10 Best Shared Inbox Software of 2026

Help Scout is the easiest way for a small team to stop forwarding messages from support@ and start sharing them. The Free plan covers five users, one Inbox and one Docs site, which is enough for a single support address and a short help center. Customers get replies that look like ordinary email rather than ticket notices, and the team gets saved replies, tags and an AI Inbox assistant. Standard at $25 per user per month adds Multiple Inboxes, live chat, SMS, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, plus one basic SLA policy and basic workflows. Plus at $45 brings round robin routing, two advanced SLA policies, a secure customer portal and light users who can comment without a full seat. The limits are clear: one Inbox on Free, routing only from Plus, and SSO and HIPAA compliance only on Pro. For a team of two to eight people sharing one or two addresses, it is the strongest place to begin.

Missive treats a shared address as a group conversation rather than a ticket. Each email thread can carry an internal chat, a collaborative draft that two people edit together, and tasks with due dates and assignees, so a small team can talk about a customer without leaving the message. It connects Gmail and Google Workspace, Outlook, IMAP, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram and SMS through Twilio, Quo or Dialpad. Starter costs $14 per user per month billed yearly and covers team spaces, inboxes, conversations and tasks for up to five users. Productive at $24 adds rules and automations, integrations with tools such as HubSpot and ClickUp, basic analytics, and API and MCP access for up to 50 users. AI drafts, summaries and translation can run on Missive credits or your own Anthropic, OpenAI or Gemini key. Missive is not a help desk with a customer portal or SLA targets, so pick it when coordination matters more than service metrics.

Drag turns Gmail into a shared workspace by showing team inboxes as boards, so a support@ address becomes columns such as new, waiting and done that teammates move cards through. Starter costs $12 per user per month billed yearly, or $16 monthly, and already includes shared inboxes, kanban, list and preview views, assignments and @mentions, templates, notes and subtasks, a help center, live chat and ten automation rules. Apps cover the Chrome extension, web, desktop and mobile. Plus at $18 adds Drag's AI assistant Varley across the inbox, help center and live chat, plus unlimited automation rules and email sequences. Pro at $24 brings WhatsApp, business hours and SLA rules, round-robin assignment, custom fields and API and MCP access. Every plan has no seat minimum, which suits a two-person shop. The trade-off is reach: Drag is a Gmail product, and reporting windows are short on the lower plans.

Front is the most capable shared inbox here, and it is priced like it. Starter at $25 per seat per month, billed annually, covers up to ten seats with a shared inbox and ticketing, AI Topics, up to ten automation rules, basic analytics and a no-code public knowledge base. That suits a small team answering support@ through one channel type. Professional at $65 per seat adds omnichannel support across email, SMS, social and WhatsApp, macros, up to twenty rules, advanced analytics, up to five workspaces and SSO and SCIM. Enterprise at $105 includes unlimited rules, a multi-language knowledge base, custom roles and AI Copilot, QA and CSAT. Below Enterprise, Copilot costs $20 per seat. The 14-day trial opens Professional features without a credit card. Small teams that only need email will pay more here than with Missive or Drag, but teams expecting to grow into chat and messaging get the longest runway.

Hiver is built for teams that already live in Gmail. Shared addresses such as support@ appear as inboxes your teammates can assign, comment on and track, with a full history of who owns each request. Growth at $25 per user per month, billed annually, covers the shared inbox and ticketing, email and live chat, rule-based automations, pre-built analytics and Slack, plus AI Agents and an AI Copilot that drafts replies and suggests next steps. Hiver also offers a standalone omnichannel version for teams that prefer a separate workspace. The jump to Pro at $55 per user brings a customer portal, SLAs, CSAT surveys, custom dashboards and API access, which is where many growing teams end up. Monthly billing is $10 more per user on every tier, and the trial runs for only seven days on the Elite plan, so plan a focused test week before you sign up.

Freshdesk is the pick when a team wants its shared address to turn into a proper help desk rather than a smarter inbox. Growth costs $19 per agent per month, billed annually, and includes ticketing and a shared inbox, a customer portal with a knowledge base, out-of-the-box inbox analytics, threads and tasks for internal discussion, roles and permissions, and Freddy AI Agent with the first 500 sessions included. Day passes at $2 let an owner or a seasonal helper answer tickets during a busy week. Pro at $55 adds intelligent routing, multiple SLA policies and external collaborators. Customers receive ticket-style replies, which some small businesses find less personal than the email-first tools above, and setup takes longer than a Gmail extension. The trial lasts 14 days and runs on the Enterprise plan, so check which features stay on Growth before you commit.

Keeping keeps things deliberately narrow. It adds shared mailboxes such as help@ to the Gmail account each teammate already uses, then layers on assignment, statuses, notes and reporting. Essentials costs $14 per user per month billed annually, or $19 monthly, with a two-user minimum, and covers two shared mailboxes, up to ten agents, an autoresponder, shared notes with @mentions, collision detection, a mobile and web portal, standard reporting, two workflows and shared templates. Advanced at $24 removes the mailbox and agent caps and adds round robin assignment, CSAT surveys, advanced reporting with CSV export, shared drafts, unlimited workflows, SLAs, custom fields and all integrations. A HIPAA plan at $49 includes an executed BAA, which few Gmail add-ons offer. There is no live chat, social messaging or knowledge base in the published plans, so Keeping fits teams whose customers write by email and who want very little to configure.

Zoho Desk is a full help desk with a free edition, which makes it a practical option for a small team that wants structure without an early bill. The free edition offers three user licenses for email ticketing. The Express edition supports multiple email channels, responses to Instagram, Facebook and X, web forms, direct assignment, workflows, multi-level escalations, contact management and AI agents using your own key or Zoho's model. Standard adds live chat, instant messaging on WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and Telegram, an answer bot, a knowledge base, a community forum, customer happiness ratings and custom reports. That is a lot of capability for the money, but customers receive ticket replies and admins face more settings than in Help Scout or Missive. Zoho's pricing page served prices in Indian rupees from our location, so we have marked USD pricing as pending until we can confirm it.

Gmelius works inside Gmail and Google Workspace and has moved toward AI assistants, while keeping the shared inbox tools small teams buy it for. The $19 Meli plan is a personal AI assistant that drafts, sorts and follows up on email, so it is not a shared inbox on its own. Growth, at $25 per user per month billed yearly or $33 monthly, adds unlimited shared inboxes, unlimited shared labels, automation rules, auto-assignments, most integrations and the API, shared email templates, and SLA and email analytics. Kanban board views, collision detection and email notes with @mentions are in the comparison table. Pro at $40 adds AI dispatching, CRM integrations, webhooks, advanced team analytics and custom permissions. The AI features are a plus, but a team that only needs a shared support@ address pays more here than with Drag or Keeping, and there is no live chat in the published plans.

Trengo is the messaging-first option on this list. Its unified inbox brings email, the WhatsApp Business API and a website chat widget into one shared view, with assignment and forwarding, @mentions and internal comments, conversation labels, custom fields, contact profiles and role-based permissions on every plan. Pricing is per team rather than per user: the Base plan includes three users, up to a maximum of five, and 1,200 conversations a year, while Boost includes ten users and 6,000 conversations and adds automation and AI help. Extra conversations and extra users are sold as add-ons, and broadcasting and voice calling are add-ons on every plan. That model suits a team handling a steady flow of WhatsApp messages, but a small email team can outgrow the conversation allowance quickly. The pricing page served euros from our location, so USD pricing is marked as pending.