Front API
Front's Core REST API is fully self-serve: any admin mints a Bearer token from Settings, with OAuth 2.0 for partner apps and HMAC-signed webhooks for real-time events. The squeeze is rate limits: 50 to 200 requests per minute by plan, with extra capacity at $200 per month per 100 rpm.
Frequently asked questions
Front scores B+ on the API Report Card. Front's Core REST API is fully self-serve: any admin mints a Bearer token from Settings, with OAuth 2.0 for partner apps and HMAC-signed webhooks for real-time events. The squeeze is rate limits: 50 to 200 requests per minute by plan, with extra capacity at $200 per month per 100 rpm.
Front has a workable official integration path. Most engineering teams can build against it directly. Solid API with minor gaps
Front is an AI-powered customer service and customer operations platform built around a multi-channel shared inbox where teams collaborate on external conversations the way they would in email.
Vertical: horizontal customer operations / shared-inbox platform (not industry-specific). Front teams work a unified shared inbox triaging inbound messages from email aliases (support@, ops@, dispatch@), SMS, WhatsApp Business, live chat, and social DMs; assign and reassign conversations via @-mentions and explicit assignment with collision detection; draft, comment, and approve replies internally before sending; apply tags, custom fields, and SLAs via rules engines; and snooze, schedule, or reopen conversations on time-based triggers.
Front is well-known in B2B customer-operations circles, consistently named a Leader on G2 for Shared Inbox, Email Management, and Customer Communications Management, and is the default shared-inbox consideration for logistics and B2B-services teams that have outgrown distribution lists but don't want Zendesk's ticketing model.
Yes, for any team that runs customer operations on Front, the platform is the system of record for the full inbound and outbound external communication graph: every email, SMS, WhatsApp, chat, and social-DM thread (with full message bodies, attachments, internal comments, assignee history, and signature), every contact record (with custom fields and handles across channels), every tag and custom field on a conversation, every rule and SLA, every knowledge-base article, every analytics event, and the full audit trail of teammate actions.
Founded 2013 in Paris by Mathilde Collin and Laurent Perrin, headquartered in San Francisco since 2014.
Default Core API rate limit is only 50 requests/minute on Starter, 100 rpm on Professional, 200 rpm on Enterprise, bulk historical migrations hit 429 immediately. Hard burst limit of 5 requests/second per resource type (1 rps for exports) applies on top of the per-minute quota, so concurrency must be carefully throttled. Full sourced list under Sources below.
Common alternatives include Zendesk, Freshdesk (Freshworks), Intercom, HubSpot Service Hub, Help Scout, Missive. Graded alternatives appear under "More from the report card" below.
Grades measure one thing: can a customer's engineering team get their own data out programmatically? We check six things (whether a real API exists, how access is gated, data coverage, auth quality, docs and developer experience, and stability) and roll them into a letter grade. Grades get re-verified, and they only move on evidence.