Hiver vs InReply: Helpdesk Platform or AI That Answers?

TL;DR: the honest verdict up front

Full disclosure: this comparison is written by InReply. Every Hiver claim on this page comes from hiverhq.com's own public pages, retrieved on 23 July 2026, so you can check each one. All Hiver facts and prices here were verified from hiverhq.com on 23 July 2026.

What Hiver does well

Credit first, because Hiver has earned it. It built its name on a genuinely good idea: turning Gmail into a shared inbox with assignment, statuses and SLAs so teams did not need a separate helpdesk. That collaboration core is still excellent. As of 23 July 2026, Hiver's pages describe email-to-ticket conversion with clear ownership, collision alerts that stop two people replying to the same thread, internal notes instead of CCs and forwards, auto-assignment and round robin assignment, SLAs with breach alerts, CSAT surveys, and analytics across volume, workload and response times. If several humans share one inbox, this is exactly the machinery that stops threads being dropped or answered twice. InReply has none of it, and this page will not pretend otherwise.

The scope has also grown well beyond Gmail. Hiver now ships two products: Hiver in Gmail, which lives inside your existing Gmail, and Hiver Omni, a standalone omnichannel platform that connects Gmail, Outlook and other providers and pulls email, live chat, Slack, voice, WhatsApp and socials into one workspace. Its Outlook pages say it connects directly to Microsoft 365 across classic Outlook, new Outlook and Outlook Web App. On top sits an AI suite: AI Agents that resolve requests end to end and AI Copilot from the Growth tier, with AI Knowledge Builder, AI QA, AI Insights and Customer Intelligence listed too (several of those marked coming soon as of 23 July 2026). The homepage bills Hiver as "the agentic AI customer service platform for complex support", trusted by 10,000+ teams, with GDPR, SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, CCPA and HIPAA compliance stated on its pricing page.

Notice the direction of travel in that paragraph: complex support, omnichannel, compliance, enterprise integrations. Hiver has moved upmarket, and deliberately so. The question for a small business is whether you are the customer that platform is now built for.

What InReply does

InReply is an AI email agent for small businesses. It connects to your existing Gmail, Google Workspace, Outlook or Microsoft 365 inbox via OAuth. There is nothing to install: no new client, no extension, no separate helpdesk. Replies come from the same address your customers already write to.

Every reply is grounded in your workspace's own knowledge base. When InReply does not know the answer, it does not invent one; it leaves the email for a human. Behaviour is organised into playbooks, which control tone, behaviour and routing per scenario, so a booking enquiry and a complaint are handled differently. Two modes govern sending: Ghost Mode, available on all plans, saves every reply as a Gmail or Outlook draft for your approval, and Autopilot sends automatically, switched on per playbook, so you choose exactly which scenarios send without review. Emails that need a person surface in an Actions list with urgent flagging, and team members can be given per-inbox access. Pricing is a flat monthly price per workspace, not per seat.

Hiver vs InReply at a glance (verified July 2026)

Hiver details verified from hiverhq.com and hiverhq.com/pricing, 23 July 2026. Where a Hiver limit is not visible on its public pages, we say so rather than guessing.

Hiver pricing in 2026 (verified)

All figures below are from hiverhq.com/pricing, retrieved 23 July 2026. Check the live page before you buy; several third-party review sites still list older Hiver tier prices.

Last verified 23 July 2026. All plans start at 2 seats, with seats scaling from 2 to 5 and then in increments of 5 (10, 15, 20 and so on). The free trial gives 7 days of Elite features with no credit card.

Two structural points deserve an honest reading. First, the 2-seat minimum: a solo founder on Growth pays for two seats, $50/month on annual billing, before anything else. Second, the seat increments: past five seats you buy in blocks of five, so a six-person team is paying for ten seats. Neither is unusual for helpdesk software, but both assume you are staffing a support function, not running a two-person business from a shared hello@ address.

InReply pricing

InReply charges a flat monthly price per workspace, scaled by email volume rather than headcount, so adding a teammate never raises the bill.

