Cove vs Front.
Cove is the AI-native helpdesk for lean teams. £99/month flat, unlimited users, AI included. Front Professional is $65/seat/month (annual) with Copilot AI billed at $20/seat/month and other AI add-ons priced separately. Front is built around shared-inbox collaboration. Cove is built around the AI moment.
Side by side.
Sources: front.com/pricing · front.com/ai · Cove pricing on covesupport.io
If AI does the first draft,
Cove is the right shape.
Flat price beats per-seat with tier caps
Front Professional is $65/seat/month on annual billing. Ten seats is ~$7,800/yr before any AI add-ons. The Starter tier caps at 10 seats and Professional caps at 50, so growth pushes you up tiers as well as seats. Cove is £99/month regardless of headcount, with no tier cliff and AI included. More on per-seat pricing.
AI drafts first, human approves
Front's product centre of gravity is the shared inbox. AI sits beside it as a suggestion layer. Cove inverts that: AI drafts the reply with cited sources on every ticket, and the human's job is to verify and approve. If "human writes, AI suggests" describes your support team today, Front is a strong fit. If "AI writes, human approves" is the workflow you want, Cove is built for it.
Shadow Mode means zero-risk trial
Cove can run alongside Front for 30 days. We import your conversations via the Front API, mirror new ones in read-only, and your team sees Cove's drafts on real tickets without anything being sent. If it isn't better, you walk. No migration weekend, no cutover risk.
AI is in the price, not three separate add-ons
Front splits AI into multiple paid add-ons: Copilot at $20/seat/month, Smart QA at $20, Smart CSAT at $10. Buy them all and you've added another $50/seat/month on top of the Professional plan, before Autopilot's custom pricing. Cove's AI is unmetered inside the flat £99/month: drafting, summarising, sentiment, the lot. No per-seat AI surcharge, no usage credits.
Honest section.
Front is the gold standard for shared inboxes.
Collaboration in the thread
Comments, mentions, assigns, draft-together: Front's collaboration model is the best in the category. Sales-ops, account managers, and support all working off the same inbox with comments tagged inside the email thread is a real Front-only superpower. Cove has basic assigns and notes; we're not pretending to match Front on this.
Multi-channel handling
Front handles email, SMS, WhatsApp, Twitter / X, Front Chat, and voicemail in one queue. If your team triages across three or four channels and needs them threaded into a single conversation per customer, Front does that today and Cove is email-only.
Integration depth
Front's plugin gallery and the depth of native integrations (Salesforce, HubSpot, Asana, ecommerce stacks, telephony vendors) is broader than Cove's. If your daily flow needs ticket data pulled live from five or six systems into the inbox sidebar, Front already has the connectors.
How Cove imports your Front.
The import runs through the Front Core API in under an hour for most workspaces under 50,000 conversations. Nothing is mutated in your Front workspace. You keep Front live while Cove ingests.
We don't import: SMS / WhatsApp / Twitter / Chat channels (Cove is email-first today), voice channels and voicemail, plugin configurations, comment threads on conversations (kept on Front, summarised in Cove as a single import note per conversation), Front AI configuration.
Questions we get.
Can I keep Front during a trial?
Yes. Shadow Mode mirrors your Front inbox into Cove read-only. Your team sees Cove's drafts on real tickets without anything being sent. Front stays the source of truth until you decide to cut over.
We rely on Front's collaboration features. Will Cove feel different?
Yes. Front's product is built around the shared-inbox collaboration model: tag a teammate inside a thread, draft together, comment on a message. Cove has assigns and notes but is not optimised for that pattern. If thread-side collaboration is load-bearing for how you work, stay on Front. If most replies are written by one agent and AI doing the first draft would change the workflow, Cove is the better shape.
What about SMS, WhatsApp, and chat channels we run through Front?
Cove is email-first today. If multi-channel triage is meaningful for your team, Cove isn't a clean swap. Teams that keep multi-channel on Front and move just the email-shaped support volume to Cove also work, but at that point you're paying for both. Most lean teams who switch are email-dominant already.
How does Cove's AI compare to Front AI?
Front AI sits as a suggestion layer beside the inbox: tone tweaks, summaries, suggested replies on request. Cove drafts on every ticket by default, with sources cited, and the human approves. Different defaults. Cove's AI is also unmetered inside the flat fee; Front AI is a per-seat add-on on top of the per-seat plan.
Is Cove cheaper than Front for every team?
For a small team on Starter ($25/seat/mo annual) without AI add-ons, the absolute prices are similar. The moment you're on Professional ($65/seat/mo), have more than a handful of seats, or pay for Copilot and the Smart QA / CSAT add-ons, Cove is meaningfully cheaper. The Enterprise tier ($105/seat/mo) widens the gap further.
What if Cove doesn't work for us?
Shadow Mode means you find out during trial, not after switching. Nothing is destructive. You stay on Front. We don't have a cancellation department because there's nothing to cancel until you cut over.
Talk to a founder.
Four fields. We reply within a working day, usually faster. We will not put you in a sales sequence; we will read what you wrote and write back.
Run by founders. Read by founders. Replied to by founders.