The 10 Best MissiveApp Alternatives

Missive is a customer service software designed to help teams collaborate over email, chat, and social media. It has all the features a customer support team would need.

But great as it is, Missive is not perfect. It has its flaws, ranging from complex UI to hassle-filled onboarding. We’ve seen people complain about customer support, too.

This raises a need for a Missive app alternative, and we’re here with them.

In this article, you will know:

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• What is Missive?
• What’s good and bad about Missive?
• Ten absolutely amazing Alternatives to Missive

What is Missive?

Missive is a customer support platform designed to streamline communication and collaboration within customer service teams. 

Missive offers a unified team inbox that consolidates messages from various channels such as email, live chat, and social media, allowing support agents to manage all customer inquiries from a single interface. This centralized approach helps reduce the complexity of managing multiple communication channels, leading to improved efficiency and faster response times.

Some of the key features of Missive are:

• Team inboxes: Separate inboxes for active members and observers.
• Flexible email setup: Email setup for all email providers are supported.
• Team chat: Collaborate and discuss ideas within the team without having to forward.
• Collaborative writing: Compose emails together, get reviewed in real time and share attachments.
• Command bar: Create your own command bars to maximize productivity.
• Different themes: Choose between light, dark and mixed themes.

Overall, Missive is a powerful team inbox and chat app designed to let teams collaborate on email, social media and live chat queries.

Why Do Companies Choose MissiveApp?

Since Missive is trusted by teams across the globe, there must be something about it, right? Here are three unique features we found that make Missive a good pick:

Distinctive internal chat

Missive’s internal chat feature is an invaluable tool for facilitating seamless communication and collaboration within customer service teams. This feature allows team members to exchange messages, share information, and coordinate tasks in real-time, all within a centralized platform. With internal chat, agents can invite specific people and start a discussion on a specific topic. 

General rooms within which a member can talk to the entire organization can also be created. Team rooms and one-to-one rooms can also be created for separate conversations.

Multi-channel inbox

Missive’s multi-channel team inbox feature is a game-changer for customer service teams, offering a centralized platform to manage inquiries from various communication channels seamlessly. 

This feature aggregates messages from different sources such as email, social media, and live chat into a single inbox, providing agents with a unified view of all customer interactions. But the unique thing about the Missive multi-channel inbox is that it has two powerful assignment flow offerings of Active members and Observers. This feature is what makes Missive stand out!

Collaborative writing

Missive’s collaborative writing feature revolutionizes the way customer service teams work together to resolve issues efficiently and effectively. Collaborative writing allows multiple team members to simultaneously contribute to crafting responses to customer inquiries or issues within a shared workspace. 

This real-time collaboration enables agents to brainstorm ideas, review each other’s work, and refine responses collaboratively, ensuring that the final message is comprehensive, accurate, and aligned with the company’s standards and policies.

Why Missive Mightn’t Be for Everyone, Then?

Why would you even consider looking for an alternative? Well, as it turns out, there are several reasons:

Complex onboarding

Setting up Missive and then training your staff on how to use the app is a complex task. This is something multiple users have complained about as well. In order to smoothly onboard Missive a personalized help approach is required. What’s frustrating is that no such help is available by the Missive team. This makes bringing Missive into your business a hassle that you may want to avoid.

Complex user interface

Users have raised concerns about the usability of Missive’s interface, particularly highlighting difficulties with navigating the sidebar. They find it challenging to locate specific features or options within the interface, which can impede their workflow and productivity. To address this issue, users recommend implementing a search function within the settings area.

What Customers Say About Missive

We dug into the reviews people have posted over the internet, and this is what people have to say about Missive:

“Simple to learn and use but has some issues”

Justin B.  on G2 says that, “The shared inboxes work well and there’s good comment and collaboration features for internal comments on emails. It has a clean design. I’d also like the ability to default search just my inboxes rather than defaulting to searching all inboxes. Depending on the plan there’s a limit to message history you can search or view.”

“Missive changed the way we communicate but onboarding could be better”

Dylan, an operations manager, G2 says that, “Missive ticks many boxes for us ranging from effortless collaboration to customizable rules. However, we would like to see better help/on-boarding resources. There is a constant stream of new updates (which is awesome), but it isn’t always clear how to implement them or how they work in practice.”

