7 best shared inbox software [Comparison table for quick decision]

More than 60% of Salesmate customers with 5+ teammates are using shared team inboxes one way or another. 

There’s no question about the effectiveness of shared inboxes, especially for customer success teams. 

Collaboration, productivity, and transparency are the values of a shared inbox. 

But when you’re looking for the right solution in the market, what’s the best approach? 

Why you need shared inbox software?

You may need shared inbox software for several reasons, including:

1. Collaborative communication: Shared inbox software allows multiple team members to collaborate on incoming messages and ensure that nothing falls through the cracks.
2. Efficiency and productivity: With shared inbox software, you can streamline message management and reduce response times, making your team more productive and efficient.
3. Improved customer experience: Shared inbox software can help ensure that customers receive timely, consistent, and high-quality responses, which can improve their overall experience with your business.
4. Centralized message management: With shared inbox software, you can manage messages from multiple channels (e.g., email, social media, chat) in a single platform, which can make it easier to track and manage customer interactions.
5. Task delegation and tracking: Shared inbox software often includes features for task assignment, collaboration, and progress tracking, which can help teams stay organized and on top of their work.

Overall, shared inbox software can help teams work together more effectively, improve communication and response times, and enhance the customer experience.

How to judge a shared inbox software: The right approach

Most independent shared inbox tools are limited in nature.  

Either they provide a shared inbox facility only, or they cost so much money.

Long story short, most tools are not value-for-money.

The right approach for your team is – what else can this platform provide besides shared inbox?

When you start questioning like this, you’ll find the best shared inbox tools that multiple teams can use in your company. 

You’ll start looking at solutions from a larger perspective and end up saving money.

I’m building this article and considering the best shared inbox tools, but they come with additional values.

1. Salesmate 

Best for businesses that want to bridge their sales, marketing, and customer experience teams

Salesmate is an all-in-one CRM and automation platform for sales, marketing, and customer success teams. A shared team inbox tool is one of the features of the platform.  

If you’re relatively new to what Salesmate can do, take a quick look at this video.

Let’s talk about the best shared inbox software inside Salesmate first. 

This is how it looks inside Salesmate. Quite simple and easy to use. 

For every email you receive, you can 

• Select multiple followers that can follow the conversation 
• Assign an owner of the conversation 
• You, as a user, chose to follow the conversation 
• Tag conversations for better segmentation 
• Close conversations once they’re done 

You can fasten your work by simply choosing from your pre-made templates. 

All you need to do is pick the right template, make the necessary changes, and hit the send button! 

As I said, Salesmate is built for collaborative teams, and support teams often deal with salespeople. 

If you find conversations relevant to the ongoing deals, you can directly associate conversations with deals in just a few clicks. 

The conversation will reflect in the detailed view of that particular deal in Salesmate:

You can also associate your response with a new meeting. You can directly choose a time slot from your calendar and add the meeting details as a reply.  

Talking about internal collaboration, you can tag your team members and let them know how to respond to the conversation. 

This is super useful for internal chats or private notes or discussions.  

We use our own Shared Team Inbox at Salesmate! 

At Salesmate, we have multiple teams using our own Shared Inbox Solution.

Sales, marketing, and customer success are using their shared inboxes.

Pretty cool! 

Our sales team uses this feature to collaborate and close more deals together. 

Our marketing team uses this feature to manage partnerships and content marketing opportunities.  

Of course, our customer success team uses this feature to resolve customer problems.

The fun thing is, when our development team is involved with customer communication to improve certain features, they also use it!

Salesmate’s Shared Inbox Software is not limited to a specific team; it’s for anybody who wants to collaborate and needs transparency. 

It’s an added benefit for us because all our crucial data is in Salesmate 😊 

Now, I’d like to talk about Salesmate from a bigger perspective.

As I mentioned, it’s not just shared inbox software. It’s a complete CRM suite with advanced automation. 

More than 5000+ companies across the globe use Salesmate as their everyday tool. Most of our customers use the tool for all three teams – sales, marketing, and customer support. 

Key features in spotlight

• Lead capturing features like Web Forms, Chatbots, and Meeting Scheduler
• Sales management features like Sales Pipeline, Deal Management, Power Dialer, Sales Reports, Dashboards, Activity Tracking, etc. 
• Inclusive communication channels – Emails, calls, texts, conferencing
• Live Chat and Automated Chatbots for customer success teams 
• Advanced automation with Marketing Automation Journeys

Pricing

• Basic – $23/user/month 
• Pro – $39/user/month 
• Business – $63/user/month 
• Enterprise – Custom 

2. Help Scout 

Best for teams looking for centralized communication solutions

Help Scout is a customer communication platform where you can manage all your conversations in a single platform.  

Talking specifically about shared inbox software, Help Scout has covered everything necessary: 

• You can assign conversations to a team or an individual 
• Drop private notes to your team, as we saw in Salesmate 
• You can save frequent replies and reuse them easily 
• Tag customer conversations for better identification 

The good thing about Help Scout shared team inbox software is – it lets you see all the past conversations from the contact.  

In Salesmate, we call it 360° Contact view, where you can see every tiny detail associated with that contact. 

As I mentioned, you should look for something extra, so here are some other features from Help Scout that I find valuable. You should definitely check them out. 

Key features in spotlight

• 1:1 live chat for website and app 
• Send in-app messages through beacons 
• Build and maintain your own knowledge base 

Help Scout is a focused platform for conversation and messaging.

If you’re looking for a platform that provides shared inbox software and other messaging solutions, you should try out Help Scout. 

Pricing

• Standard – $20/user/month 
• Plus – $40/user/month 
• Pro – $65/user/month 

3. Front 

Best for teams that are looking to sort out their customer communications

Front shared inbox tool comes with necessary needs like tagging teammates, assigning conversations, etc. 

