Front Reviews

Pros
From the moment you launch either the desktop, web or mobile views, Front is an easy-on-the-eyes tool for processing high volumes of email in an efficient way. Unlike other solutions I have explored, Front finds the right balance between traditional inbox and ticket-based helpdesks -- both of which have strengths for digital comms power users. In Front you will find useful tools for snoozing messages, discussing messages in an iMessage-style chat and most importantly, delegating emails to specific team members using the 'Assign To' function. Teams that utilize Slack in their workflows will appreciate Front's Slack integration which lets you seamlessly move conversations to and from the chat platform. Two smaller but highly valuable features are the ability to set a buffer between when you click send on an email and when the message is actually sent, allowing you to cancel a misfired email, and the auto BCC feature which is great for logging emails in our CRM.

Cons
There are two annoyances I have with Front. First, the app doesn't seem to properly process received calendar invitations. Instead of allowing me to accept, decline or otherwise respond to invitations, Front simply downloads the .ics file, which is then opened in my default calendar app, Outlook. Second, though Front syncs with Office 365, messages deleted in Front are not removed from Outlook. For some users this may be beneficial, but for me it creates extra work and annoyance.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Front allows teams to work in a more organized flow with incoming emails. One of the ways we have been able to utilize Front has been to group all emails for specific teams into Team inboxes and then team members can take emails out of the queue and work to bring the box to zero. This has saved us a lot of time from trying to organize emails in outlook. The main selling feature for us however was the ability to create a custom plugin in the panel on the right as well as pull data from the current conversation from the Front API that is well built. This allows us to customize our flow. Front also has several default integrations some more useful than others. They seem to be growing at a large pace so you can expect to see major enhancements with the product in the future.

Cons
The price can be a little high per user and the Enterprise version doesn't seem to offer the kinds of benefits you would want to see for such a large price jump. There also seem to be some features on enterprise that feel like they should be one tier down like user roles and authorization.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
Easy to use, scalable to any size company and has a fantastic phone app.

Cons
No issues so far.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

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.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

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 :)

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
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.

Rating breakdown

Pros
Front allows my support team to fully engage with customers and each other across platforms all within Front. We're able to see the Tweet that customer sent and if they sent multiple emails about an issue. It allows us to give their time the highest value and the highest productivity for ourselves.

Cons
Their pricing structure is limiting with cost per user and price hikes for additional features that would benefit the platform and experience for every user. Their support staff can also be slower to respond than would be expected for a support platform.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
First, front streamlines all of our team communication in one place. It allows for teams to have visibility on incoming messages/inquiries, assign them to the appropriate staff member, and even have internal conversations/notes that are not visible to the customer. You can also set reminders, alerts (i.e. snoozing a conversation for a few days), and set time-saving canned/saved responses. It's incredibly user-friendly.

Cons
First, It's very expensive.

Rating breakdown

Pros
I work remotely, as does the rest of the team I belong to, and using Front to coordinate client emails is essential to presenting a united front in terms of responses and feedback. The ability to tag, comment and reassign is especially helpful in providing clients with a consistent and uniform voice when answering.

Cons
If I had something that I like least about Front, it is the problems that can arise from someone re-opening an already archived email. It can cause the email to show up in the inbox of the individual who archived it and nothing can be done with it, and it is a pain to make it re-archive.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 7/10

Pros
My company is a call center, and we use Front to help organize and track our leads. Often our customer service department will take web chats, which are then viewed by sales through front. We really enjoy the ability to sort multiple inboxes, add tags as well as comments. We also have many users, so each representative can track the leads they have submitted, tagged or commented on.

Cons
We came to a point where our growth was too large for Front alone. We designed our own web application to work in tandem with front, because the reporting was not the easiest to use.

Rating breakdown

Pros
Front App, which is a mail management software, hits all the right marks. We use it for e-commerce and received 100s of emails a day. Front has easy to use Filter to filter out the important ones from the unimportant ones. We have used it for over a year and never had a single complaint. We love this app! Also, their customer service (which we rarely use) is A+ as well.

Cons
I think they adjusted their pricing a little bit but otherwise all good. We contacted them about pricing and were promptly grandfathered in with our original plan.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
The interface is very attractive in comparison with other software. I really like the option that allows you to assign emails on-the-go and the way it organizes your mail. Also, that you can add your own automated responses which makes easier your workflow when sending important emails to clients.

