This article brings the perspective of Gmail-based teams who found Drag to be the best Hiver alternative for them. If their reasons resonate with you, Drag may be a better fit for your team too.
In a nutshell, the reasons why users pick Drag over Hiver are:
- Hiver inconveniently manipulates users’ Gmail labels.
- Drag has a better privacy approach in its architecture.
- Drag offers better visibility on shared conversations.
- Hiver is too expensive.
- Drag is more customizable.
- Cannot manage tasks in Hiver.
1. Hiver manipulates users’ Gmail labels
Hiver started as a shared Gmail labels tools. More recently, moving into the Shared Inbox space has brought complexity and foundational technical changes. A legacy of development handling labels to allow collaboration in Gmail resulted in a Shared Inbox that still relies on Gmail labels.
This means for each shared inbox, stage, or team member, Hiver automatically generates new labels in users’ inbox. The worst part is that these labels are not removed when users uninstall Hiver. Drag leaves no footprint in users’ inboxes. Once they uninstall Drag, their Gmail accounts get back to exactly what it was before.
“I have 300+ Hiver shared labels in my Gmail + my own custom labels. Let’s say I start 10 projects and I would like to share each of these with different set of people. If I want to make steps on each project (only 3, let’s say started, ongoing, done), to do this I have to create 30 new labels. It’s a jungle.”
Miko Linnavirta | Total Sec
2. Drag has a better privacy approach
In Hiver, when an email is sent to a shared inbox, a copy of the email is sent to every individual user’s inbox. You can’t stop users from forwarding emails externally, for example. Or in the event of someone being removed from a shared inbox, every email historically sent to that shared inbox will still be in their inbox. This dramatically increases the risk of data security breach.
In contrast, with Drag, if someone is removed from a shared inbox, they immediately lose access to any future and historical emails. We do not duplicate emails across team member’s individual inboxes. Technically, Drag shares the account permissions to access a specific inbox, which can be revoked at any time, with immediate effect.
Turn Gmail into your Team’s Workspace.
- 2.5x faster email responses.
- 20 hours less spent per month, per team member.
- 40% more deadlines achieved and happier teams.
3. Drag offers better visibility
Visibility has become more and more critical for businesses. Trello, for example, disrupted the task management software industry by introducing the Kanban methodology into business workflow software. Nowadays, almost every task management software offers this type of view.
Besides kanban, Drag also brings other board view options (list view, preview view), offering flexibility for users to visualize work the way they prefer. If you like working in a visual way, Drag is the best Hiver alternative for you.
4. Hiver is too expensive
We are not in the market to compete on pricing. However, we do believe in a strong pricing strategy that is aligned with the market we are playing in, and Drag and Hiver take very different approaches to it:
- Drag offers a free plan for small teams with up to 3 users. Hiver offers no free plan at all.
- Hiver’s entry pricing is double than Drag’s.
- Drag’s starter plan doesn’t limit number the number of shared inboxes, or number of users. Hiver does both of these.
- Upgrading plans in Drag results in a 50% user / month price increase, while upgrading plans in Hiver means a 160% price jump.
Scroll down on this page to read more about our plans and pricing.
5. Drag is more customizable
Yes, with Drag, you can share email addresses such as sales@ or support@, in real-time, in shared boards. But there are lots of different ways you can use Drag that you cannot achieve with Hiver.
For example, in Hiver you can only share entire inboxes, while in Drag you can either share entire inboxes or just specific emails.
Another example of customization Drag offers is via custom fields. With them, you can tailor shared workspaces to serve different type workflows. For examples, you can create a deal value field for your sales board, and a years of experience field for a recruiting board.
6. Cannot manage tasks in Hiver
Hiver is fundamentally a Help Desk tool in Gmail. Drag is a workflow management tool in Gmail. We allow small teams to manage other workflows rather than customer support from inside their inbox too.
While in Hiver an email represents a support ticket, a card in Drag can represent a support ticket, a lead, an applicant’s CV or simply a task. Drag boards and cards are a blank canvas for teams to manage tasks, whatever they represent, collaboratively, from Gmail.
In other words, with Drag, you don’t need to spread your work across Shared Inbox + Trello + Asana + CRM + Help Desk and the list goes on. Small teams can manage everything they need from inside the place they spend their day: Gmail.
Is Drag always the best Hiver alternative?
Ultimately, Drag is not the best Hiver alternative for all teams. If you are a large enterprise interested in advanced Help Desk features, Hiver is probably a better fit for you. However, if you are a small team working in Gmail and Google Workspace looking for a highly customizable Gmail Shared Inbox, you should consider switching to Drag.
Turn Gmail into your Team’s Workspace.
- 2.5x faster email responses.
- 20 hours less spent per month, per team member.
- 40% more deadlines achieved and happier teams.
