Alternatives to a shared inbox tool

A shared inbox tool is priced per person and works per address. That mismatch is what sends most small firms looking for an alternative. A nine-person firm buys nine seats of a queue product to run one general address. The other eight mailboxes are where the actual mistakes happen, and they stay outside it. Count your addresses before you compare anything. Every figure, cap and published limit on this page comes from the company’s own documentation, checked September 6, 2026.

If one address genuinely needs several people working it, the cheapest alternative arrived with your subscription. Microsoft 365 has shared mailboxes that need no license of their own, and Google Workspace has delegation and a Collaborative Inbox.
The free ones have edges, and Microsoft publishes them plainly: 25 users, 50 GB, no way to stop anyone deleting mail, and no encryption on anything the mailbox sends.
If you want a paid product lighter than what you have, the entry rungs are Missive at $14 a user and Help Scout’s free plan at five users. Help Scout’s contact ceiling decides it for most practices.
Read where the AI is metered before you compare sticker prices. Front’s Starter is $25 a seat, and its Copilot add-on is another $20 on top.
If the trouble is work falling between people who each have their own mailbox, a shared inbox won’t reach it, and neither will Point. They’re different fixes, and the section below says which is which.

Count the addresses, not the people

This takes ten minutes, and it decides which half of this page you should read.

A shared inbox product has two units in it. It bills by the seat and manages by the address. Those are unrelated numbers, and the gap between them is where the money goes. Picture a nine-person firm with one info@ address and nine personal mailboxes. It buys nine seats so three people can work one address. The nine mailboxes holding the actual client relationships stay outside the product, unless everybody agrees to move their whole working day inside it.

So write your addresses down and mark each one.

One address, several people, genuinely. A general inquiries line, a documents@ for a busy season, a bookings address. Anyone might answer, nobody owns it, and the failure is two people replying or nobody replying. That’s a queue. It’s what these products are built for, and the rest of this page is about which one to buy.

One address, one person, with cover when they’re out. The bookkeeper’s mailbox that somebody has to be able to reach in August. This is the most common case in a firm of five to fifteen. What it needs is access rather than routing, and access is free.

Ten personal addresses, and things falling between them. Nobody dropped it because nobody was holding it. The mail arrived at somebody’s own address, so a shared inbox sits somewhere else entirely. When an email falls through the cracks between you is the closer diagnosis, and it’s a different purchase.

Most firms find they have some of all three, and that the second one is much the largest. If the mail that goes wrong at your practice mostly arrives at somebody’s own address, you’re shopping in the wrong aisle. Comparing tiers all afternoon leaves that where it is.

The shared mailbox already in your subscription

Whatever else you weigh, price it against this. For a lot of firms it’s the whole answer, and it costs nothing extra.

On Microsoft 365 there’s a shared mailbox, and it’s a real object rather than a workaround. Microsoft’s admin documentation, checked September 6, 2026, states that “A shared mailbox can store up to 50 GB of data without assigning a license to it”. It also states that “To access a shared mailbox, a user must have a licensed Exchange Online mailbox, but the shared mailbox doesn’t require a separate license.” So if your people already have Microsoft 365 seats, the shared address itself is free. People with the right permission send as the mailbox or on its behalf. That’s why the documentation names reception and support desks as the intended use. It reaches Outlook on the web and the Outlook mobile apps.

On Google Workspace the same job is split across two separate things instead.

Delegation is the first. Gmail’s help page describes a delegate as “someone who can read, send, and delete emails in your account for you”, and a work or school account can “Add up to 1,000 delegates”, against 10 on a personal gmail.com address. Two details are worth knowing before you lean on it. When a delegate sends, “their email address appears”, so the recipient sees who actually wrote it. That’s either transparency or an awkwardness, depending on the client. And “It can take up to 24 hours before a delegate can use your account”, which makes it a good answer to a vacation planned in advance and a poor one to somebody falling ill on a Monday.

Collaborative Inbox is the second, and it’s the closer analog to a paid product. It sits on a Google Group. Google’s help page says a member “can assign responsibility for a conversation to yourself or another group member” and mark a conversation as “complete, needing no further action, or a duplicate of another conversation”, with labels across both. Assignment and a resolution status are the two features people most often think they’re buying a shared inbox for. Setting it up is a job for a group owner or manager, who creates the group or enables the features on an existing one and sets the permissions.