“Deepest integration with Gmail but still some confusion about closing and archiving emails”

Isaak, a CEO in Australia, in his review said that, “Missive has the deepest integration with Gmail and an excellent API that allows us to build a custom integration with our internal tooling. However, there is still some confusion about how to best handle closing and archiving with team emails – so it is closed from an individual’s box but not the shared box.”

“Simply incredible but no ticket numbers”

Phil, says that, “The team inbox feature is simply incredible. It allows our team to chat between responses to our customers or suppliers to make sure we say the correct things. But since this isn’t a help desk, there are no “ticket numbers”, where everything has a clear number attached to it.”

10 Best Alternatives to Missive

1. Keeping

If we could describe Keeping in a single sentence, we’d say Gmail but on steroids. But naturally, this isn’t specific enough. So, in a nutshell, Keeping is an email management software that works inside your Gmail inbox. 

Using Keeping for your customer support operations feels like having Gmail with extra features. Some of the key features you get with Keeping our:

• Tag tickets with labels such as order processing, after-sales, etc., and assign priorities to separate urgent and non-urgent tickets.
• Create and distribute shared knowledge bases among team members to expedite responses. 
• Use private notes for internal discussions with various team members, eliminating the tedious task of forwarding emails.
• Integrate with Shopify for order status visibility and Zapier to seamlessly connect Keeping with other platforms with Slack.

This is not it, Keeping also comes with these benefits over Missive:

• Less costly: To use Missive’s full set of features, a hefty amount has to be paid. For small and medium businesses, it could be a lot. Keeping comes in as the affordable option that has just the right amount of features you need to ace customer service. 
• Easy to set up and use: Who doesn’t know how to use Gmail? Since Keeping is just an extension to your Gmail inbox, your customer support teams can easily set up and use our customer support platform. 

Basically, Keeping is power-packed with features that let you deliver exceptional customer service and that too at affordable costs. Check out Keeping now to boost your support operations!

2. DragApp

Drag is a collaborative tool that adds collaborative features on top of Gmail. 

The app allows you to create email sequences, saving the support team from spending hours setting up emails individually. Team members can also create reusable templates to focus on important conversations.

Drag includes reporting and analytics tools to help users track their performance and determine if they’re on the right path. They can monitor email response times and assess whether additional team members are needed.

You can leave internal notes to update team members on tasks or provide suggestions. The app features discussion boards for easy task monitoring, ensuring everyone can view pending and ongoing tasks effortlessly.

3. Trengo

Trengo is another Missive alternative designed to help you build strong customer relationships on any channel. 

Trengo combines conversations from Gmail, Telegram. SMS, WeChat, Outlook, Facebook and Livechat.

The shared inbox feature lets your team assign emails and create workflows. You also get access to reporting analytics and a knowledge base builder. 

Another interesting feature is Trengo’s chatbot, which allows teams to easily create multi-channel chatbots using drag-and-drop flows. Once created and activated, these chatbots can assist in deflecting contacts or directing customers to the appropriate team member.

4. Spike

Spike is an app that boosts productivity by transforming your email client into a chat-like space. The tool offers a seamless platform for collaboration and project management directly from your inbox.

One key benefit of Spike compared to Missive is that you can stay within your email while using the app. This means customer service teams can communicate with clients without switching between apps, helping them stay focused.

You can also create groups with your team and clients for project collaboration. They can work together in real-time, accessing files and adding collaborative notes to keep everyone aligned.

Managing email archives is simple with Spike’s shared team inbox feature, allowing you to archive and forward messages directly from your email.

Spike may not be suitable for large organizations and is more tailored to small businesses with budget constraints. Additionally, if your business relies heavily on Gmail, Spike might not be the best fit as some of its advanced features still need improvement.

5. Helpwise

Helpwise is a comprehensive customer support tool designed to streamline your communication channels. 

It offers a centralized platform where you can manage emails, SMS, WhatsApp, live chat, and social media accounts, all from one convenient dashboard. 

With features like shared inboxes and team collaboration tools, Helpwise facilitates seamless cooperation among your team members. Additionally, it integrates with popular platforms such as Zapier, Hubspot, Slack, and Shopify, expanding its functionality and compatibility with your existing tools. 

You can automate processes using customizable workflows and rules, reducing manual tasks and increasing efficiency. Helpwise also enables you to create an internal help center for onboarding new support team members, ensuring consistent and effective training. 

