The best shared inbox for a small team depends on two things: how many channels you answer on, and how many people answer. For 2 to 10 people on one email address, pick a tool that shows who is on each email, warns you when someone is already replying and does not bill per person: Trupeo does that for 10 EUR a month per mailbox for 2 people and 20 EUR for 3 or more, excluding VAT. Missive fits teams that also answer SMS or WhatsApp, Front, Hiver and Help Scout fit support teams that are growing, and the free options (Google Groups, Gmail delegation, a Microsoft 365 shared mailbox) are enough while one person owns the address.
The short answer
One sentence per situation, prices as observed in October 2026:
- Zero budget, low volume: the Google Groups Collaborative Inbox. It is free and lets members assign a conversation and mark it complete.
- One person owns the address and a colleague covers holidays: Gmail delegation, or a Microsoft 365 shared mailbox. Both are included in the accounts you already pay for.
- Already on Google Workspace Business: check whether Google’s native shared inbox has reached your Admin console; it is rolling out in phases.
- Email plus SMS, WhatsApp or team chat: Missive.
- A knowledge base would cut your email volume: Help Scout.
- A support desk that hires every year: Front or Hiver.
- 2 to 10 people on email, any provider including IMAP, priced per mailbox rather than per person: Trupeo, at 10 EUR a month for 2 people and 20 EUR for 3 or more.
- A volunteer HOA board or strata committee whose members change at each annual meeting: Trupeo, because the price does not grow with head count and access moves with the members. See shared email for HOA boards and strata committees.
- A works council: see shared email for works councils.
Trupeo is our product. We say so upfront, and every section below names what each tool does best and who should buy it. On several rows the honest answer is not us.
How we compared
Three rules.
First, we price the whole team, not the seat. “$25 per user per month” looks small on a pricing page. Five people turn it into $125 a month, $1,500 a year. That multiplication is the whole story of shared inbox pricing for small teams, so we do it in the open.
Second, every price was read on the vendor’s official pricing page in October 2026, in the currency shown there: US dollars for the paid competitors, euros for Trupeo. Competitor figures are annual-billing rates. Trupeo has no annual plan: it is billed monthly, with no commitment.
Third, we judge from a small team’s seat: no support department, nobody whose job is configuring software, little patience for an admin manual. A tool can be excellent and still be the wrong size for three people.
What a team of five pays, and how you can try it
| Tool | Entry price (October 2026) | Team of 5, per month | Free trial | Pick it if |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Groups Collaborative Inbox | Free | $0 | Free tool | Budget is zero and volume is low |
| Gmail delegation / Microsoft 365 shared mailbox | Included with your accounts | $0 extra | Already included | One person owns the address |
| Google Workspace native shared inbox | Included in Business editions | $0 extra | Already included (rolling out) | You are on Workspace Business and it has reached you |
| Trupeo | 10 EUR per mailbox for 2 people, 20 EUR for 3 or more | 20 EUR | 30 days, no card | 2 to 10 people on one address, any provider, IMAP included |
| Missive | $14 per user (Starter, up to 5 users) | $70 | 30 days, no card | Email, SMS and chat in one app |
| Gmelius | $25 per user (Growth, first plan with shared inboxes) | $125 | 7 days | Your team lives in Gmail |
| Hiver | $25 per user (Omni Growth) | $125 | 7 days | A support desk that will grow |
| Help Scout | $25 per user (Standard) | $125 | Free plan, plus 15 days on paid plans | A knowledge base would cut your volume |
| Front | $25 per seat (Starter, up to 10 seats) | $125 | 14 days | A larger operations team |
Paying month to month costs more where the page shows it: Gmelius moves to $33, Hiver to $35, and Missive to $18 according to its billing documentation. Front and Help Scout display their annual rates, marked “Save 24%” and “-16%” for paying yearly, so their monthly rates are higher. Hiver sells seats as 2, then 5, then multiples of 5, so a team of 3 pays for 5. For teams of 3, 7 and 10, free options included, see shared inbox pricing, per user or per mailbox.
