Front API
Front's REST API for managing shared team inboxes, conversations, contacts, and messages across email, SMS, and social channels for customer-facing teams.
Score Breakdown
⚙ Agent Friendliness
🔒 Security
OAuth 2.0 with named scopes provides better access control than most support platforms. API tokens are bearer tokens — store in secrets manager. Webhook HMAC validation is documented and expected.
⚡ Reliability
Best When
An agent needs to automate triage, routing, or response drafting for customer email and multi-channel inbox workflows in a team setting.
Avoid When
You need a simple single-user inbox or live chat support; Front's shared inbox model adds overhead for individual users.
Use Cases
- • Triaging and routing inbound customer messages automatically based on content or sender
- • Creating draft responses in shared inboxes from AI-generated reply suggestions
- • Tagging and categorizing conversations using agent-evaluated message content
- • Syncing contact data and conversation history with CRM systems
- • Automating SLA tracking by updating conversation status and assignees programmatically
Not For
- • Internal team communication (use Slack or Teams instead)
- • High-volume transactional email sending (use SendGrid or Postmark)
- • Live chat scenarios where sub-second response is required
Interface
Authentication
API tokens for server-side automation (bearer token in Authorization header). OAuth 2.0 for user-context integrations with scoped permissions. Token generated per company or user. OAuth scopes include shared_resources, conversations, contacts, and more.
Pricing
No free tier — trial available. API access included in all paid plans. Higher tiers unlock advanced automation rules, analytics, and SLA management. Per-seat pricing scales with team size.
Agent Metadata
Known Gotchas
- ⚠ Front uses a resource-centric ID system (e.g., cnv_xxx for conversations, msg_xxx for messages) — IDs are not interchangeable between resource types
- ⚠ Sending a message reply vs creating a new message are different endpoints with different required fields
- ⚠ Rate limit of 50 req/sec applies per API token — shared tokens across agents will hit limits faster
- ⚠ Webhook events require signature validation with HMAC-SHA256; skipping validation is a security risk
- ⚠ Conversation state model (unassigned, assigned, archived, trashed) must be understood to avoid routing conflicts
- ⚠ Importing external messages (non-Front channels) uses a different import endpoint with distinct schema
Alternatives
Full Evaluation Report
Detailed scoring breakdown, competitive positioning, security analysis, and improvement recommendations for Front API.
Scores are editorial opinions as of 2026-03-06.