Between them, those cover the second shape from the section above completely. If what you needed was for somebody else to get into the mailbox, you’ve already bought it.

Where the free version runs out

Microsoft is unusually candid about its own ceilings, so you can plan around these rather than discover them. All of the following sits on the same admin page, checked September 6, 2026.

Twenty-five users. “A shared mailbox supports a maximum of 25 users. If too many users access the mailbox at the same time, they might experience connection failures or duplicated messages.” A firm of five to fifteen sits well under it. A firm that puts its whole staff plus seasonal help on one busy-season address might get there.
Fifty gigabytes, then a cliff. Past the limit, “you can receive email for some time, but you can’t send new email. After some time, the shared mailbox stops receiving email and senders to the mailbox receive a non-delivery receipt.” Raising it to 100 GB means assigning an Exchange Online Plan 2 license to the mailbox, and the mailbox starts costing money at that point. A general address that’s been collecting attachments for nine years is the one to check.
Nobody can be stopped from deleting. “You can’t prevent users from deleting messages in a shared mailbox.” Microsoft’s own suggestion where that matters is to use a Microsoft 365 group instead.
Nothing sent from it can be encrypted. “Email sent from a shared mailbox can’t be encrypted because the mailbox doesn’t have its own security context (username and password). As a result, it can’t be assigned an encryption key.”
No separate login, by design. “A shared mailbox isn’t intended for direct sign-in by using its associated user account. Always block sign-in for the shared mailbox account and keep it blocked.”
Inside the organization only. “You can’t give people outside your business, such as people with a Gmail account, access to your shared mailbox.” If your part-time bookkeeper is a contractor on her own domain, membership is closed to her.

Then the functional gap, which is the honest reason paid products exist. A shared mailbox has no internal comment on a thread, no indicator that a colleague is already typing a reply, no shared draft, no saved replies everybody uses, and no report on how long anything took. Google’s Collaborative Inbox gives you the assignment and the resolution status, and stops there.

So the test is what your failure actually looks like. If it’s nobody could get in while she was out, the free option solves it today. If it’s two of us answered the same client and one of us was wrong, you need something that says out loud who has this one, and the free option stays quiet.

The paid rungs, and where the AI is metered

Four products cover the realistic range for a firm of five to fifteen. Prices are what each vendor published on September 6, 2026.

Missive is the cheapest real one. Starter is $14 a user a month for up to 5 users, Productive is $24 for up to 50, and Business is $36 for unlimited. It comes with a 30-day trial that takes no credit card. Watch the Starter cap. A limit of 5 users is below the size of most firms asking this question, so a nine-person practice is buying Productive whatever the headline says. The way Missive handles AI is unusual enough to matter to the bill, and Point vs Missive goes through it properly.

Help Scout is the only one here with a permanent free plan, and its shape is specific: 5 users, 1 inbox and 1 Docs site, with a ceiling of 100 contacts per month. That last number is the one that decides it. A support desk answering the same fifty people sits comfortably inside it. A practice where two hundred clients write in during a filing month runs past it, and will be on a paid plan by February. Paid runs $25, $45 and $75 a user a month, with 16 percent off for annual billing. Extra inboxes are $10 a month annually and extra Docs sites are $20. Standard and Plus come with a 15-day trial and take no credit card. Its AI Answers add-on is priced by outcome rather than by seat, at $0.75 a resolution, with three months free.

Hiver works inside Gmail rather than replacing it, which is why firms on Google look at it. Its pricing page shows two figures per plan, the lower one for annual billing: Growth at $25 a user a month annually and $35 monthly, Pro at $55 and $65, Elite at $85 and $95. All plans start at 2 seats, and signing up gives you seven days of Elite.

Front is the heavyweight, and it’s worth being clear that it has moved a long way past being a team email app. Starter is $25 a seat a month for up to 10 seats, Professional is $65 for up to 50, and Enterprise is $105, on annual billing. What the AI costs on the two lower tiers changes every comparison on this page. Copilot is “$20 / seat / month as an add-on”. Smart QA is another $20 and Smart CSAT is $10. Autopilot starts at $0.05 a conversation. Enterprise includes all of them. Front also publishes the line that tells you what kind of product it is: “We require an onboarding package be purchased for contracts over $25k.” Point vs Front works through who it’s actually built for.

Now put nine people through that, for one shared address, over a year.

