What's the Best Shared Inbox Software? 9 Top Tools (2025)

It’s common for companies to start off managing team email by creating distribution lists that route messages to their related departments (e.g., sales@, support@, etc.) or by sharing the login credentials for a dedicated email address. This works well enough when a team is small, but as your team grows and email volume increases, a number of problems crop up.

People send conflicting email replies because they don't realize someone else has already responded. You have to change passwords every time someone leaves the company so they can't continue to access the system. People waste time writing replies only to find out that someone else was also replying and got their message sent off first. The list goes on.

Shared inbox software solves all of these problems and more. It gives your team the tools they need to collaborate on email effectively and efficiently.

If you're ready to upgrade to a better way of managing team email, we've put together this list of the nine best shared inbox software to consider.

What is a shared inbox?

A shared inbox is a single email inbox that multiple users can access and manage using individual logins. It allows teams to collaborate on incoming emails, assign messages, and track responses without forwarding or duplicating emails. Shared inboxes are most commonly used by customer-facing teams like sales and customer support.

The benefits of using shared inbox software

Shared inbox software helps teams:

• Create accountability: Emails in a shared inbox can be assigned to specific team members so everyone knows which messages they are responsible for.

• Promote collaboration: Shared inbox platforms allow you to tag, mention, and leave private notes for other employees when their help is needed to resolve a request.

• Improve organization: Shared inboxes have features like tags and custom fields that can help keep communications organized and assist with routing.

• Increase productivity: Most shared inboxes have workflows that can automate repetitive tasks and canned responses for replying to FAQs quickly, and many also now include AI features that can automatically send or draft replies to customers for you.

• Prevent duplication: Shared inbox software typically comes collision detection features that alert users when someone else is currently replying/has already replied to an email so teams don't waste time on requests that are already being handled.

• Personalize interactions: Many shared inbox tools have easily accessible customer profiles that let you see things like who you're replying to, what their customer status is, what company they work for, and what other emails they've sent to your team.

• Improve security: Each user on your team has their own, individual login for a shared inbox, keeping access to your inbox safe and secure.

• Quantify your efforts: Shared inboxes come with reporting and analytics capabilities that give you insight into your team’s performance.

Key features to look for in shared inbox software

Some shared inbox tools offer hundreds of features, allowing you to manage email and deliver multi-channel support. Others are simpler, offering only a handful of features for basic needs. The right one for your company will depend on your specific needs and budget. 

However, there are some key features to look for in your shared inbox software that are crucial for getting the benefits listed above:

• Automation: While you might not need advanced automation like AI-generated drafts and replies, you should at least look for basic automated workflows that let you send auto-replies, route emails to the right departments, and organize incoming requests.

• Canned responses: One of the best ways to reduce the amount of time it takes to reply to emails is to create templated responses that your team can insert into emails in seconds to reply to frequently asked questions.

• Analytics and reports: Look for tools with reports that help you identify trends and monitor your team's performance to understand where you’re doing well and where you have room for improvement. Easy-to-read dashboards and custom report building capabilities make it easy to stay informed and make data-driven decisions.

• Collaboration tools: Look for features like mentions and private notes that let your team communicate internally about emails before replying, and make sure that there's some form of collision detection that lets team members know when someone else is actively replying or already replied to a customer inquiry.

• Delegation capabilities: At the very least, you'll want to be able to manually assign specific emails to specific team members. But you may also want to look for tools with features like views that let you see only the requests you care about or round-robin for assigning incoming requests to team members equally.

• Organization features: If you have multiple people working on different types of incoming emails, you may want to look for tools with folders, views, and labels, as well as custom form fields that can help with routing requests automatically.

• Integrations: You'll likely want to be able to connect your shared inbox to other tools that contain important customer information, such as your CRM or billing system.

Other things worth considering are the accuracy of the platform's search function for finding historical emails, the availability of the software on mobile if your team replies to emails when away from their desks, and the security capabilities of the platform if you handle protected data.

The 9 best shared inbox software in 2025

Below, you'll find our reviews of the best shared inbox software. We've noted what types of teams each platform is best for, called out some of each tools' unique features, and listed pricing for each so you can find the right solution for your budget.

1. Help Scout – Best shared inbox software for customer support teams

Help Scout's shared inbox has many features designed to make it easier for teams to stay productive, collaborate seamlessly, and deliver exceptional email support.

