automating performance metrics tracking. It provides customer service teams with trend alerts and benchmarking features to maintain high standards in team efficiency.
Compared to other Front alternatives, timetoreply provides tailored analytics for different sectors. This includes insurance, professional services, legal services, logistics, manufacturing, and more.
These tailored analytics ensures teams get insights relevant to their unique communication needs. Additionally, timetoreply supports integration with over 5,000 third-party tools, which enhances its basic functionality with more advanced features.
Key features
Pros
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Pricing
Image via timetoreply
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Image via Zendesk
Zendesk is one of the most widely known Front alternatives, and for good reason. It’s a comprehensive customer service platform that helps companies manage customer interactions across multiple support channels, including email, social, live chat support.
Zendesk Support Suite provides the enterprise-level tools to personalize support and business communication. You can create customized help centers, automate ticket routing, and integrate with CRMs and analytics tools.
Email reporting features are another strong suit of Zendesk compared to some Front alternatives. It offers dashboards that track everything from resolution times to agent satisfaction.
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Image via Zendesk
Image via Freshdesk
Freshdesk is one of the leading Front alternatives for managing customer support. This AI-powered customer service tool is ideal for teams seeking streamlined customer experience workflows without having to use a heavy enterprise system.
With Freshdesk’s Freddy AI feature, you can set up chatbots to automatically handle repetitive tasks, customer queries, and resolve tickets more efficiently.
You can also customize customer portals, assign roles, and set up workflows to help reduce manual effort.
Freshdesk offers a shared team mailbox similar to Google Collaborative Inbox or Google Workspace, making it easy for teams to manage support tasks together. It streamlines collaboration, task assignment, and project management within a single platform.
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Image via Freshdesk
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Image via Gorgias
Unlike many Front alternatives, Gorgias is purpose-built for DTC brands, making it a top choice for fast-growing ecommerce companies.
With native integrations to Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento, Gorgias connects support teams directly to order and customer data. This allows agents to view order history, issue refunds, or update shipping details without ever leaving the helpdesk.
With Gorgias’s AI feature, you can resolve customer support inquiries using AI-driven personalized or brand-aligned responses.
Another reason Gorgias is one of the best Front alternatives is its focus on revenue-driving support. You can track support-driven sales, upsell within tickets, and assign revenue attribution to agents.
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Image via Gorgias
Image via Email Meter
Email Meter is one of the top Front alternatives, especially for companies focused on maximizing email productivity. Compared to most Front alternatives that are customer support tools, Email Meter is an email analytics tool that helps businesses track and analyze how customer service teams use email for support.
Email Meter works by connecting directly to your team mailboxes and pulling customer service metrics like email response time, average resolution times and other key metrics without the need for agents to change how they work.
With Email Meter, you can get insights on individual and team performance across Gmail and Microsoft 365. You can also export email metrics reports for analysis or schedule custom reports to your inbox.
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Image via Email Meter
Image via Helpmonks
If you’re looking for powerful Front alternatives that blend shared inbox functionality with advanced tools for marketing and automation, then Helpmonks is a great choice.
It’s one of the Front alternatives that allow centralized email collaboration with live chat, push notifications, and smart workflows. Agents can easily assign conversations, leave internal comments, and tag support queries.
You can manage multiple mailboxes, workgroups, and brands from a single dashboard. Additionally, it provides automation rules that enable you to tag, assign, and trigger marketing emails based on specific criteria.
Beyond email, Helpmonks offers customer relationship management capabilities, email marketing tools, and a knowledge base. Teams can segment contacts, create drip campaigns, and trigger actions based on user behavior.
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Image via Helpmonks
Image via EmailAnalytics
Among Front alternatives focused on email performance, EmailAnalytics stands out as a top choice. It integrates with Gmail or Outlook to provide insights on send/receive volume, response times, peak activity hours, and key conversations.
The tool enables teams to benchmark SLAs, monitor response-time trends, and prevent overlooked emails. Its daily and weekly dashboards display team-level insights, making it easy to track team performance across agents.
Managers can use this data to improve response times to customer inquiries, distribute workloads effectively, and identify bottlenecks before they become issues.
With visual dashboards, customizable key performance indicators, and exportable reports, EmailAnalytics provides a clear view of internal team communication.
Key features
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Pricing
Image via EmailAnalytics
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One of the best Front alternatives for teams that need to improve their email productivity but aren’t ready to switch to a whole new email ecosystem is timetoreply.
Timetoreply is business email analytics software to help you measure your customer-facing teams’ email activity and metrics, helping you gather the data and insights you need to improve team email performance.