Microsoft 365 shared mailbox, or Gmail delegation, or a Collaborative Inbox: nothing beyond what you already pay.
Missive Productive: $2,592.
Help Scout Standard, or Hiver Growth: $2,700.
Front Starter: $2,700. With Copilot switched on, $4,860.

That’s a range of nearly five thousand dollars a year for the same address, and the two ends of it do different jobs. What the money buys is the things a shared mailbox has none of: the comment, the assignment, the collision indicator, the saved replies, the report. Whether those are worth $2,700 a year depends entirely on how many messages a week actually land on that address. Twenty a day is a product. Twenty a week is a folder.

Who gets to read all of it

This section is about access rather than price, and it’s the reason some firms are better off leaving their addresses where they are.

A shared inbox is, by construction, the opposite of need-to-know. Everyone in it sees everything that arrives there. For a general inquiries line that’s the entire point, and the decision makes itself. For a practice where the same address receives a client’s bank statements, last year’s return and a copy of a driver’s license, it’s an access decision. Somebody should make it on purpose rather than inherit it from a purchase.

If you prepare returns, that decision has a rule attached to it. Section 314.4(c)(1) of the FTC Safeguards Rule requires a covered firm to “Limit authorized users’ access only to customer information that they need to perform their duties and functions, or, in the case of customers, to access their own information” (16 CFR §314.4(c)(1), checked September 6, 2026). Which firms the rule covers, and what else it asks of a mailbox, is set out in the hidden cost of an unmanaged inbox.

Read that carefully, because it’s narrower than it first sounds. What it asks for is a scope you can justify for the shared address. One general line that four people work, where anything sensitive gets moved out to the engagement partner, is a defensible arrangement and a common one. Nine people in a single pool that receives every client’s documents, because it was simpler to buy one product, is the arrangement that needs an answer. The answer is usually more addresses rather than fewer.

Two of Microsoft’s published facts belong here rather than in the pricing section, because they’re structural rather than commercial. Nobody in a shared mailbox can be prevented from deleting messages. And nothing sent from a shared mailbox can be encrypted, because it has no security context of its own to hold a key. Microsoft publishes both plainly, and both follow from what a shared mailbox is. If your firm’s answer to a client’s request for something confidential goes out from the shared address, that’s worth knowing before somebody asks.

Put the equivalent question to a paid product in writing rather than assume the answer. Ask whether a person can be scoped to some inboxes and not others. Ask whether there’s a record of who read a message and who deleted it, and whether that record survives the person leaving. The confidentiality questions worth asking any vendor is the list to take into the call, and it applies to a shared inbox vendor exactly as it does to an AI one.

When the shared address was never the problem

Here’s the other half of the readership. If this is you, everything above is somebody else’s page.

A lot of firms buy a shared inbox after a bad week where every problem happened in somebody’s own mailbox. A client’s question sits in a partner’s mailbox for four days while he assumes his colleague has it. A document request arrives on a Thursday and gets answered the following Wednesday, because the person it landed on was in a meeting when it came in and never saw it again. Both of those are personal-mailbox problems. They’re the same problem twice: the mail arrives in an individual’s mailbox, and the fact that somebody has it lives only in that person’s head.

A shared inbox reaches mail that arrives at a shared address, and this mail arrived somewhere else. Moving everything into one pool to fix it usually makes it worse, because it takes correspondence that had a clear owner and gives it to nobody. When you stop having to ask who has it is the version of that argument at two partners, and covering for each other when one of you is out is what it looks like across a week.

That’s the ground Point is built for, and one thing is worth saying before anything else.

Point is not a shared inbox and does not offer one. Everyone signs in as themselves and connects their own Gmail or Microsoft 365 mailbox. What a firm shares is the organization, not a login, and there’s no single pooled view of one address that several people work. If the first shape from the top of this page is what you have, the earlier sections are your page.

What Point does instead is aimed at the mailbox that stays personal.

Arriving mail is scored for how much it matters and how soon. The thing that can’t wait sits at the top, rather than the thing that came in most recently. A first-time sender gets scored on the same basis as a partner, and you flag nobody in advance. Mattering and being urgent are two separate readings, and important versus urgent is where they get confused.
A summary in ordinary words sits on every thread, so you can tell what’s being asked of you from the feed.
An ask buried three paragraphs into a reply becomes a dated task with a date on it. A thread that’s gone quiet comes back on the day you picked. What to do about a thread nobody answered covers that.
A request to meet goes to Point. Point runs the back-and-forth, and a real event lands on the calendar.
Email and team chat sit in one feed. That’s where a firm of a few people settles the “who has it” question: one sentence in a channel both of you are in, kept next to the mail it refers to.
Point writes its decisions back to the mailbox, so a thread you clear in Point is archived where Outlook or the Gmail app finds it.

