Front sorts tickets.askVela resolves them.

It depends on your focus. If your team collaborates heavily across email, social, and SMS, assigning and commenting on conversations, Front is very strong as a shared inbox. If your main goal is for customer questions in the shop to be solved automatically and independently — order status, cancellations, refunds, product questions — askVela is the better choice. Many shops start with askVela as an action-taking support AI in front of the inbox and only pass true edge cases to the team. We handle the migration for free.

Yes. askVela is EU-hosted, a data processing agreement (DPA) is included, and the AI is natively German-speaking. Self-hosting is available on request. Your customer data never leaves the EU — a clear difference from primarily US-hosted platforms.

Front is a shared team inbox: it brings conversations from many channels together so your team can assign them, comment on them, and process them via workflows. But Front doesn’t answer customer questions on its own — every conversation ends up with an agent. askVela is an action-taking customer AI with a live chat widget: it answers questions from your content with source citations, handles order status and cancellations on its own, negotiates fair partial refunds (payout only after your approval), and recommends products. That reduces ticket volume instead of simply distributing it better.

askVela costs a fair flat rate — with unlimited agents and a fixed AI allowance of 1,000 to 12,000 replies a month. There’s no billing per seat, per ticket, per conversation, or per AI-resolved case. Front charges per seat (Starter, Professional, Enterprise) and offers core AI features on lower tiers as paid add-ons. As your team grows, your askVela bill stays predictable instead of rising with every seat and every AI resolution.