Top 4 Front Alternatives Based on 30,000+ Reviews

Customer satisfaction is more vital than ever, but it has never been more challenging, as businesses face an unprecedented catastrophe of soaring call volumes, hold times, and escalating customer demands across multiple channels.¹

Figure 1: Most-used customer communication channels by customers ranked by volume of enquiries

Front is a help desk software, which can lower the pressure on service leaders and professionals by decreasing call volumes and growing their digital care ecosystems. However, with dozens of help desk software alternatives on the table, Front might not be the optimal solution for each organization, and other Front alternatives might better answer the organizational needs of different businesses. 

This article discusses the features, user ratings, and pricing of the Front and its top four competitors.

Comparison of Front and its top 4 alternatives

Table 1: Comparison by market presence

Vendors	Total number of employees*	Total reviews**	Average ratings**	Ease of use***	Quality of support***	Free trial	Pricing: starts from per seat/month
Front	362	2,257	4.5/5	9.2/10	9.2/10	7-day	$15.00
Zendesk Support Suite	6,275	10,355	4.3/5	8.5/10	8.4/10	14-day	$55.00
Salesforce Service Cloud	70,443	4,593	4.4/5	8.1/10	8.1/10	30-day	$25.00
Zoho Desk	19,130	7,201	4.4/5	8.5/10	8.3/10	15-day	$7.00
Freshdesk	12,917	6,600	4.4/5	8.8/10	8.8/10	14-day	$15.00

*Based on the total number of employees on LinkedIn as of 11/14/2023.

**Based on the total number of reviews and average ratings on Capterra, G2, and Trustradius software review platforms as of 11/14/2023. 

***Ease of quality and quality of support data is based on G2 ratings as of 11/14/2023.

Table 2: Comparison by features

Vendors	AI-powered self-service	(CSAT) survey	24/7 customer support	Software integrations	Supported languages
Front	✖	In premium plans	✖	1000+	Contact Front
Zendesk Support Suite	✅	In premium plans	✅	1200+	30+
Salesforce Service Cloud	✅	In premium plans	✅	2500+*	35+
Zoho Desk	✅	✅	✅	5000+	40+
Freshdesk	✅	✅	✅	650+	30+

*# of integrations for Salesforce Service Cloud product data represents the total # of integrations for Salesforce.

Note: With Front at the top followed by sponsored vendors (ZendeskSupport Suite and Salesforce Service Cloud), other vendors are sorted in descending order according to the total number of review data.

Vendor selection criteria

Considering the abundance of help desk software vendors, the lists above are filtered according to the vendor criteria mentioned below, which helps businesses make more accurate decisions.

• Employee size: 300+ employees on LinkedIn
• Number of reviews: 2,000+ total reviews on Capterra, G2, and Trustradius. 
• Average rating: 4.0+/5 on Capterra, G2, and Trustradius.
• Ease of quality and quality of support rating: 8.0+/10 on G2.

Front

Front is a help desk tool that assists businesses aiming to increase efficiency in service operations. It aims to monitor response data and gather feedback from customers to evaluate the team’s and human agents’ productivity, while also allowing access to support requests via any channel—email, SMS messaging, and social media in a shared inbox.

Pros

Automation: Users admire Front’s advanced features for helping them to effortlessly improve and streamline their operations.²

Ease-of-use: Users evaluate Front as a user-friendly product for sending emails daily, sharing drafts with support teams, and getting their feedback.³

Customizable tags: Some users compliment the tagging feature which is an important element of their email organizing and customer service, noting that they can personalize tags with colors or emojis and choose to keep them private or public.⁴

Cons

Connection issues: Some users claim that shared inboxes get disconnected, causing delayed emails.⁵

Challenging customization: Some users claim that the platform has become saturated with customization options, and determining the right configuration and approach for a particular use case is challenging.⁶

No Google Chat interface: Some users state that it would be ideal if Front had a Google Chat interface since some users need to have Google Chat open in a separate window at all times, and frequently need to ping other coworkers from there.⁷

Calendar management: Some users say that managing customer support meetings in their calendar with Front is difficult, and they are unable to create new events in the mobile version.⁸

User Ratings

• G2: 4.7/5
• Capterra: 4.5/5
• Trustradius: 4.3/5

Pricing (seat/month, billed annually)

• Starter: $15.00
• Growth: $49.00
• Scale: $79.00
• Free trial: 7-day⁹

Top 4 Front alternatives

1- Zendesk Support Suite

Zendesk’s customer service tool; Zendesk Support Suite is designed for customers to obtain personalized help from human agents through a variety of contact methods, including email, telephone, social media, and live chat.

