Front Pricing, Features, Reviews & Comparison of Alternatives

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.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

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.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
What I like the most about Front is that I don't have to use Cc option on e-mails anymore. Front has a lot of great options and one of them is called "mention" Let's say a customer writes to you and you are not the correct contact person for that e-mail: with our previous electronic mail supplier we had to go over it and write something like "I'm copying Karen here who will help you out with your request" and copy Karen's name on Cc space. But with Front now we just need to "assign" that e-mail to the right coworker and it'll disappear from you inbox. Then it'll go automatically to the right person and he or she will reply from it (without customer seeing too many e-mail redirectioning to the correct party)

Cons
There is something I haven't found on Front and it is the option called "recall message". When you send a message there is a gap of 5 seconds to cancel it but once it has been sent there is no way to recall it

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
The overall look of Front is simple, which is nice. The snooze function on emails. The support staff were friendly and quick to answer.

Cons
My company switched my team over to Front after a couple people who shared an inbox had issues with managing it. I didn't have a shared inbox, but struggled with the lack of functionality for just personal inboxes. There are so many missed functionalities to Front it made my job incredibly inefficient. I found myself spending more time doing my job which consists of heavy emailing because of Front problems. 1. No calendar. Cannot make appointments, set up meetings, etc. 2. Unable to edit messages in a previous thread. Say someone sends you a list of questions. You cannot just answer next to their list in the previous email and say "see below." 3. Archiving messages... when we first switched to Front, the management team used it for a few weeks to test it. When the team was instructed to switch within the next couple weeks, and BOOM thousands of emails that Front could not autoarchive. I had about 10 emails in Outlook during the switch. The front inbox had accumulated thousands over the course of the management test period. Front could only auto archive shared inboxes, not personal. I had to spend 20 minutes selecting 3000 emails to auto archive since it didn't sync correctly with Outlook. 4. Saving emails... you can't. You only have the option to send a link of the email which only works for those that also used front. 5. You cannot edit pasted tables in front, as far as formatting goes. No deletion of columns or making rows smaller. 6. No red flags or categorizing. Often I'd keep emails in Outlook and red flag them to remind myself to check on it before I leave. No flagging in Outlook. This is replaced by snoozing in Front to make it reappear later, but I do miss the flag option. 7. You archive something in someone else's inbox that they share with you... it archives in their inbox, too. 8. No options to make folders. You want to move emails to a folder to refer to later? You cannot. I could go on and on and ended up emailing a list of 18 problems after using Front for the first 3 months to management who sent to Front support. The responses were basically they hope to rollout that feature one day. Which obviously doesn't help now.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 0/10

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.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10