How to read these pages
Each comparison covers one product against those five criteria and records the date its own public pages were last checked. None of them ranks a winner. A tool built for a 200-person support organization is not failing when it suits a six-person team badly; it was built for someone else, and saying so is more useful than a score.
We sell one of the options, so treat our reading of the criteria as a starting point and check each vendor's current pages yourself. The review date on a row tells you how old our reading is. Where something could not be confirmed from a vendor's own pages, the comparison says so rather than guessing.
Product boundary: DuoInbox's pricing, packaging, and availability are not published. No page here carries a price, a plan tier, or a cost comparison — ours or anyone else's.
The five criteria
- Access model
- How the tool reaches your mail. Some options run inside the Gmail interface as an extension, some connect as a server-side application through OAuth, and some move the work into a separate interface of their own. Ask what scope the connection requests, whether that scope can be narrowed to one workflow rather than the whole mailbox, and how quickly access can be withdrawn.
- Where automation runs
- Rules either run in a browser while somebody has the tab open, or run server-side whether or not anyone is signed in. That difference decides what happens to a queue overnight, what happens when the person who wrote the rule is away, and whether a rule behaves as a personal preference or as a team policy.
- What is auditable
- After the fact, what can a reviewer reconstruct? Ask what record exists for the condition that started a piece of work, the actions taken during it, the recipient of anything sent, and the person who approved the send. A tool that shows current state but keeps no history answers a different question from one that records the sequence.
- Who owns the agent
- Where an AI feature is involved, ask whose agent it is. A vendor-bundled agent arrives with the plan and the vendor defines what it does. A customer-owned agent is configured by the team, scoped to a workflow they wrote, and reaches mail under permissions they set. Neither is automatically the right answer; they answer to different people.
- Team-size fit
- Most tools in this category are shaped for a team size. Something built for a 200-person support organization carries roles, routing, and reporting a six-person team pays for and never uses. Something built for six people runs out of structure at sixty. Judge fit by the smallest team the tool still makes sense for, not by the length of its feature list.
Published comparisons
A comparison appears here once someone has read the vendor's own current public pages and dated what they found. Anything older than a quarter gets re-checked or removed.
| Comparison | What it covers | Reviewed on |
|---|---|---|
| Front alternatives | Front's published plan prices, seat caps, and AI add-on pricing, and who should stay on Front. | |
| Hiver alternatives | Hiver's published price ladder, AI feature tiering, and its own AI-guardrails and human-review statements, and who should stay on Hiver. |
While the table is short
The criteria are useful without a comparison beside them. How DuoInbox works walks the same ground for one product: what starts a run, what the run may reach, and what stops before anything leaves. Controls lists what an operator can set and stop, and Security states plainly which questions we cannot answer yet.
For the category itself rather than a product, team inbox software sorts the five shapes this cluster compares within, and the rest of the guides cover agent permissions, review states, and audit history without naming a vendor.
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