Gartner Magic Quadrant Industry Analysis ranks Zendesk as #1 for digital customer service use cases based on the collected data from its customer base along with peer evaluators.¹⁰

With Zendesk Support Suite agents can select, organize, and manage help desk tickets related to customer chats, tweets, calls, and emails. Zendesk users can manage customer conversations with built-in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to leverage customizable quantitative customer insights based on customer feedback, customer segmentation, and chatbot sentiment.

Pros

Help desk usability: Some comments reveal that adding a new brand and basic help center functions to Zendesk Support Suite is simple and does not require the assistance of a professional support team, agents and supervisors can access customer information across several channels efficiently.¹¹

Design and user interface: Reviews highlight that Zendesk Support Suite offers an up-to-date and intuitive design, and the widget structure is regarded as clean and simple to use.¹²

Integrations: Users admire the platform’s integration capability with current systems and customized APIs.¹³

Cons

Customer support: Some users state that they had a poor experience with Zendesk’s support, adding that it is difficult to contact them by email since users have to submit a ticket via chat.¹⁴

Customization: Users expect to customize the CSAT scoring and emails.¹⁵

Bugs: Some users note that there are a few bugs in the Zendesk Support Suite that may affect user productivity (e.g. users are taken out of tickets immediately after opening them, and user’s notes on postings do not appear correctly).¹⁶

User Ratings

• Capterra: 4.4/5
• Gartner: 4.2/5
• G2: 4.3/5

Pricing (per seat/month, billed annually)

• Suite team: $55.00
• Suite growth: $89.00
• Suite professional: $115.00
• Suite enterprise: Custom pricing
• Free-trial: 14-day¹⁷

2- Salesforce Service Cloud

Salesforce Service Cloud is a customer support software with help desk features that integrates with other cloud-based customer service software and social media service technologies. Service Cloud aims to assist users in streamlining services, enhancing team collaboration, and identifying relevant subjects to help support agents by optimizing their work.

Pros

AI chatbot: Users give positive credit to Service Cloud’s chatbot features, stating that chatbots provide faster information mining for their agents as they help resolve customer requests.¹⁸

360 help desk communications: Users state that they can use Service Cloud’s help desk and live chat capabilities efficiently, leveraging instantly ticket resolutions.¹⁹

Case tracking: Users note that case tracking is useful for tracking KPIs compared to other rivals.²⁰

Cons

Onboarding: Some reviewers found it difficult to get started with initial onboarding, stating that the learning curve is steep.²¹

Setup: Users emphasize that initial setup can be time-consuming.²²

Omnichannel connection: Users frequently report that assigned work disappears from inboxes when they lose an internet connection or open a new browser.²³

User Ratings

• Capterra: 4.4/5
• Gartner: 4.4/5
• G2: 4.3/5

Pricing (per seat/month, billed annually)

• Starter: $25.00
• Professional: $80.00
• Enterprise: $165.00
• Unlimited: $330.00
• Free trial: 30-day²⁴

3- Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk, based in India, has 50,000 customers and 12,000+ employees. The help desk software company employs contextual AI features to help companies of all sizes prioritize, control, and respond to customer inquiries across all your support channels, including phone, text, and online platforms.²⁶

Pros

Integrated help desk functionality: Project managers state that Zoho Desk has assisted them in focusing on help desk issues while providing high-quality service.²⁷

Ticket management: Users have applauded Zoho’s ticketing system for allowing them to easily manage customer support operations while rapidly monitoring, creating, and responding to tickets.²⁸

Custom panel and usability: Some users admire Zoho Desk’s custom panel options, which allow them to display unresolved help desk activities or complaints, allowing any registered agent to follow up and address the ticket.²⁹