Every plan starts with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required. Full details on the pricing page.

The five-person maths

Do the sum for a five-person small business. On Hiver's Growth tier at the verified annual price, five seats cost $125/month ($1,500/year), and that is the entry AI tier. On Pro, where SLAs and CSAT live, five seats cost $275/month ($3,300/year). On Elite it is $425/month. The same five people fit in InReply's Growth plan at a flat £79/month with 2,000 credits and three inboxes, and the sixth hire changes nothing, because the price tracks email volume, not headcount. The comparison is not perfectly like for like (Hiver is doing queue management InReply does not do), but if what you actually need is the email answered, one of these bills grows with your team and one does not.

The real difference: who answers the email?

1. Hiver organises human answering

Hiver's core model, even with its AI suite, is a team of human agents working a queue. The software decides who owns each conversation, warns when two people collide, tracks whether responses met the SLA, and reports on it all. AI Copilot drafts replies and suggests next steps, and AI Agents can resolve requests end to end on the paid tiers. It is a support department in software form, and for a genuine support department it is well built.

2. InReply removes the queue where it can

InReply starts from the other end: most small-business email is repetitive questions your documents already answer, so the fastest queue to manage is a shorter one. It answers those emails from your knowledge base, in your voice, per playbook. What it cannot answer, it declines to guess at and routes to the Actions list for a human, with urgent emails flagged. That abstain-by-default behaviour matters for customer email: a confident wrong answer is worse than a short wait for a right one.

3. Control models

Hiver's controls are workflow controls: routing rules, approval of drafts in a shared queue, QA scoring on the top tier. InReply's controls are autonomy controls: Ghost Mode keeps every reply as a reviewable draft on any plan, forever if you like, and Autopilot is enabled playbook by playbook, so automation expands exactly as far as your comfort does and no further.

Where Hiver wins

• Team workflow. Assignment, collision alerts, internal notes, round robin, SLAs and CSAT. InReply offers none of these.
• Omnichannel. Chat, Slack, voice, WhatsApp and socials alongside email on Hiver Omni. InReply is email only.
• Reporting. Analytics on volume, workload, response times and quality. InReply has no equivalent dashboards.
• A real free plan. Hiver's $0 tier is a genuine on-ramp for basic shared-inbox needs. InReply has a trial, not a free tier.
• Compliance badges. GDPR, SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, CCPA and HIPAA listed on Hiver's pricing page.

Verdict sentence: if you are staffing a support team and need the machinery to run it across channels, Hiver is the stronger product and a credible one.

Where InReply wins

• It answers the email. Grounded in your own knowledge base, with a human fallback via the Actions list instead of improvised answers.
• Flat, forecastable pricing. One workspace price scaled by volume: no per-seat fees, no 2-seat minimum, no seat-block jumps at hire number six.
• Nothing to adopt. It works inside the Gmail or Outlook inbox you already have, via OAuth. No new platform, no migration, no extension.
• Autonomy you set per scenario. Ghost Mode drafts on every plan; Autopilot switched on per playbook, so review-first is a permanent setting, not a phase.
• Longer trial. 14 days without a card, versus Hiver's 7 days of Elite.

Verdict sentence: if the job is getting customer email answered promptly without adopting a support department's toolkit, InReply is built for exactly that.

Which one should you pick?

• Support team of five or more, multiple channels, management wants dashboards → Hiver. This is who the platform is built for, and the per-seat price buys real machinery.
• Small business drowning in repetitive email on a hello@ or support@ inbox → InReply. The bottleneck is composition, not coordination, and flat pricing fits a small team.
• Two or three people who mainly need collaboration, not automation → an honest answer: possibly neither. Compare the lighter shared-inbox tools in our shared inbox software guide or InReply vs Gmelius.
• Regulated industry needing HIPAA on paper → Hiver, on today's public claims.

Weighing more than these two? Our roundup of Hiver alternatives compares six options including Missive, Help Scout and Front, with every price verified from vendor pages. Once more for clarity: every Hiver fact and price on this page was verified from hiverhq.com on 23 July 2026.