The fun thing about Front is – it offers analytics for your shared inbox. You can track email behaviors, team performance, average response time, etc.  

Another good thing I found was rules inside the shared inbox. So, you can automatically sort conversations and drive them to the right person using certain rules.  

Besides shared inbox software, you can find the following features on this platform. 

Key features in spotlight

• Create custom rules for inboxes 
• Insights on team performance 
• Front claims to connect all the communication channels like email, SMS, social media, WhatsApp, etc. 

In my opinion, Front is a simple tool for teams that want to resolve their customer communication and make it easy. It does not offer high-end automation (yes, Rules are there), but it’s easy to use and does what’s necessary.  

Pricing 

• Starter – $19/user/month (Minimum 2 users required) 
• Growth – $49/user/month (Minimum 5 users required) 
• Scale – $49/user/month (Minimum 10 users required) 

4. Hiver

Best for teams that enjoy the Gmail interface and want to manage shared inboxes from the same

Hiver is a Gmail shared inbox and helpdesk software facilities.

Talking about the shared team inbox software, Hiver has all the usuals.

You can assign conversations, save canned responses, and set up auto-assignment.  

However, I found collision detection quite interesting. Basically, if two team members are responding to the same conversation, it gives you an alert. That’s pretty cool. 

Hiver also lets you edit the response collaboratively. So you can structure the best answer for your customers.  

Besides the shared inbox, we get the following values from Hiver. 

Key features in spotlight

• Create basic rules to assign conversations to the right person 
• Enable round-robin email management 
• Live chat software for web visitors 
• Manage your own knowledge base  

Hiver is a Gmail-based customer communication platform. If you’re too comfortable with Gmail and want to continue with the same interface, you should definitely check out Hiver. 

Pricing 

• Lite – $15/user/month  
• Pro – $39/user/month 
• Elite – $59/user/month 

5. Helpwise  

Best for teams that aim to bring all the communication channels under one platform

Helpwise is a help center software aiming to bring all the communication channels under one platform.  

This tool assists you in having a unified platform where you can manage multiple channels like emails, social media, Slack, WhatsApp, etc. 

Bringing social media messages is always useful because customers reach on multiple channels these days.

It’s quite a popular concept, and I love the fact that Helpwise offers 50+ integrations with various CRM, telephony systems, and task management tools.  

Talking about the shared inbox platform, Helpwise has tried to keep the interface like email clients for relatable UX. That’s quite useful for most people.  

Its shared inbox tool provides usual features like tagging, assigning, and analytics.  

Just like Hiver, Helpwise also offers collision detection to avoid duplicate messaging.  

Key features in spotlight

• Live chat widget for web visitors 
• Set up CSAT surveys in inboxes for quick customer feedback 
• Create and maintain your own help center for articles and resources. I love the fact that Helpwise has offered SEO options, so your help articles can also bring new traffic 
• Distribute conversations with automation rules

Helpwise is useful for multiple teams, but I think the tool is created specifically for customer service teams.  

The keyword is “communication” here. I would put Helpwise in the same categories as Front and Help Scout.  

Pricing 

• Free for limited team 
• Premium – $20/user/month 
• Advanced – $40/user/month 
• Enterprise – Request quote 

6. Gmelius  

Gmail-centric tool with shared inboxes, labels, and Kanban board

Another Gmail-centric shared inbox tool in the town like Hiver.  

Gmelius is a team collaboration platform with shared inboxes, shared labels, and Kanban boards.  

Again, the purpose is quite clear. It’s centered around people who find Gmail very dear. 

Besides the usual tagging, assigning, and saving email templates, it has an interesting feature of shared labels.  

Here, you get to share Gmail tags with the team. Tags can be anything – projects, departments, stages, processes, etc. 

Key features in spotlight

• Kanban view in Gmail can be exciting for some users to manage pipelines, processes, or tasks. However, there are free plugins to turn your conversations into tasks in Gmail 
• You can integrate this Kanban board with Trello. That’s extremely useful for a majority of users 
• Gmelius comes with workflows, and one of the use cases is sequences.  
• In Salesmate, we have kept these two features separate. We noticed that customers prefer task automation and communication in separate ways.
• That’s why Workflows are for minor task automations, and Sequences are dedicated to automated follow-ups in Salesmate. 

I think Gmelius is a simple tool for people who like Gmail. But I always feel platforms that depend on other tools (like Gmail, in this case) have limitations.  

Pricing 

• Plus – $12/user/month 
• Growth – $24/user/month 
• Pro – $49/user/month 

7. Missive

Best for teams looking for a communication-centric platform

The last one on the list is Missive. A simple tool heavily focused on communication.  

Interestingly, this is the only tool in the list that offers internal team chat. Missive covers other channels like SMS, WhatsApp, Socials, etc. 

I appreciate that Missive has focused solely on communication and tried to cover the maximum ground.

They have built ample small features to support communication and make it more user-friendly. 

Key features in spotlight

• Internal chat for quick resolution 
• Canned responses 
• Collaborative writing 
• Workload distribution in 4 different ways 
• Workflows for basic automation 
• Live chat for web visitors 

I think Missive is specifically built for customer support teams. There are tiny communication-driven features that you’d appreciate, but it’s all related to communication, nothing else. 

Pricing

• Starter – $14/user/month 
• Productive – $18/user/month 
• Enterprise – $26/user/month 

The decision: Which one is the best shared inbox tools for you?

Frequently asked questions on shared inbox tools

Note: Screenshots are visual material used in this article are just for educational/comparison purposes. All the rights reserved by respective owners/brands/platforms. Prices mentioned in this article are referenced in October 2022. Pricing plans for respective platforms/tools are subject to change in the future.