Cons

Delays: Some reviews show that Zendesk Support Suite consistently delays, making updating and submitting the tickets problematic.³⁰

Search functionality: Some users express that the search functionality might need to be improved, which causes users to not be able to locate tickets often.³¹

Ticket filtering: Some users note that the filtering system is not as responsive, as non-relevant tickets shown in the search results.³²

User Ratings

• G2: 4.4/5
• Capterra: 4.5/5
• Trustradius: 4.5/5

Pricing (per seat/month)

• Express: $7.00
• Standard: $14.00
• Professional: $23.00
• Enterprise: $40.00
• Free trial: 15-day³³

4- Freshdesk

Freshdesk is a customer support tool with over 60,000 clients, the platform offers omnichannel, automated ticket routing, SLA management, and self-service knowledge base features that support businesses of all sizes.

Forrester Consulting claims that Freshdesk reduces ticket volume by ~25% using self-service and AI-powered chatbots.³⁴

Freshdesk can help businesses with customized customer service practices while monitoring tickets and contacts. With Freshdesk, users can manage and handle incoming tickets from several channels based on elements such as customer prioritization, customer demographics, ticket topics, agent workload, or agent availability. 

Pros

Automation: Users have applauded Freshworks’ automation features for minimizing repetitive tasks, increasing productivity, and assuring quick replies to customer queries.³⁵

Help desk usability: Some users say that with Freshdesk it is simple and quick to manage different teams and tickets throughout a service desk setting.³⁶

Customer support: Some users claim that Freshdesk’s customer support team is satisfying in terms of responding quickly to encounters, reviewers highlight that they rarely spend more than 12 hours without receiving a response from Freshdesk.³⁷

Cons

Merging tickets: Some users complain about the merging ticket feature, stating that when long tickets are merged, the extra ticket is completely added as a note, leading to data duplication.³⁸

Email management: Some customers have reported inconsistent and inefficient email management operations using the software.³⁹

Navigation and ticket merging: Some users state that ticket navigation and merges create confusion since they are not separated, and new users may find it challenging.⁴⁰

User Ratings

• Capterra: 4.5/5
• G2: 4.4/5
• Trustradius: 4.3/10

Pricing (per seat/month)

• Growth: $15.00
• Omni-channel growth: $29.00
• Pro: $48.99
• Omni-channel pro: $59.00
• Enterprise: $69.00
• Omni-channel enterprise: $99.00
• Free trial: 14-day⁴¹

5 compared features of Front alternatives

1- AI-powered self-service

AI self-service implies the use of AI instruments to enable customers to solve issues, acquire data, and perform operations autonomously with little or no direct human intervention.

 AI-powered customer support technologies are intended to:

• Recognize text and voice requests.
• Create customized replies using either generative AI models.
• Manage customer queries by follow-up messages or route difficult queries to the best-suited agents.
• Determine the customer intent and sentiment.
• Applying algorithms for keyword recognition.

2- Customer satisfaction surveys (CSAT)

A customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey is used to calculate a CSAT score by asking customers business-related questions such as “What is your level of satisfaction with the product or service of  [ABC enterprise?”. The scale runs from 1 to 10, with 10 representing “strongly satisfied”.

CSAT survey can be used to assess customer demands, identify issues with your products and/or services, or assess customer segmentation based on their results. Survey scales are frequently used to track improvements over time and acquire an improved awareness of how well the organization is achieving customer success.

3- 24/7 customer support

24/7 customer support is a service that assists customers at all hours of the day, regardless of time zone.

4- Software integrations

Software integration is the practice of merging two or more digital systems to extend their capabilities. When the software is connected, they may communicate data and provide information to each other in real-time.

5- Multilingual support

Multilingual support is an approach when a variety of language-accessible customer support services is offered, including addressing customer questions, providing help, and problem-solving in their native or preferred language. Multilingual support ensures that customers can get the most out of the products and services regardless of whether they speak their native or chosen language.  

Transparency statement

AIMultiple serves numerous tech companies, including Salesforce and Zendesk.

Further reading

Read our transparent, up-to-date articles to learn more about social customer service alternatives and customer support tools.

For more on customer service, check out our data-driven list of help desk software.

Contact us to find out more about social customer service:

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External Links

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