While some shared inbox tools interrupt your conversations with ticket numbers and login portals, Help Scout is invisible to those who reach out for your support. All they get is a helpful response to their question that looks just like a regular email.

Stay organized as you scale

Help Scout's mailboxes, tags, and assignments can help your team keep things organized:

• Mailboxes sort email messages across teams, brands, products, and email accounts, which is especially helpful if your team is responsible for multiple email addresses.

• Categorize emails by topic or type of issue with tags. These visual indicators help you track different conversations — and they enable topic-specific reporting, too.

• Assign conversations to users through a simple drop-down menu. The user sees all of their assignments in a “mine” folder. You can also search by an assignee to see what a specific team member is working on.

Collaborate as a team

All Help Scout plans come with unlimited user licenses. This makes it possible to give everyone at your company access to the platform so that you can get advice from colleagues in other departments without racking up seat-based costs.

Help Scout also comes with features that make it easy to collaborate on requests behind the scenes before replying to customers. Create a private note to give context to another team member who picks up a request, or @mention a teammate in a private note to send them a notification that you need their help on a request.

Deliver personalized support

When your team picks up a conversation, they have immediate access to the sender’s full profile: what they’ve asked you, their account history, and quick links to other internal systems.

With the full context readily available to them, your team can give a much more personalized and useful reply without slowing their response times. Plus, no one has to suffer through a back-and-forth email chain of you asking for account information.

Stop stepping on each others’ toes

In Help Scout, collision detection indicators enable everyone to see who is working on which issues in real time.

It’s a simple visual notification system:

• When you view your email queue in the inbox, a yellow triangle shows you that another user is viewing a conversation, and a red triangle appears if someone is responding.

• When you are viewing a conversation, a user's avatar is highlighted in red when they are writing a response or leaving a private note.

Another great aspect of collision detection is that it doesn’t allow you to send a message if another person replies while you are working on a response. This prevents customers from receiving duplicate replies or conflicting information.

Save time and effort with workflows, tags, saved replies, and AI

Your team members are most valuable when they’re spending time understanding problems and solving them — not when they’re clicking around in a messy inbox sorting emails.

Use Help Scout to apply tags and create workflows to automate common tasks. For example:

• Automatically assign billing issues to the finance team.

• Identify urgent issues and raise their priorities.

• Give your product team an easy way to review customer feedback on particular issues.

As trends emerge, you can build a library of saved replies. These are email templates that will save you the trouble of having to type the same responses over and over. 

Help Scout also has AI features to help you deliver better responses more quickly.

AI Summarize can create a succinct summary of any conversation with a single click of a button. Use it to quickly get up to speed on pressing issues.

AI Assist is another tool offered in all Help Scout editors (Inbox, Docs, and Messages). It can adjust the length and tone of your responses, correct spelling and grammar mistakes, and even translate a reply into languages like Spanish, Chinese, French, and more.

You can also give your team a head start on every response using AI Drafts, a writing assistant that creates an initial draft for incoming messages based on information from previous conversations and information in your knowledge base. With AI Drafts, all you need to do is review the draft, make any necessary edits, and hit send.

Collect feedback with satisfaction ratings

Help Scout offers the option to include satisfaction surveys at the end of each email your team sends. You can adjust the language and visuals in emails and on the collection page. There’s also the option of including a space for comments.

With this capability, you benefit from capturing the real thoughts and feelings of the people you communicate with every day.

Use your support conversations to create a better organization

Help Scout’s reporting tools help you turn a stream of conversations into usable insights. Understand your customers better than ever by answering questions like:

• When do most people need help, and how responsive are you during those times?

• Which support channels do people want to use, and how is that changing over time?

• What do people think about a new feature or service, and what language do they use to describe it?

• Which types of questions are you best at answering, and which are associated with lower satisfaction?

Provide more than just email support

A shared inbox is just one of the tools your team gets access to when you sign up for a Help Scout plan. You can also use Help Scout to create a knowledge base, offer live chat support, and send visitors proactive messages or microsurveys while they're browsing your website.

If your organization offers phone support, you can use Help Scout's integrations to funnel those conversations into the system. Your team can prioritize and work more efficiently with everything in a central location.

Pricing

Free plan available. Paid plans start at $50 per month.

