Priced at the first seat
Per user per month, annual billing, read from each vendor’s own pricing page on 2026-08-22. The column that decides most small-business purchases is the last one.
| Tool | From | Mac app | Your support address |
|---|---|---|---|
| Missive | $14 per user (Starter) | Electron | Connects your mailbox over IMAP, syncs to their cloud |
| Help Scout | $25 per user (Standard) | Web only | Forwards your address into their inbox |
| Front | $25 per user (Starter) | Electron | Connects your mailbox, syncs it to their cloud |
| Zoho Desk | $7 per user (Express) | Web only | Forwards your address into their inbox |
| Gmail | Free | Web only | It is your mailbox |
The five, and what each is actually for
Missive: Best value for a real team
The cheapest entry price of the genuine shared inboxes, and the collaboration is the point rather than an add-on: several people draft one reply, with team chat sitting beside the thread.
Watch for: Starter leaves out rules, integrations and API access, and the tier that includes them is $24 a user.
Help Scout: Best if replies should not look like tickets
Customers receive ordinary email with no ticket numbers or reference footers, which for a small business selling to humans is worth more than the feature list suggests. The free tier covers five users.
Watch for: The most expensive entry price here at $25 a user, and AI Answers bills separately at roughly $0.75 a resolution.
Front: Best for heavy internal collaboration
Comments, mentions and assignment inside the thread, with the strongest workflow tooling of the group. If two or three people genuinely work the same queue, this is what that feels like done properly.
Watch for: Starter caps the team size and holds back rules and analytics; most reviews describe the $65 seat. It is an Electron app, not native.
Zoho Desk: Best free option, and cheapest paid
Three agents free on one email channel with no expiry, then $7 an agent. Nothing else here is close on price, and if you already run Zoho the integration is real.
Watch for: It is ticketing rather than a shared inbox proper, so replies carry the queue with them. Web only.
Gmail: Best until it is not
A Google Group or a delegated mailbox gives several people access to one address for nothing, using software everyone already knows. For a small business with low volume this is a legitimate answer and not a cop-out.
Watch for: No assignment, no way to see who is replying, and two people answering the same customer twice is a matter of time rather than bad luck.
Shared inbox or help desk?
The words get used interchangeably and they describe two different experiences for the person you are replying to.
- A shared inbox keeps it looking like email. No ticket number, no reference footer, no portal. The coordination happens on your side and the customer never sees it. Missive, Front and Help Scout are built this way.
- A help desk makes it a ticket. A status, a queue, a routing rule and usually an identifier the customer sees. That is the correct trade once volume, routing or SLA reporting matter. Zoho Desk, Zendesk and Freshdesk are built this way.
For a small business selling to humans, the email-shaped option is usually worth the extra money. For a small business handling hundreds of requests a day, it is not.
If you are the only person answering
Then the premise of this page does not apply to you, and it is worth saying so before you spend anything.
Every product above is priced per seat because its value is coordination: assignment so two people do not reply at once, internal notes so a colleague has context, analytics so someone can see who handled what. With one seat, none of that does anything. You are buying a team feature set and using the inbox.
The failure a single founder actually has is different, and no tool on this page models it. A mailbox has two states, read and unread, and archiving clears it. Support work has four: not yet read, being worked on, done but not communicated, and closed. The third is the one that costs money, because the bug got fixed, the release shipped, and nobody told the person who reported it. In a mailbox, and in a ticket queue, that looks exactly like a finished job.
Questions people actually ask
What is the best shared inbox for a small business?
Missive if you want the most capability per dollar for a real team, Help Scout if it matters that customers receive ordinary email rather than tickets, Front if two or more people genuinely collaborate on the same replies, and Zoho Desk if price is the deciding factor or you need a free tier. A Google Group is a legitimate starting point at low volume.
What is the difference between a shared inbox and a help desk?
A shared inbox keeps the conversation looking like email: the customer gets a normal reply, and the collaboration happens invisibly on your side. A help desk turns each conversation into a ticket with a status, a queue and usually a reference number the customer sees. Shared inboxes suit businesses selling to people; help desks suit volume, routing and SLA reporting.
Do I need a shared inbox if I am the only person answering?
No, and this is worth being direct about. Every product in this category prices and designs around coordinating people. If there is nobody to coordinate with, the features you are paying for are the ones you will never open. What a single person usually needs instead is a way to tell apart a thread they finished from a thread they finished and told the customer about, which is a different problem and not one a shared inbox solves.
How much does a shared inbox cost?
Per user per month on annual billing: Zoho Desk from $7, Missive from $14, Front and Help Scout from $25. Multiply by seats, then check what the entry tier leaves out, because in most cases the plan being reviewed is a tier above the one being advertised.
Is there a shared inbox with a native Mac app?
Not really. Front and Missive ship desktop clients built on Electron, which are web apps in a window rather than native applications. Help Scout, Zendesk, Freshdesk and Zoho Desk are web only. If a genuinely native Mac client is a requirement, the category does not currently have one, which is part of why Moorline exists for the single-user case.
Pricing read from each vendor’s published pricing page on 2026-08-22. These change, and the entry tier is frequently not the tier being reviewed elsewhere, so confirm the plan as well as the number before you commit.