Front Alternative: Choosing Between a Shared Inbox and a Store-Aware AI Agent

The fourth "where is my order?" of the day lands in the shared inbox and Front handles it well. It gets tagged, routed to whoever is free, and answered against a thread history the whole team can see. Nobody replies twice. Nobody has to ask who took it.

Then the fifth one arrives, and the sixth, and by Friday you have paid three people to look up tracking numbers in another browser tab.

That is usually the moment someone starts searching for a Front alternative. Not because Front is doing its job badly, but because the job it does is coordination, and the problem in front of you is repetition.

What Front is genuinely good at

Front is email-native in a way most helpdesks are not. Most support tools convert an email into a ticket and then make you work inside the ticket. Front keeps the conversation looking like a conversation and puts the team apparatus around it: internal comments and shared drafts sit alongside the message, assignments give a thread a clear owner, tags carry the categories your team already argues about, and real-time agent availability stops a conversation being assigned to someone who logged off twenty minutes ago.

Two smaller features tell you who Front is designed for. Guest accounts let you pull a colleague into a thread to comment without buying them a license. When a support answer depends on the warehouse manager, or the one person who knows how the supplier contract works, that is a real workflow and most tools solve it with a Slack copy-paste. Workspaces divide inboxes into separate spaces with their own workflows, analytics and tags, which matters when support, billing and partnerships share a company but not a queue.

The channel coverage is broad. Professional and Enterprise handle email, SMS, social, and Front Chat in one inbox, with voice and voicemail through integrations like Aircall and Dialpad, a customer portal with dynamic ticket forms, and native WhatsApp as a paid add-on. Front lists 9,300+ companies as customers, and the ones it fits are recognisable: logistics coordinators, account managers, agencies, any team where a single customer thread involves three internal people who need to agree before anyone hits send.

If that describes your support, the rest of this article is not for you. Stay on Front. Its published Starter, Professional and Enterprise rates are $25, $65 and $105 per seat per month as of publication on Front's pricing page, and for a collaborative team that is a defensible price for a well-built tool. Front also runs a 14-day free trial with all the Professional features and no credit card required, which is more than most of the category offers.

Reason one: the bill tracks your headcount

Per-seat pricing assumes the cost of support rises with the number of people doing it. For an agency or a services business, that assumption holds. For an online store it comes apart, because ticket volume is driven by orders and orders are not driven by headcount at all. A two-person store shipping 4,000 orders a month has an enormous queue and nobody to put in the seats.

Front's own numbers make the shape clear enough. As of publication, Starter is $25 per seat per month and supports a single channel type; Professional is $65 per seat per month and is where multiple channel types start. A storefront chat widget plus an email address counts as two channel types, so the most basic ecommerce setup is already a Professional conversation.

The full tier structure, the seat caps, and what a realistic monthly invoice adds up to are covered in our breakdown of Front's pricing. What matters for this decision is narrower: buying another seat buys another pair of hands, and hands are not what a repetitive queue is short of.

Reason two: the AI is a separate purchase, on two different meters

Front sells its AI as add-on products rather than as part of the plan, and the two products a store would care about are billed on completely different logic.

Copilot is the real-time assistant that drafts replies and suggests next steps for a human agent. As of publication it is $20 per seat per month as an add-on, or included in Enterprise. It is priced per seat because it is a tool for the person in the chair. Add it to a Professional seat and that seat goes from $65 to $85.

Autopilot is Front's omnichannel AI agent, the one that resolves customer work without a human writing the reply, and it is priced per conversation starting at $0.05. Front lists it as an add-on on all three plans, Enterprise included, so the tier that bundles Copilot, Smart QA and Smart CSAT still bills Autopilot separately. Front publishes the starting figure and not the volume tiers above it, so what you would actually pay at your volume is a sales conversation rather than a number you can model in a spreadsheet.

Front does include some AI at every tier without an add-on: Topics for analysing why customers contact you, plus Compose, Translate and Summarize, each capped at up to 200 actions per teammate per day. Those are assistive features for humans, and the per-teammate cap is another place the billing unit is a person.

There is a coherent philosophy behind all of this. Front's AI is mostly built to make agents faster, and the one product built to remove the agent from the loop is the one that stopped being priced per agent. That is honest design. It is also a signal that if AI resolution is the thing you want, you are buying it at the edge of the product rather than at the centre.

Reason three: the inbox does not know your store

This is the one that decides it for most ecommerce teams, and it is not a pricing complaint.