Missive: chat and SMS next to your email
Missive is the cheapest of the paid competitors: Starter costs $14 per user per month billed yearly and stops at 5 users. Productive is $24 (up to 50 users) and Business $36. There is no free plan, which its billing documentation says plainly, and new teams get a 30-day trial with no credit card.
Its real strength is many channels in one app: email next to SMS, WhatsApp, social accounts and an internal chat. It connects Gmail, Outlook, Exchange, iCloud and any IMAP provider. If the people you serve reach you on more than one channel, that is a serious argument. If email is your only channel, you pay for a denser app than you need, and the bill grows with each person: $70 a month for five. See Trupeo vs Missive.
Gmelius: for teams that will not leave Gmail
Gmelius builds the shared inbox into Gmail itself: the team keeps the mail client it already knows, and nobody switches apps. Shared inboxes start with the Growth plan at $25 per user per month billed yearly ($33 monthly). The cheaper Meli plan, at $19, does not include them, and Pro costs $40. The trial lasts 7 days, on the Growth plan, and there is no free plan.
The limit is structural: Gmelius works only with Gmail. If one of your addresses lives on Outlook or at a hosting provider’s IMAP server, it is out. Five people on Growth: $125 a month. See Trupeo vs Gmelius.
Hiver: a support desk, inside Gmail or on its own
Hiver sells two editions: Hiver in Gmail, which “lives inside your existing Gmail”, and Hiver Omni, a standalone support platform that, in its own words, “works with Gmail, Outlook, and other email providers”. The prices published are Omni’s: Growth at $25 per user per month billed yearly ($35 monthly), Pro at $55 ($65) and Elite at $85 ($95). The 7-day trial opens the Elite plan, and no card is asked until you upgrade.
Five people on Growth: $125 a month. A ten-person support desk that will be twenty next year should look at Hiver seriously. Three people on one contact address will mostly find menus they never open. See Trupeo vs Hiver.
Help Scout: when a knowledge base would cut your email
Help Scout is a full helpdesk, not only a shared inbox. Its best argument for a small team is Docs, the knowledge base: good public help pages stop some emails before anyone writes them.
It is also the one paid vendor here with a free plan as well as a trial: 5 users, 1 inbox, 1 Docs site, 100 contacts a month and 10 saved replies. One hundred contacts a month is about five new people per working day, which a normally busy organization passes quickly. Beyond that, Standard costs $25 per user per month billed yearly, Plus $45 and Pro $75, with a 10-user minimum on Pro. Standard and Plus come with a 15-day trial, no credit card. See Trupeo vs Help Scout.
Front: excellent, and built for someone bigger
Front is a good product and open about who it serves: operations teams handling email at scale. Starter costs $25 per seat per month billed yearly and stops at 10 seats; Professional is $65 (up to 50 seats) and Enterprise $105. Starter allows one channel type. The 14-day trial gives the Professional plan’s features, and there is no free plan.
Front connects Gmail and Office 365 directly. Other providers are connected by forwarding incoming mail to Front and sending through your own SMTP server; its help article does not mention IMAP. For teams of fifteen to a hundred with integrations to run, Front is excellent. For a five-person shop, $125 a month buys the entry plan of a product designed for someone else. See Trupeo vs Front.
Google Groups Collaborative Inbox: free is a feature
Google Groups hides a feature called Collaborative Inbox. A member can assign a conversation to themselves or to someone else, and mark it complete, as needing no further action or as a duplicate. It is free and covers the minimum: knowing who handles what.
The limits are the price of free. The interface is a forum, not a mailbox. Conversation history has to be on, and the group’s owner or manager has to switch the feature on and give members the “moderate metadata” permission (and “moderate content” to close a conversation as needing no action or as a duplicate). Do not confuse it with a plain distribution list, which sends copies to everyone with no coordination at all: see shared mailbox vs distribution list. More free routes are in the free shared mailbox options.
Google Workspace’s native shared inbox: arriving in phases
Google Workspace now has a native shared inbox, still rolling out in phases as observed in October 2026. An admin creates it from the Admin console, under Users, “Set up a shared email address”. It is supported on Business Starter, Business Standard and Business Plus. If you do not see it yet, Google’s own advice is to use delegated Gmail accounts in the meantime.