It provides insightful tracking and metrics to monitor email load, key performance indicators, and team performance, empowering you to make data-driven decisions and optimize your support operations.

6. HelpScout

HelpScout’s shared team inbox software is a unified solution for managing all customer conversations. 

Alongside the team inbox, HelpScout provides additional customer support features like help center and messaging. It enables tracking emails and setting up shared inboxes to improve team collaboration. 

HelpScout features an intuitively designed interface, reducing the need for extensive training and allowing teams to quickly adapt. You can create custom ticket fields to gather necessary information for resolving tickets efficiently. 

Additionally, you  can customize Help Scout’s appearance to align with your brand and set and monitor service level agreements (SLAs) to ensure customer expectations are met.

7. Hiver

Hiver is a customer support platform that works alongside Gmail, perfect for teams aiming to enhance customer relationships. 

Its interface smoothly integrates with Gmail email client, making it simple and intuitive to use, with a speedy setup process. You can set up intelligent rules to automatically organize conversations, freeing up time for your team to focus on more intricate tasks. It facilitates routing emails to the appropriate team member based on their expertise.

Teams have the flexibility to organize conversations randomly and utilize rule-based automation for complete visibility. Hiver’s Email Notes key feature enables seamless team collaboration within the main inbox. 

Notes are attached to email threads, ensuring easy communication without cluttering your inbox. You can also utilize @Mentions in Email Notes to notify team members about pending tasks and gather their input.

Hiver offers valuable insights into your team’s performance and areas for improvement through its Analytics dashboard. You can access various types of reports, including Conversation Reports, User Reports, CSAT Reports, and Custom Reports.

8. Freshdesk

Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer support software designed to streamline customer requests from various channels like email, web, phone, chat, and social media into one system.

Parent-child ticketing is a feature that breaks down complex customer issues into smaller tasks (child tickets), allowing different teams to assign conversations simultaneously and speed up the resolution process.

Customizable agent roles in Freshdesk let you tailor agent roles, providing different levels of access based on their responsibilities. This includes setting up ticket assignment rules based on agents’ expertise for effective ticket routing and management.

Freshdesk’s ticket management system automatically turns customer queries into tickets, helping support agents prioritize, assign, and track each query efficiently.

Freshdesk doesn’t seamlessly integrate with Google Workspace tools like Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Contacts, which might be a drawback for businesses heavily dependent on these tools.

9. HappyFox

HappyFox is a cloud-based support solution aimed at streamlining your support operations. It helps to reduce chaos with a robust ticketing system, self-service knowledge base and community forums. 

It converts customer queries from various channels like email, phone calls, chats, web requests, and social media into tickets for easy tracking and prioritization. With its smart rules engine, you can automate workflows to boost team productivity. 

The tool also categorizes customer conversations automatically based on their type, such as customer support, sales, or marketing. Additionally, support teams can break down tickets into smaller parts for faster resolution.

With HappyFox, you can create both internal and external knowledge bases—which are multilingual as well. Self-service features don’t end there because there is no-code support portal builder, customizable contact portal, and AI-powered chatbots. 

10. ZohoDesk

Zoho Desk is a customer support platform aimed at streamlining and consolidating communication channels for businesses. 

Ideal for small enterprises, it offers a free version that’s budget-friendly. The Work Modes feature offers various ticket views, organizing them by priority, due date, and status. 

Zoho Desk also automates ticket assignment using a Round Robin system, evenly distributing tickets among agents based on preset criteria. This eliminates manual allocation and promotes fair workload distribution.

ZohoDesk’s AI bot Zia is also efficient and helps with auto ticket tagging, sentiment analysis, and reply assistance. In terms of self-service, Zoho offers customizable guided conversations, multi-brand help center and knowledge base.

Wrapping Up

Clearly, Missive does not lack options in terms of alternatives. So, when Missive does not fit your bill, there’s a lot you can choose from. Some alternatives are visually appealing, while others provide you value for your money. The alternative you choose depends totally on what your business needs!

If you are a small to midsize looking for a feature packed solution which is also affordable, Keeping is the one for you. Keeping works right inside your Gmail inbox and transforms it into a customer service excellence machine. Want to know more about how you can do this? Check out Keeping now!