2. Outlook Shared Mailbox – Best starter shared inbox for Outlook users

If your team is already using Microsoft Outlook, you can also use it to create a shared mailbox that multiple team members can access. Basically, you create the team email address, then you invite others in your organization to give them access to it.

The primary benefit of using a shared mailbox is you're able to give multiple people access to one inbox, which is more secure than sharing logins to a single inbox. 

If you're a small team that doesn't handle a ton of email requests, it's a decent solution that doesn't come with additional costs. However, if you're looking for more advanced efficiency, collaboration, and reporting tools, it won't hit the mark.

Pricing

Free for Microsoft 365 users.

3. Google Collaborative Inbox – Best starter shared inbox for Gmail users

Similar to Outlook's shared mailbox, a Google Collaborative Inbox lets teams set up a shared mailbox associated with a Google Group.

Collaborative Inbox has a few more features than Outlook, such as being able to assign emails to specific employees and set email statuses. While not as powerful as other options on this list, it doesn’t cost anything additional, so it can be a good starter option for small teams.

Pricing

Free for Google Workspace users.

Recommended Reading

Customer Service

Setup Guide: How to Create a Shared Inbox in Gmail

4. Hiver – Best for creating a robust shared inbox in Gmail or Outlook

If you're already using Gmail or Outlook but find that Google's Collaborative Inbox or Outlook's shared mailbox don't have the features you need, Hiver is a good option to consider.

Hiver acts as an add-on to Gmail/Outlook that makes the shared inbox more robust. You can use it to manage email via a shared inbox and branch into other channels like live chat and self-service support.

With Hiver’s shared inbox, you can assign emails to specific people either manually or via round-robin auto-assignment. Other inbox features include private notes, collision detection, shared drafts, and the ability to tag conversations and create rule-based automations.

The software offers analytics for tracking your productivity, plus more advanced features like AI tools and rule-based chatbots, but it should be noted that many of the more advanced features are only offered on higher-cost plans.

Pricing

Free plan available. Paid plans start at $19/user per month.

5. Drag – Best combined shared inbox and project management software

Drag is another option for teams that use Google Workspace. Much like Hiver, Drag is an extension that operates on top of your existing Gmail account. This makes for a gentle learning curve when introducing the platform to your team for the first time.

Drag has all of your standard shared inbox features like email assignments, tagging, @mentions, shared drafts, and collision detection. It also has a team chat feature for easy collaboration with teammates.

The big differentiator for Drag is its project management capabilities. Users can choose between visual Kanban boards or list views to easily manage tasks and checklists along with their emails.

Pricing

Free trial available. Paid plans start at $10/user per month.

6. Front – Best shared inbox software for agencies

Most shared inbox tools are used to manage a group email address (info@, support@, etc.). However, if your team also wants to use a personal email address when responding to messages, Front could be a great option.

Front offers both personal and team email management features. This makes it a great option for agencies where you may need to be able to reply to clients from an individual email address, as well as make sure client requests don't go unanswered when someone is out of the office.

Some of Front's collaborative features include internal comments, shared drafts, canned responses, and internal discussions. The platform also supports live chat, has a knowledge base builder, and has several integrations with third-party tools. It also has more advanced features like analytics, automation, AI features, and CRM integrations on its higher-tier plans.

Pricing

Free trial available. Plans start at $19/seat per month.

7. Zoho TeamInbox – Best shared inbox for teams using other Zoho products

Zoho TeamInbox gives you all of the collaboration tools you need to manage team inboxes, including the ability to delegate or follow threads, tag email conversations for better organization, and snooze messages for later follow up. It's a great option if you're already using other Zoho products and want to stay in its app ecosystem.

TeamInbox takes collaboration a step further by allowing you to chat with teammates from within an email thread when you need their input or even draft a message together in real time.

Beyond collaborative features, TeamInbox has rule-based automations to increase productivity, email templates for quicker replies, and, for those who like to keep all of their emails in one place, you can manage your personal email on the platform as well.

If you’re interested in giving the tool a try, licenses for TeamInbox can be purchased separately, or the app can be accessed as part of the Zoho One suite.

Pricing

Free trial available. Paid plans start at $5/user per month.

