If your team is sharing a login, relying on CCs and BCCs to loop people in, or stretching Gmail's or Outlook's shared mailbox tools beyond what they were designed for, you're probably losing emails, duplicating work, and operating without any visibility into how your team is actually performing.

Dedicated email management software solves these problems. The tools on this list give teams a shared inbox that multiple people can work out of simultaneously without stepping on each other's toes — plus features for assigning emails, collaborating on replies, and reporting on response times and volume.

To help you find the right tool for your team, we've compiled this list of the nine best email management software. Below, you'll find our detailed reviews of each platform, including who they're best for, what unique features they offer, and how each compares on price.

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PlatformSummaryG2 RatingFree TrialStarting Price

Help Scout

Best for relationship-driven businesses, Help Scout gives your team the tools they need to stay organized, collaborate effectively, and reply quickly without sacrificing quality.

4.4/5

15 days

Free for up to five users; paid plans start at $25/user per month

Front

Best for managing personal and team email inboxes in the same system, Front lets you collaborate with teammates regardless of where a customer sent their request.

4.7/5

14 days

$25/seat per month

Gmelius

Best for team email management inside of Gmail, Gmelius adds features like reporting, AI assistants, and SLAs to your existing Gmail Collaborative Inbox.

4.4/5

7 days

$25/user per month

Drag

Best for internal support teams, Drag is a low-cost and simple solution for teams like HR and finance that want to take a project-management approach to replying to emails.

4.5/5

7 days

$12/user per month

Emailgistics

Best for team email management in Outlook, Emailgistics adds features like reporting, assignments, and automation to your existing Outlook shared mailbox.

4.7/5

Not available

$11/user per month

Ideagen Mail Manager

Best for creating archives of individual emails in Outlook, Ideagen Mail Manager saves incoming and outgoing emails to searchable project folders for future reference.

4.3/5

Available by request

Contact for pricing

eDesk

Best for ecommerce companies, eDesk integrates with several ecommerce platforms and marketplaces to give you the data you need to respond to emails quickly.

4.5/5

14 days

$39/agent per month

Hiver

Best for teams on a tight budget, Hiver's free plan lets you add unlimited users and manage email, live chat, and Slack requests as a team from a single shared inbox.

Not rated

7 days

Free plan available; paid plans start at $25/user per month

Missive

Best for agencies, Missive combines email management, task tracking, and internal messaging into one system to help you collaborate as a team on client requests.

4.7/5

30 days

$14/user per month

1. Help Scout – Best for relationship-driven businesses

Inbox-ListView-Blog-MediaLibrary

Help Scout is ideal for businesses in industries like financial services, property management, logistics, healthcare, education, manufacturing, and professional services where the quality of support you provide directly impacts your bottom line. It comes with features that make it easy to stay organized so nothing slips through the cracks, collaborate efficiently as a team, and reply quickly without sacrificing quality.

You can create multiple mailboxes in Help Scout for different departments, or you can create teams to assign requests to a specific group of individuals while all working together in the same inbox. When emails come in, you can assign them to individuals/teams manually or automatically, and everyone on your team can create custom views that let them filter the inbox to see what's most important to them.

Collaboration features in Help Scout make it easy to resolve requests as a team. Collision detection notifies you when someone else is actively replying or has already replied to a request. Teammates can have back-and-forth discussions on requests with private notes, @mentioning any coworkers they need input from. An @mention notifies the person who was mentioned so they can jump in and respond.

There are also a number of features that let you send high-quality responses more quickly. Saved replies let you create a library of default responses to FAQs that can be inserted into replies in just two clicks. You can use Help Scout to create a knowledge base, then you can search for relevant knowledge base articles from within the email conversation interface and insert links to them directly into your replies.

And while saved replies and linking to knowledge base articles are great for FAQs, AI Drafts are ideal for replying to more nuanced questions. AI Drafts use generative AI to write a draft response for you using information from previous replies your team has sent. All you need to do is review the draft for accuracy, edit it if necessary, and click send. AI can also translate responses and fix spelling and grammar errors.

Finally, customer profiles appear in a sidebar alongside every conversation so you can get the information you need to reply quickly and personalize your reply. In addition to default data like names, companies, email addresses, and previous support conversations, you can add custom properties that display in the sidebar, and you can integrate with 100+ third-party platforms to pull in information from other systems.

Pricing

Free plan and trial available. View Help Scout's current pricing.