For a firm holding client financial data, the deciding question is usually how far the software may go, rather than how well it sorts. That’s a setting rather than a promise, and it’s set separately for sorting, for drafting and for arranging a meeting. Each one ships on review: Point prepares, then waits for you. You raise the ones you’ve decided you trust, one at a time. The top of the range lets Point act unprompted, which is the reason the range exists. Underneath sits a log in plain sentences naming the thread each action touched, and most of it reverses in a click. How the levels behave is set out in the autonomy dial. Mail written to trick whatever reads it is held in quarantine before the AI sees it. If you run more than one business, each one is kept out of the other’s view.

One caveat applies to every product on this page, paid or free. Once an email is sent it sits on somebody else’s server, and it stays there, whatever any of us implies.

Where a shared inbox is genuinely the better buy, said once. Buy the shared inbox if several people work one address at volume. Buy it if you need to know whether the team answered faster this quarter than last. Buy it if you’ve promised a client-facing service level, or if your inbound arrives by text and chat as well as mail. Those are real capabilities, Point lacks them, and a queue that’s actually being worked is what does that job.

What to settle before you switch

You can answer all of these from where you’re sitting, and any one of them can turn out to be the whole decision.

How many of your addresses are actually shared? If the answer is one, price the free option first. A per-seat product for the whole firm usually needs more than a single shared address to earn it.
What’s the cap on the tier you want? Missive’s Starter stops at 5 users, Front’s Starter at 10, Help Scout’s free plan at 5 users and 100 contacts a month, and a Microsoft 365 shared mailbox at 25 users, all checked September 6, 2026. Two of those bite a nine-person firm.
Is the AI in the price or on top of it? Front sells Copilot at $20 a seat a month on Starter and Professional, and Help Scout charges $0.75 a resolution. Compare the number you’d actually pay with the features on.
Who sets it up, and out of whose week? Routing rules, tags, response targets and reporting are how these products earn their money, and every one of them is configured by hand. A practice with no operations lead is quietly volunteering the owner for that job, on top of the workload that sent her shopping. Front requires a purchased onboarding package above $25,000 in contract value, which is a fair signal of how much setup the category assumes.
What comes with you if you leave? The mail is yours either way. The comments, the assignments and the internal notes belong to the product. Ask what the export contains before you sign.
Can access be narrowed, and is deletion recorded? Microsoft publishes that deletion can’t be prevented in a shared mailbox. Ask each paid vendor the same question, and keep the answer.
What are you paying for twice? If you already have Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, some of what you’re about to buy is already on the invoice. What an AI email client costs does the whole sum for the adjacent category, tools you stop paying for included.

Common questions

What is the cheapest alternative to a shared inbox tool?

The one in your existing subscription. Microsoft 365 shared mailboxes need no license of their own, per Microsoft’s admin documentation. Google Workspace offers delegation of up to 1,000 delegates on a work account, plus a Collaborative Inbox that supports assignment and a resolution status. All of it was checked September 6, 2026. If your real requirement is that somebody else can get into a mailbox, that’s the entire answer, and it costs nothing extra. What you give up is an internal comment on a thread, a sign that a colleague is already replying, and any report on how long things took.

Is a Microsoft 365 shared mailbox a real alternative to Front or Help Scout?

For coverage, yes. For running a queue the gap is specific rather than a matter of polish. A shared mailbox has no assignment, no internal notes, no collision detection and no analytics. It carries published limits worth planning around too. There’s a maximum of 25 users, and 50 GB before sending stops. Anyone in it can delete mail, and anything sent from it goes out unencrypted. All of it was checked September 6, 2026. If four people answer twenty messages a day at one address and occasionally trip over each other, the paid product earns its money. If two people check one address twice a day, the free one is already enough.

What is the best free shared inbox for a small team?

There are two honest candidates, and they suit different firms. Google’s Collaborative Inbox is a feature of Google Groups rather than a separate purchase. It gives you the two things people usually mean by a shared inbox: assignment and a resolution status. A group owner or manager has to create or enable the group and set the permissions first. Help Scout publishes a permanent free plan with 5 users, 1 inbox and 1 Docs site, and it’s a real product rather than a trial. Its ceiling of 100 contacts a month is low for a professional practice, where a filing season means hundreds of clients writing in. Both were checked September 6, 2026.

