Front Reviews

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.

Pros

It is incredibly easy to use. We transitioned to this from HubSpot support and we were concerned about a learning curve, it is about as basic and intuitive as it comes. We budgeted 2 weeks to implement and it took us less than 2 days to transfer everything over and learn how to use it for its core functions.

Cons

I may be doing this incorrectly- but the Slack integration doesn't always work correctly. I think it would've been helpful in the integrations section to have a troubleshooting guide if it doesn't work. For us we filled out all fields and appropriate slack channels but the messages were not sent there. (Again could be our error)

Alternatives Considered

Zendesk Suite

Reasons for Choosing Front

HubSpot was AWFUL! I am so passionate about this. We had several situations with HubSpot where emails were sent to the wrong individuals with support tickets, the site crashed completely, and it was inconvenient that they did not have a mobile app. We got a Customer Success Representative at HubSpot assigned to us and they "follow-ed up" on the bugs and were never fixed. Eventually she ghosted us. Switching to front was the best thing that could've happened to us.

Switched From

HubSpot CRM

Reasons for Switching to Front

As part of our product offering, we send emails from our client's email domain to appear as it is from them. With these integrations, Zendesk's product was unable to support the configuration but Front was able to.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Freshdesk, Bird, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pros

I love Front's ability to display who on an email chain has read our last response (revolutionary!) & the ease at which my team can comment back and forth and converse with each other, all while hidden from our customers in the email thread. Email tagging, inbox splitting, & the infinite number of archiving and email redirection rules we can put in place keeps my team organized (& myself sane!)-- as a company that receives tens of thousands of emails a day, Front allows my operations team to truly battle the "Front lines" of customer communication.

Cons

The biggest issue we deal with is Front's occasional latency. In an industry where fast is better than perfect, the last thing my team needs is Front to be lagging or down. We have a huge backlog of archived emails (Front also acts as customer documentation platform for us) so searching information can be super tedious if the platform doesn't load or crashes. My team works to urgently solve problems and every second counts, so we cannot risk even a minute of latency.

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.

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

Pros

Great help in setting up, Easy to maintain, transparent in billing, Great customer service, Love being able to comment internally on emails, sharing them, collaborating on drafts, and having internal discussions on emails.

Cons

It is rather expensive for our use, but still worth the money for us. When we share a link, if the email hasn't been shared with a specific individual, the link won't work for them until they have express permission.

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.

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

Pros

The shared inbox is a great feature for our client service team. We provide 24 hour support, and being able to assign open emails to available team members ensures that our clients can receive acknowledgement and support when needed. I also enjoy the various integrations with other systems that are available (contacts, calendars, proprietary workflow management systems, etc.). The Front support team is also accessible and responsive to issues and requests.

Cons

The notification settings seem spotty - I either receive none or a notification for everything, whether or not the email is assigned to me. Additionally, there are quite a few service delays or interruptions. Occasionally the inbox counts can be off from the actual numbers of emails therein.

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.

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

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.

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 :)

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.