Google’s documentation describes delegates who can read, send and delete mail in it. It does not describe assigning an email to one person or leaving a note for the team. For a team already paying for Workspace with low volume, it is worth checking first. Our full walkthrough of the three Google options: a shared inbox in Google Workspace for a small team.
Gmail delegation and the Microsoft 365 shared mailbox: fine while one person owns the box
Gmail delegation lets colleagues read and reply without knowing the password. It is free and already there, but it has no assignment, no status and no team notes: see the real limits of Gmail delegation for a team.
The Microsoft 365 shared mailbox needs no license of its own: each person who uses it needs a licensed Exchange Online mailbox, and it stores up to 50 GB. Microsoft caps it at 25 users and warns that too many people at once can cause connection failures or duplicated messages. There is still no owner per conversation. Our guide: the Microsoft 365 shared mailbox for a small team, and the side by side Trupeo vs Outlook shared mailbox.
Their sweet spot: one person runs the address and another covers during holidays. Once two or three people answer it every day, the classic problems return: nobody owns an email, “read” stops meaning anything, and the Sent folder becomes the way to check what was answered.
How to stop two people answering the same email
Duplicate replies come from one gap: nothing tells you, at the moment you open an email, that someone else already has it. Three habits close it, whatever the tool.
- One person per email, visible to everyone. Before replying, take the email. If someone else’s name is on it, leave it.
- A signal while someone is writing. Being “on it” is not enough if two people open the email in the same minute. The tool has to show that a reply is being written.
- An alarm for the emails nobody took. The opposite failure, an email everyone thinks someone else has, costs more than a double reply.
In Trupeo, “Who’s on it” is shown on every email, and “I’ll take it” is one click. You see when another member is writing a reply before you start yours, and when another member is already replying, Trupeo stops you editing and sending at the same time, says so calmly and keeps your text. When nobody has been on an email for 10 minutes, a notification opens it, with “I’ll take it” one click away. The method in detail: how to avoid duplicate replies.
Where Trupeo fits
Trupeo turns the mailbox you already have, Gmail, Outlook, Microsoft 365 or any IMAP provider, into a shared mailbox for the team. Everyone signs in with their own account, with no shared password. Each email shows who is on it and a status (To assign, In progress, Done), with team notes the person who wrote never sees, labels and search.
The price takes the opposite bet from the table: it is set per connected mailbox, not per person. 10 EUR a month for 2 people, 20 EUR for 3 or more, excluding VAT, whatever the head count after that. The “team of 5” column reads $70 to $125 for the paid competitors; for Trupeo it reads 20 EUR, and it still reads 20 EUR at eight. Verified associations and schools get 50% off; nobody else does. You can try it for 30 days with no card.
This matters most for volunteer boards. An HOA board or a strata committee changes members at each annual meeting: a per-seat tool bills every new member, while Trupeo’s price does not move, and access leaves with the person who stepped down. See shared email for HOA boards and strata committees and a shared mailbox for self-managed HOAs; for the wider choice of software, see software for self-managed HOAs and strata schemes. A works council has the same shape, with a mailbox that outlives each term: see works councils. Boards, committees and works councils all pay the normal price above.
What Trupeo does not do, said plainly: no analytics dashboards, no SLA automation, no SMS or chat channels, no knowledge base. If you need those, Missive, Help Scout and Front do them better. If your need fits in one sentence, “everyone should know who answers what, without sharing a password”, that is Trupeo’s whole scope.
Frequently asked questions
Which shared inbox is easiest for a team moving off a basic group mailbox?
The one that keeps your address and adds as little as possible: a person per email, a done status and a way to see who is replying. Trupeo connects the mailbox you already use, Gmail, Outlook or IMAP, so nothing changes for the people who write to you. If you are on Google Workspace, check the native shared inbox and the Collaborative Inbox first: they cost nothing extra.
Which shared inbox tools are easy for non-technical users?
Tools that look like a mailbox and ask for no configuration. Gmelius stays inside Gmail, which helps a team that knows Gmail. Trupeo shows one list, who is on each email and a Done button, and each member gets their own account by invitation. Full helpdesks like Front or Hiver have more settings than a volunteer or a three-person office will use.