Can Google Workspace do a shared inbox?

Not as one object, which surprises firms moving from Microsoft. It splits the job in two. Delegation gives named people read, send and delete access to somebody’s mailbox. The delegate’s own address appears on anything they send, and access takes up to 24 hours to start. Collaborative Inbox turns a Google Group into something closer to a queue, with conversations assigned to a member and marked complete, needing no further action, or a duplicate. Checked September 6, 2026. Between them they cover most of what a small firm means by a shared inbox. A shared draft and a response-time report are what you’d still be missing.

Is Missive a cheaper alternative to Front?

At the sizes small firms actually buy, yes, and the gap widens once the AI is counted. Checked September 6, 2026, Missive’s Productive tier is $24 a user a month for up to 50 users, against Front’s Professional at $65 a seat for the same ceiling. Front’s Copilot is a further $20 a seat on anything below Enterprise. Missive’s Starter at $14 stops at 5 users, so most firms asking this are comparing $24 with $65. The two products differ, and Point vs Front and Point vs Missive each go through what the higher price is buying.

Do we need a shared inbox at all if there are five of us?

Probably not, and the question to settle is how much of your mail arrives at an address that belongs to nobody. In most professional practices that’s a small fraction, because clients write to the person they know. A shared inbox priced per seat to manage that fraction is an expensive way to solve a filing problem. Where it earns its place is a genuine general line with real daily volume, or an address a client-facing promise is attached to. Running the firm inbox works through the version of this in an accounting practice.

Is Point a shared inbox alternative?

Only for one kind of reader. Point is not a shared inbox and does not offer one: everyone signs in as themselves and connects their own mailbox, and there’s no pooled view of a single address. If several people genuinely work one address, buy one of the products above. If you were shopping for a shared inbox because things fall between colleagues who each have their own mailbox, that’s a different problem, and the mail landed on a personal address rather than a shared one. Point works on the personal mailbox: what landed, what it commits you to, and by when.

What is the alternative for a firm on Microsoft 365 specifically?

Start with the shared mailbox, because it’s included and Microsoft documents its limits honestly. If you outgrow it, the first thing to check about any paid product is whether it accepts a Microsoft account at all. A good deal of this software is built Gmail-first, and Alternatives to Superhuman for small firms names a well-known nearby product that publishes a flat no. Ask each vendor about your exact provider before the demo. Point takes a Microsoft 365 mailbox and its calendar on the same footing as a Google one. The sorting lands in the mailbox itself, so what you clear is cleared in Outlook too. Point vs Outlook goes through that.

The short version

Count addresses, not people. A shared inbox tool bills per seat and manages per address, and most small firms have one shared address and a personal mailbox for every person in the building.
If the requirement is coverage rather than a queue, you’ve already paid for it. Microsoft 365 shared mailboxes need no license of their own. Google Workspace has delegation, and Collaborative Inbox is a feature of Google Groups with assignment and a resolution status.
Microsoft publishes the ceilings. There are 25 users and 50 GB before sending stops, with no way to prevent deletion, no encryption on outbound and no external members, checked September 6, 2026.
Paid, for nine people over a year: Missive Productive $2,592, Help Scout Standard and Hiver Growth $2,700, Front Starter $2,700 and $4,860 with Copilot. What the money buys is comments, assignment, collision detection and reporting.
A shared address is an access decision as well as a workflow one. Section 314.4(c)(1) of the FTC Safeguards Rule requires covered firms to limit users’ access to the customer information they need for their duties, and a pooled inbox is the opposite arrangement by design.
If the real failure is a client’s question sitting in one person’s mailbox while everyone assumed somebody else had it, no shared inbox reaches it, and Point is not a shared inbox either. Point works on the mailbox that stays personal.

If what you’re really shopping for is a replacement mail app rather than a way to share one address, the shortlist has almost none of these names on it. That comparison is done in Alternatives to Superhuman for small firms, and what the first week of any change of this kind asks of you is in switching to an AI email client.

Point’s capabilities are set out plainly, one line each, on the benefits page, and the home page shows a normal Tuesday rather than a feature table. That tends to settle the question faster. There’s a version of the same week for accounting and tax practices and one for each of the other trades this was built around.