2. Front – Best for managing personal and team email inboxes

Front - Individual Inbox

Front's unique feature is that it lets you manage both team and personal inboxes in the same system. It's helpful to think of it like Slack. You can have a team inbox that's accessible to multiple individuals — similar to a Slack channel — as well as individual email inboxes for one-to-one communications, like Slack DMs. Once everything's set up, you can toggle back and forth between the inboxes in the same interface.

This is great for getting all email communications into one centralized tool, but there are other benefits too. Front also allows you to share emails in your personal inbox with others on your team. For example, if you receive a personal email about a billing question that you don't know how to answer, you can simply mention someone in billing or assign the email to that team — no forwarding or CCing required.

Additionally, if someone on your team is going to be out of the office, their personal inbox can be shared with another team member. That person will be able to view and reply to all emails received. This eliminates the need for out-of-office messages specifying who to reach out to instead and ensures that all of your customers get the help they need regardless of where they send their questions and requests.

As far as collaborative email management, Front lets you create reusable reply templates, have private conversations with coworkers alongside email conversations, and assign requests to individuals/teams either manually or automatically. There's also a guest collaborator feature that lets you share an email with anyone — even if they don't have a Front account — so they can view it and comment on it privately.

Front also offers a number of AI features. You can generate draft replies to emails, turn on autopilot to have AI reply to requests automatically, and use a copilot to refine or translate replies you wrote yourself. There's a Topics feature that reports on the most common reasons why customers contact you, a Smart QA tool that surfaces issues in responses, and a Smart CSAT feature that adds CSAT scores to all replies.

Pricing

Free trial available. View Front's current pricing.

3. Gmelius – Best for collaborating on shared email accounts in Gmail

Google Groups Alternatives - Gmelius

Most team email management tools use your existing email provider only for sending and receiving emails. All management of those emails is done in a separate platform. Gmelius is different. Instead of moving your email to a separate platform, it works on top of your existing Gmail individual and Collaborative Inbox accounts, adding additional email management features to Gmail's core interface.

You set up Gmelius by adding all of your shared email addresses to it. Then, you choose which of your Google Workspace users should have access to those shared email addresses. Shared inboxes then appear as folders in each assigned user's personal Gmail account, and users can access those inboxes by clicking into the shared email folders.

You can also assign emails from your shared inboxes to individual team members, or you can set up round-robin or load-based routing to assign requests automatically. Emails that have been assigned to an individual will show up in a separate "Assigned" folder for quick access. Emails can be marked as open, pending, or closed, and you can add tags to emails to highlight important information.

Gmelius also offers most of the standard features you'll find in all team email management tools: collision detection, private notes and @mentions, saved replies, custom views, and tags. Plus, you'll get access to a handful of more sophisticated features like SLAs, automated workflows, and an AI executive assistant that writes draft replies, sorts your inbox, schedules meetings, and provides an overview of your day.

The best thing about Gmelius is that it adds reporting — a feature that's not available in Google Collaborative Inbox. You'll be able to see metrics like average time to close both for individual team members and overall, and you'll get reports detailing your busiest times of the day and days of the week, your progress toward hitting your SLAs, and trends in requests that had specific tags applied to them.

Pricing

Free trial available. View Gmelius' current pricing.

4. Drag – Best for internal support teams

Product Screenshot: Drag

Drag is a low-cost option for internal support teams like HR, finance, facilities, and legal that need a simple way to manage large volumes of email as a team. Like Gmelius, Drag works inside of your existing Gmail account, adding additional features that make it easy to collaborate on sending replies.

Inboxes in Drag can appear in either a list view or as a Kanban board. The Kanban board view is helpful for showing what's waiting for a reply and what's already in progress, or you can set up custom lanes for a more project-management-style workflow. Emails turn into cards in the Kanban board. They can be assigned to team members, due dates can be set, and you can even add individual task lists to them.

Another unique feature of Drag is read receipts, which allow you to see if someone you emailed has read your reply: if they've opened the email, when they opened it, and how many times they opened it. Additionally, you can select who replies are sent from — either individual accounts or team email addresses — as a default for the inbox as a whole or for the individual emails you're responding to. 

For collaboration, Drag offers features like collision detection, private notes, shared drafts, and email templates. You get a handful of pre-built reports for things like first response times, average response times, user performance, and tags and SLAs. You can also export the data as a CSV if you want to build custom reports that aren't available in Drag.