Which vendors offer real free trials?
As observed in October 2026: Trupeo 30 days with no card, Missive 30 days with no card, Front 14 days, Gmelius 7 days and Hiver 7 days with no card until you upgrade. Help Scout has a free plan (5 users, 1 inbox, 100 contacts a month) and a 15-day trial of its paid plans with no card. Google Groups is free.
How do shared inbox prices compare, per user or per mailbox?
Most vendors bill per user: $14 to $25 per person per month at entry level, so five people pay $70 to $125. Trupeo bills per connected mailbox: 10 EUR for 2 people, 20 EUR for 3 or more, whatever the head count. The calculation for teams of 3, 7 and 10 is in shared inbox pricing, per user or per mailbox.
What is a good alternative to an Outlook shared mailbox?
If one person owns the box, keep the Outlook shared mailbox: it is included and holds 50 GB. If several people answer every day and need to know who is on what, add a shared inbox on top of the same address: Trupeo connects Microsoft 365 directly. See Trupeo vs Outlook shared mailbox.
Which shared inbox should an HOA board or strata committee use?
One priced per mailbox, where each member has their own login and loses access when they step down. Trupeo costs 20 EUR a month for the mailbox from 3 people, whether the board has three members or seven. See shared email for HOA boards and strata committees.
Can a shared inbox show when someone is already replying?
Some can. Trupeo shows when another member is writing a reply, and stops you editing and sending at the same time while they are, keeping your text. Plain shared mailboxes and Gmail delegation do not tell you; you find out from the Sent folder. More in how to avoid duplicate replies.
Sources:
- Pricing · Missive: Starter at $14 per user per month billed yearly up to 5 users, Productive at $24 up to 50 users, Business at $36, the 30-day trial with no credit card, and email, SMS, social accounts, WhatsApp and internal chat, as observed in October 2026.
- Billing and plans (Missive Docs): the $18 monthly price of Starter and “Missive has no free plan”, as observed in October 2026.
- Email accounts (Missive Docs): Gmail, Outlook, Exchange, iCloud and IMAP accounts, as observed in October 2026.
- Gmelius Pricing: Meli at $19, Growth with shared inboxes at $25 ($33 monthly), Pro at $40, the 7-day trial on Growth and no free plan, as observed in October 2026.
- Hiver Omni Pricing: Growth, Pro and Elite at $25, $55 and $85 per user billed yearly ($35, $65 and $95 monthly), seats from 2, then 5, then increments of 5, the 7-day trial with no card until upgrade, “Hiver in Gmail lives inside your existing Gmail” and “works with Gmail, Outlook, and other email providers”, as observed in October 2026.
- Help Scout Pricing: the free plan (5 users, 1 inbox, 1 Docs site, 100 contacts per month, 10 saved replies), Standard, Plus and Pro at $25, $45 and $75 per user billed yearly, Pro’s 10-user minimum, the 15-day trial with no credit card and the “-16%” annual discount, as observed in October 2026.
- Front Pricing and Plans: Starter at $25 per seat billed yearly up to 10 seats, Professional at $65 up to 50 seats, Enterprise at $105, one channel type on Starter, “Save 24%”, the 14-day trial and email accounts listed as Office 365, Gmail and Custom, as observed in October 2026.
- Front Help Center: connecting a custom email account: other providers receive through email forwarding and send through your own SMTP server, as observed in October 2026.
- Use a group as a Collaborative Inbox: assigning conversations, marking them complete, as needing no action or as duplicates, and the “moderate metadata” and “moderate content” permissions required, as observed in October 2026.
- Turn on Collaborative Inbox features (Google Groups Help): conversation history required, owner or manager role to enable it, as observed in October 2026.
- Create a shared inbox (Google Workspace): Business Starter, Standard and Plus, phased rollout, setup from the Admin console, delegated accounts in the meantime, and what delegates can do, as observed in October 2026.
- About shared mailboxes in Microsoft 365: 50 GB without a license, a licensed Exchange Online mailbox required for each user, and a maximum of 25 users, as observed in October 2026.