Timetoreply works with both Microsoft and Gmail, as well as any other custom mailbox solution you use.
Once you connect your team’s mailboxes to timetoreply, your email activity data will instantly populate and you can see your team’s individual and collective reply time performance, average email volumes, peak hours for email activity, and much more.
Timetoreply is designed to work seamlessly for customer service, sales, and any other customer-facing team in your business, making it the perfect alternative to Front if you need email analytics for multiple departments.
You’ll have all of the metrics you need to improve how your team engages with your customers and your sales leads using email.
Schedule a demo now and discover the future of elevated communication strategies!
Everyone has improved their reply times by at least 300-400%, giving our customers 3-4 times faster and therefore a better experience. As a business owner, that’s huge!
There are several distinguishing features that make timetoreply an excellent alternative to Front.
1. Powerful email analytics to optimise performance
The key difference between Front and timetoreply is that timetoreply helps you improve your team’s email performance with powerful customer service email analytics.
From the moment you install timetoreply on your team inboxes, it will start collecting actionable data on key metrics such as:
You will immediately start making improvements to your processes, goals, and staffing requirements to ensure your key stakeholders are never left waiting for a reply.
2. Goal setting and SLA management
Timetoreply is designed to be more than just a standard email analytics tool. It’s here to help you turn those insights into real improvements.
On Front, SLA management is only available on higher-tier plans and needs to be set up using custom rules, so it can be tricky to use without spending time setting it up correctly.
One way that happens is with goal setting and SLA management.
For example, you will set your customer service SLA goals that your team needs to meet, and timetoreply will compare how your team performs against those goals.
You can see if your reply times are within your SLA goals, and if they’re not, use the insights to make improvements to ensure they are hit in the future.
Suppose that you didn’t hit an SLA goal, but then noticed it was because you didn’t have enough support reps working at peak email volume times. You will then address that by hiring new team members, or routing fewer emails to support by using a self-service system.
When you start using timetoreply, you’ll quickly identify key areas for improvements to ensure you always hit your company’s most important email targets.
3. Start seeing results in minutes
Front is a great platform, but it’s going to take time before you fully switch all of your email activity onto the platform and start seeing the benefits.
With timetoreply, you can get set up in minutes. As soon as your inbox is connected, historical data is populated in your dashboards so you can see past performance.
Using that, you can set future targets for your team, and make decisions with real data to back them up.
As well as that, timetoreply includes features like:
Timetoreply’s email response management software will help your team level up their email performance and ensure your customer-facing teams deliver the service experience your existing customers and sales leads expect.
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1. What are some reliable Front alternatives for email analytics?
Several tools offer strong email analytics, including timetoreply, EmailAnalytics, and Email Meter. These Front alternatives help monitor team performance, track key performance indicators, and enhance support software with data-driven insights.
2. What’s the best Front alternative for a small team?
If you’re operating at a smaller scale, tools like EmailAnalytics or timetoreply are excellent choices for email management. These Front alternatives are simple to set up, require minimal training, and offer strong ROI through enhanced email reporting and SLA tracking.
3. What kind of key performance indicators can be tracked using email analytics tools?
With email-focused Front alternatives like timetoreply, teams can track a wide range of key performance indicators, including:
4. Are there Front alternatives with marketing or CRM features?
Yes. Platforms like Helpmonks offer integrated tools for email marketing, live chat, CRM, and knowledge base management, which makes it an all-in-one solution for growing brands.
5. Can I use Front alternatives with my current email platform?
Yes. Most Front alternatives integrate seamlessly with Gmail, Outlook, and Office 365, so you don’t have to change your email provider to start tracking performance.
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As we’ve seen, there’s no denying that Front is a powerful email management platform for customer service and success teams. It can help you bring all of your email activity into one place, and collaborate on email replies.
However, it’s not right for every team. Depending on your requirements, some of the tools we looked at in the Front alternatives section may be a better fit.
If you’re looking for a tool with powerful email analytics to help you improve customer service and sales team email performance, timetoreply is the only option for you.
Schedule a demo now and discover the future of elevated communication strategies!
Get live inbox alerts and reply quickly to customer emails with timetoreply
Head of Customer Success @ timetoreply
Barry Blassoples is the Head of Customer Success at timetoreply, where he helps customer-facing teams boost revenue and protect brand reputation by providing actionable insights to improve their business email response times. He has over 15 years of leadership experience across customer success, sales, and marketing roles in high-growth tech companies.
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