Cons
I think the monster faces that the software had initially were a unique characteristic that nobody else had. You should switch back to that version or add the option. Usually, the app takes some time to load and it can be very frustrating. Seeing things load quickly, or at the very least improves the user experience.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Front allows our small team to share an inbox of customer support emails, in addition to the calls we receive, and organize them to best see the types of emails that we are receiving. Additionally, the tags allow us to track what types of emails and calls we receive to determine our weaknesses.

Cons
I would like to see the calls and emails integrated into the same threads within the customer history page in a timeline. Additionally, I wish Front integrated with other software in a more productive manner.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
This software makes it easy to collaborate on emails, gives staff accountability, has fair audit features, and if you pay enough money, the ability to create additional roles is also pretty nice.

Cons
No built-in spam filtering. Have to use your own email provider for that. Extras like additional roles and the ability to separate teams is too expensive. The software can't be customized aside from creating rules, which don't always cover what you needed done.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 6/10

Pros
There have been many improvements made in the past few months; the user interface is much more streamlined, and it has fewer bugs - I rarely experience crashes with this app.

Cons
I wish it could have been better integrated with other applications such as Outlook; it would be great to have integration with other tools and software.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
I can share and comment on threads with the rest of my team. As an admin, I also have granular control over users' access permissions to email inboxes.

Cons
The disregard the little details over and over again in favor of new updates. The app (iOS especially) makes me wait a lot of times when it shouldn't, making it feel slow in stark contrast to other mail apps. Things don't load instantly. Contacts aren't cached. Their UI designers blatantly disregard Android / iOS / Mac / web design conventions (which are there for a reason) in favor of their own convoluted system. Their release notes are boring and they make me update my app even when it's perfectly usable (this condescending attitude is particularly annoying). Many of these small glitches have actually led to catastrophic disasters within my team like unwittingly sending followup emails ("sequences") to 200+ recipients. My advice to them: focus on stabilizing your current, buggy product rather than trying to introduce a million features that don't work 100%.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 3/10

Pros
I love how it connects my other products and especially the feature about assigning or looping in other team members and creating a thread about an email. It keeps things organized and makes my life less confusing!

Cons
I don't like the send later functionality. The software doesn't mention or give the option to select time zone, which can be an issue when you work across many offices, and also doesn't have a summary or a warning before firing off an email. I think it would be more beneficial to schedule a send and then have the ability to edit the delivery time, access those emails etc in a clear and easy way

Rating breakdown

Pros
Searchability of emails. And good integrity with other common tools including Slack, Trello and Asana

Cons
This is just a feature request rather than a complaint, but I can have all the conversations in an email opened by default instead of the collapsed view? This may save few hundreds of clicks per week.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
I love how easy it is to arrange your inboxes in an orderly way and how easy it is to respond and archive emails. It makes it look very organized - I like that you can have all company inboxes and anyone can work on an email. I like that I can mention a colleague on an email I want her/him to respond to.

Cons
I would like the option to see what my colleague is writing on a ticket that's inside a shared inbox. I think that would be a useful tool to add.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
1) It's the simplest tool I have ever used. 2) Delivers a great customer experience 3) Your team members automatically get's the updates on the communication. 4)Team inbox has enabled us to be more collaborative and responsive to the customer queries.

Cons
I don't find any major issue except the pricing. I would highly recommend this product to everyone.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
Front has been great to have better interactions with customers and not waste time in unnecessary administration. This has greatly improved the response times from our team to clients

Cons
Pricey and a nice-to-have in some cases. If this is not something your organization struggles with, you might not want to spend the money

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
They have a desktop app (+ mobile & web), they support multiple channels (emails, SMS, phone calls, tweets, Facebook messages, in app messages etc.), you can easily collaborate on drafts and see responses from different team members, email templates and reminders are very handy! If you want to manage your email all in one place you can add your individual inbox as well. And their customer support is top-notch!

Cons
They don’t offer a live chat feature yet - we use Olark for that.

Rating breakdown

Pros
I like front's UI and how we can change themes. Also, the private and team tags is basic for our wupport team to have an easier way to track specific tickets.

Cons
I would love to have more fonts added, the ability to add larger files to our emails and more characters for the FB inbox.

Rating breakdown

Pros
It's well organized and has a ton of features. They're constantly building new stuff and adding to the platform

Cons
It's honestly pretty buggy. Like lots of little random bugs. It feels like a lot of the functionality was thrown together quickly, but it works for the most part

Rating breakdown