8. HubSpot Service Hub – Best shared inbox software for sales teams

Service Hub is HubSpot's product that's aimed at customer service teams, but it's also a great choice for sales teams that need to collaborate on lead, prospect, and customer emails. It integrates instantly with HubSpot CRM, making it easy to see all relevant details and previous interactions in one place. 

HubSpot Service Hub has the basics of what is necessary to manage incoming communications, like a shared inbox and basic reporting capabilities. 

For those interested in offering chat, they have a live chat product as well. You can add the live chat widget to your website to provide real-time responses to questions from leads, and you can also integrate live chat with Slack to manage incoming chats in a shared Slack channel.

Pricing

Free plan available. Paid plans start at $15/seat per month.

9. eDesk – Best shared inbox software for ecommerce companies

eDesk is a shared inbox that's built for ecommerce teams. They have a number of integrations that let you connect with sites like Shopify, eBay, and Amazon. Instead of looking at multiple channels, you’re able to have all those messages in one central inbox.

You’re also able to process refunds and returns for eBay orders directly from eDesk, which can be a huge time saver if you do a lot of business on that platform. 

Beyond that, eDesk offers some more standard features like internal notes, reports, and collision detection — though some of those are only offered on their higher-cost plans.

Pricing

Free trial available. Paid plans start at $39/agent per month.

Runner-up options

If you didn't find the tool that feels right for your organization in the options above, we have a few alternatives you can consider. While we didn't find these platforms to be the best on the market, each offers something unique that might make them the right option for your team:

• Groove: Shared inbox software for customer service teams with a lengthy three-month trial period that gives you lots of time to determine if the platform works for you.

• Zendesk: Highly customizable enterprise customer support platform for managing requests from all support channels in a shared inbox.

• Missive: Good alternative to Front for agencies looking for a shared inbox. You can reply from shared and personal emails and use the platform for task management.

• Gmelius: Good alternative to Hiver and Drag for teams that want to manage email and projects through Gmail using an add-on.

• Emailigistics: Platform with features similar to Hiver that works on top of your existing Outlook shared mailbox.

How to choose the best shared inbox software for your team

Knowing which options are available and the key features to look for is a great starting point when searching for shared inbox software, but it’s only a start. In order to find the best fit for your team, you’ll need to take a few more steps.

Involve your team in the process

The best people to help you select a shared inbox system are your team members. They’re the ones with their hands on the wheel every day, and leaving them out sets a bad precedent.

If you select a system that doesn’t align with known pain points, your team members are a lot less likely to go all-in on the change.

Approach the selection process as a leadership opportunity for at least one full-time individual contributor and one manager. This small group will play an important role in shaping the team’s approach moving forward; make sure they’re excited about the chance to contribute to positive change.

Understand the weaknesses of your current system

Send out a survey to your team asking where your current system is failing to meet your organization's needs. Make sure to go through any big-picture takeaways from their responses as a group to make sure you understand their greatest insights.

Here are some possible questions to explore:

• What do people complain about most?

• If someone writes in with an ongoing issue, what’s your process for understanding past communications?

• Are you happy with the current email response time?

• Do you know how many issues you resolve every day?

• Do you have the permission and capability to turn around a bad experience (give refunds, etc.)?

• How do you measure your own performance every day?

• If you could change one thing about the current email management process, what would it be?

• How often does someone write in saying an issue still hasn’t been resolved?

All of these details set the foundation for you to understand how a new tool can fit in within the larger context of your email support strategy.

Test solutions that align with your needs

Using the key priorities your team has already identified, narrow down the list of potential shared inbox tools to a handful of options.

From there, set aside time to test them all. Ask the team members you appointed to use the software the way they would every day. Run reports, create saved replies, assign conversations to team members, and respond to emails, noticing how the sender's history appears within the software.

As simple as it is to select the software with the most bells and whistles, take the time to hone in on the options that make it easiest to serve your audience’s needs while aligning with your organization's values.

Most of all, consider the solution that has the same level of support that you aspire to provide. Reach out to their support team often and see how well it works on their end; if they don’t live up to your expectations, their software won’t either.

Streamline your work by upgrading to a shared inbox

If your team is running into issues with efficiency, is working over each other when trying to collaborate, or needs more sophisticated reporting tools to keep track of their work, it's probably time to upgrade to a shared inbox tool like the ones listed above.

A shared inbox will go a long way toward ensuring that your customers and clients receive quality support from your team and that your team has the right tools to get the job done.