Front is platform-agnostic by design. It unifies channels, not commerce data. Its plan comparison covers channels, rules, workspaces, analytics, knowledge base and user management, and does not price an ecommerce order lookup as part of any tier. Front doesn't publish an order-data capability on its pricing page, which is a different statement from saying no integration exists, and worth checking with their sales team if you are close to a decision. But the product's centre of gravity is the message, not the order.

The practical version: a customer writes "where is my order, I think I ordered the medium." Answering that means knowing the order exists, what shipped, when, what the return window says, and whether the medium is back in stock. Every one of those lives in Shopify or WooCommerce. A shared inbox routes the question to a human who then goes and looks all of it up.

That lookup is the actual work. Assignment, tagging and internal comments are overhead around the work. Front is very good at reducing the overhead, and it is not built to do the lookup. If most of your queue is order status, returns, sizing and stock, then the tool is optimising the wrong half of the job. A different angle on the same problem is in our notes on cutting support ticket volume before you buy anything at all.

Where Ernest fits

Ernest is built for the third case: a Shopify or WooCommerce store where the queue is repetitive and the headcount is small.

It connects to the store rather than sitting beside it. On connect it imports Shopify policies and the product catalog automatically and ingests the rest of the site, so answers are grounded in the store's own return window and shipping terms instead of a generic knowledge base someone has to write. It does live order lookups, searches the live catalog to answer "do you have this in medium", and handles the pre-purchase questions that stall a checkout at 2am: sizing, fit, shipping cost and time, compatibility.

Cancellations and returns can run fully automatic or behind one-click merchant approval, per action, whichever you set. Refunds are always approval-gated regardless of that setting, so money never moves without a merchant clicking.

Two things are worth knowing before you commit. Simulation onboarding replays your real past tickets against Ernest before it talks to a single live customer, so you can read how it would have answered last month rather than trusting a demo. And conversation intelligence surfaces the recurring gaps in what customers keep asking, which is how you find the policy page that is missing rather than answering the same question 200 more times.

Pricing is per conversation, not per person: a free plan with 100 conversations that never expire (a real free plan, not a trial), then $49 a month for 500 conversations, $149 for 2,000, and $299 for 10,000. AI is included at every tier. Hiring a part-time helper for the holidays does not change the bill.

What Ernest does not do

Front covers a lot of ground that Ernest deliberately does not, and pretending otherwise would make the rest of this useless.

• No shared inbox workflows. No internal comments, no shared drafts, no assignments, no agent availability, no macros, no guest accounts, no workspaces. If your team's problem is three people coordinating on one thread, Front solves it and Ernest does not attempt it.
• No agent management layer. No QA scorecards, no CSAT tracking, no per-agent performance reporting. Those only make sense once you have agents to measure.
• Two channels. Storefront chat widget and email, with escalation to a human by email. No phone, SMS, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, or social. Front's Professional and Enterprise plans handle those, and if a real share of your volume already lives there, that gap is disqualifying.
• No CRM, ERP, WMS, or helpdesk integrations. The connection is to your store, and that is the whole surface.
• No customer portal with ticket forms. Front has one; Ernest does not.

The option nobody suggests: run both

These products do not have to be an either/or, and for a team of six with a genuinely collaborative queue they probably should not be.

Put Ernest on the storefront to take the repetitive volume before it becomes a thread. Order status, returns, sizing, shipping, policy questions. What it cannot answer escalates by email, which lands in Front where your team already works with the full history attached. Front keeps doing the collaboration it is good at, on a queue that has stopped being 60% tracking numbers.

Nothing about that requires switching, and it changes what each tool is being asked to be good at. Deciding when the handoff should happen is its own design question, covered in getting the AI-to-human handoff right.

How to decide

Two questions settle this faster than a trial of either product.

Is your next hire a support person? If yes, Front's model matches your cost structure and buying seats is buying capacity you will use. If the honest answer is that you cannot afford another person and the queue keeps growing anyway, seats are the wrong unit and no amount of workflow tooling fixes it.

What fraction of last month's tickets needed a lookup in Shopify? Go count fifty of them. If it is over half, the bottleneck is store data, and a shared inbox with an AI add-on metered per conversation on top of per-seat licences is an expensive route to answering them. For the wider ecommerce-native field, our Gorgias alternatives comparison covers tools built around order data rather than around the inbox.

If the counting exercise lands over half, the cheapest next step is replaying those same tickets against something store-aware and reading the answers. Shopify stores can install Ernest from the App Store and run the simulation against real history before deciding anything.

Front figures in this article come from Front's public pricing page as of publication and reflect annual billing. Check the source before you sign anything.