Like the other tools on this list, Drag also offers a handful of AI and automation features. AI can sort and assign emails based on rules you set, draft replies to emails for you, summarize long back-and-forth conversations, and clean up spelling and grammar issues in replies you've written. When its AI feature writes a reply for you, it will also provide its source material for you to reference when evaluating it.

Pricing

Free trial available. View Drag's current pricing.

5. Emailgistics – Best for collaborating on shared email accounts in Outlook

emailgistics

Gmelius and Drag are great if you're already using Gmail or Google Collaborative Inbox and want to continue working out of those tools, but if your team uses Outlook and wants to stay there, Emailgistics is your best option. It’s an extension that works with your current Outlook shared mailbox, adding features like assignments, reporting, conversation histories, response templates, and team scheduling.

One of the biggest downsides of Outlook's shared mailbox is that it doesn't support assigning emails to individual teammates. That can make it difficult to know who's responsible for what — or who's handling what. Emailgistics solves this problem with manual and automatic assignments. Assign emails to users individually, or assign requests automatically by creating rule trees to specify conditions.

Rules in Emailgistics can also automate other actions in your inbox. They can automatically apply tags to specific types of emails, send auto-replies to customers to let them know their requests were received, and prioritize emails based on things like who sent the email or how long they've been waiting for a reply.

As far as collaboration features, you can have private conversations with coworkers using internal notes, set your availability so the system knows when individuals can and can't accept new assignments, and see all previous conversations with a customer alongside a new email request. You can also reply faster with AI-generated draft replies and get up to speed quickly with AI-generated conversation summaries.

The best thing about Emailgistics is that it adds detailed reporting to your Outlook shared mailbox. You can view all of your key metrics on a dashboard that updates in real time; view volumes, response times, and resolution rates by mailbox or user; and get reports showing if you're hitting your SLAs. Your dashboard can also be customized with specific widgets to make it easy to keep an eye on key metrics.

Pricing

No free trial offered. View Emailgistics’ current pricing.

6. Ideagen Mail Manager – Best for creating an archive of individual Outlook emails

Email Management Software - Ideagen Product Screenshot

If you don't need a shared email inbox but do need better insight into the decisions that are being made about projects in individual email conversations, Ideagen Mail Manager is a good option to consider. Rather than giving teams a shared inbox where they can collaborate on emails together, it gives you tools to file sent and received emails from Outlook into searchable project folders.

Mail Manager does this by monitoring behavior, the content of emails, and senders/recipients to learn which project folders emails should be saved in. Anyone at your company can search all of your archived emails to find the information they need. Searching emails is quick and efficient: Use advanced filters to find what you need and search through millions of emails in seconds.

All emails are saved on your own servers — or in applications like SharePoint, Viewpoint, Procore, or OneDrive — so you aren't required to keep Mail Manager forever in order to retain access to your data. Additionally, if you also communicate with clients or teammates using Microsoft Teams, those chats can also be archived using Mail Manager so they're searchable alongside email communications.

Pricing

Free trial available. Contact Ideagen Mail Manager for pricing.

7. eDesk – Best for ecommerce companies

edesk

Built specifically for ecommerce companies, eDesk brings all of your customer communications into a central shared inbox. It integrates with ecommerce platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce, marketplaces like Amazon and eBay, social media sites like TikTok Shop and Facebook, and shipping platforms like AfterShip and ShipStation to give you everything you need to reply to customer emails.

Its ecommerce platform integrations show you customer order data alongside email requests. In a sidebar for every email conversation, you'll be able to see data like current and previous orders, customer lifetime value, and previous support conversations. You can process refunds, cancel orders, and make edits to orders directly in eDesk; the changes you make will sync to your integrated platforms.

You can also pull in requests from Amazon, eBay, Walmart, and TikTok Shop and manage those in your shared inbox as well. There are tools to help you meet Amazon's response time requirements and to request reviews from customers automatically. And if you're selling products globally, there's also AI translation built in so you can automatically translate incoming and outgoing emails into other languages.

When it comes to managing emails in eDesk, you can add tags and set up custom fields, change ticket statuses, merge or split requests into one or multiple tickets, and snooze emails that don't need replies right away. For collaboration, you can assign requests to individuals or teams, use collision detection to avoid duplicate work, tag teammates when you need help, and create shared custom inbox views.

Like many of the other tools on this list, eDesk also offers several AI features. You'll get suggested replies that you can insert into responses, AI classification that automatically detects topics and priorities, and an AI agent that responds to queries across all channels both pre-sale and post-sale. Finally, you get access to detailed reports that show you team performance, volume across channels, and CSAT scores.

Pricing

Free trial available. View eDesk's current pricing.

8. Hiver – Best free email management software

Hiver Screenshot

If you have a tight budget and need something that's free but also more feature-rich than Google Collaborative Inbox or an Outlook shared mailbox, Hiver might be right for you. Like Help Scout, it offers a free plan, but Hiver's is more generous. On Help Scout's free plan, you can only add up to five users. On Hiver's, you can add unlimited users.

Hiver's free plan includes a lot of features that are a significant improvement over Gmail's and Outlook's free shared inbox tools. You can assign incoming emails to individuals, filter your inbox with custom views, store and manage customer information, and add private notes to collaborate with teammates. You also get access to Hiver's default reporting, though custom and advanced reports will require a paid plan.

There are some restrictions on features and capabilities in the free plan. For example, you can only create a single tag and one email template, you can only create one shared inbox, and you can only add one email alias. Collision detection and automation are only in paid plans. But if your needs are simple — you just want a shared inbox with assignments and reporting — those limitations probably aren't a big deal.

Live chat is also included in Hiver's free plan, which is helpful if you're thinking about expanding into new channels, and you can also build an external help center with custom branding that's hosted on your own domain. And while most of Hiver's AI features are exclusive to paid plan subscribers, free plan customers do get access to the platform's copilot that suggests responses and next steps for your team's reference.

Finally, while most of Hiver's integrations are only available on paid plans, you can integrate with Slack on the free plan. The Slack integration will let you pull requests that customers sent via Slack into your shared inbox, or you can use the integration to send Slack messages for other internal teams to get the information you need to reply without leaving Hiver.

Pricing

Free plan and trial available. View Hiver's current pricing.

9. Missive – Best for agencies

Product Screenshot: Missive

Missive is a good fit for agencies because it combines email management with built-in task tracking, letting you turn incoming emails into assignable, trackable work items without switching to a separate project management tool. You can also integrate with Asana, ClickUp, Todoist, and Trello to bring tasks from those systems into Missive, but Missive is robust enough that you might not need those other tools.

When an email comes in that requires multiple steps to resolve, you can turn it into a task directly from the conversation. A due date, assignee, and link back to the email are filled in automatically based on context. You can also break complex requests into subtasks; view all outstanding tasks by person, team, or due date; and get a calendar view of what's coming up.

You can create teams in Missive to organize people by client account or department — think separate spaces for your design team, your finance team, or each major client. Each space has its own shared inbox, shared tasks, and internal chat. Emails can be assigned to teams or individuals, you can merge multiple emails into a single conversation, and you can pin important conversations to your sidebar.

Collaboration goes beyond private notes and @mentions. Teammates can co-author replies in real time using collaborative drafting. There's a guest access feature that lets you invite people outside your organization to view or comment on a specific conversation without needing their own Missive seat. Additionally, an audit trail logs every action taken in Missive, so you always know who did what and when.

On the AI side, Missive can generate instant draft replies, translate messages, summarize conversations, and execute AI-powered automation rules for things like automatically creating a task if an email mentions a deadline. In addition to email, Missive can be used to manage requests from social and SMS in your inbox, and its built-in team chat functions like Slack without you needing a separate messaging tool.

Pricing

Free trial available. View Missive's current pricing.

Choosing the right email management software for your team

Knowing which options are available and what key features they offer is a great starting point when searching for email management software, but to find the best fit, you’ll need to take a few more steps.

First, finding a better system starts with understanding what's not working for you in the system you're currently using. 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 exactly what's causing problems.

Next, use that information to compile a list of must-haves and nice-to-haves. Review the detailed plan comparison tables of the products you're considering, and make sure they have all of your must-have features at a price you can afford to pay. If multiple tools have what you need within your budget, you can make the decision based on which one offers the most of your nice-to-have features.

Once you've narrowed down your list of potential solutions to a handful of options, start free trials of each of the tools on your list, and involve your team in the process, bringing in at least one full-time individual contributor and one manager. Use the software the way you would every day. This will give you the best sense of whether or not the new tool is going to work for you.

If you need more help, check out our Buyer's Guide to Choosing the Right Customer Support Tool.

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Jessica Greene
Jessica Greene

Jessica Greene is a Help Scout alum, where we make excellent customer service achievable for companies of all sizes. Connect with her on LinkedIn or through her website.