whats-best.ai

Customer Service & Helpdesk

Hiver

Provenance unknown Report an error

Panel rating · 6 judges · How to read the stars

Category median

Sovereignty: not determined

0–5 in half steps. 5 means the rubric's top anchor is met on the evidence.

by Hiver · hiverhq.com

Report an error on this page Is this your product? →

Link to this page

Hiver: AI-assisted analysis on whats-best.ai Hiver: AI-assisted analysis on whats-best.ai (dark)

Add ?theme=dark to the image address for dark backgrounds. The badge shows the category and the month of the latest evaluation, and EU-Made where that is the product’s provenance. It never shows a score.

Hiver at a glance

Vendor
Hiver
Headquarters
Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 13 Oct 2026
Data hosting
Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 13 Oct 2026
Free plan
Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 13 Oct 2026
Panel verdict
The AI panel rates Hiver 1.5/5, the mean of 6 judges. Hiver is a customer service and helpdesk product sold in two editions, Hiver Omni and Hiver in Gmail; the vendor states that more than 10,000 teams use it globally. how scores are made
As of
Vendor pages captured 13 Oct 2026; evaluated by the panel 15 Oct 2026. all sources

Hiver alternatives, European ones first →

Read this page as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.

The Support Lead

Weighted verdict

Runs a team of twelve against an SLA the sales team promised. Wants routing that reflects skill, timers that warn before they breach, and reporting she can take to a quarterly review. Reads "AI-powered" as a claim to be checked against the queue on a Monday morning.

Same scores as the panel view — this lens weights them the way this judge cares.

Scored by The Support Lead

Panel median The Support Lead This judge’s scores over the panel median. Each label opens its reasoning below.
Scores per criterion, in stars out of 5
Criterion Panel median The Support Lead
Ticketing, queues & SLA 1.5 of 5 1.5 of 5
Channels in one queue 3 of 5 3 of 5
Knowledge base & deflection 2 of 5 3 of 5
Customer data protection 0 of 5 0 of 5
Integrations & API 1.5 of 5 1.5 of 5
European sovereignty 0 of 5 0.5 of 5

Ticketing, queues & SLA

How this is scored

The engine: how work is routed, prioritised, escalated and measured — and whether an agent can find the ticket they need among ten thousand.

0 — A shared mailbox with labels; no ownership, no status model, no history beyond the thread.

3 — Tickets with assignment and open/closed status, but routing is manual, there are no SLA timers and search covers subject lines only.

5 — Queues with rules-based routing, priorities, a working status model, SLA timers with breach warnings, and full-text search across ticket bodies.

8 — Business-hours-aware SLA policies per queue or customer, escalation chains, macros and triggers, merge and split, and reporting on first-response and resolution time by agent and queue.

10 — The workload is managed rather than merely tracked: capacity-aware assignment, SLA per contract with reporting an account manager could show a customer, audit of every status change, and search that finds the ticket from a half-remembered phrase.

Report an error

The Support Lead

The captured page lists Ticketing, Automation and Analytics among the product modules and describes shared inboxes for handling complex requests, which is basic ticketing territory. We found no public information on routing rules, SLA timers or breach warnings, escalation chains, or search across ticket bodies — the things my twelve agents and I live or die by. Until those are on a page, this is a module name, not an SLA tool. 1

Report an error

Channels in one queue

How this is scored

Email, chat, phone, portal, messengers and social — judged on what actually lands in the same queue with the same history, not on how many channel logos the marketing page carries.

0 — Email only.

3 — Email plus one more channel, but the second lives in its own inbox: no shared history, and a customer who switches channel starts again.

5 — Email, a web form or portal and live chat all landing as tickets in one queue, with the customer's history visible whichever channel they used.

8 — The above plus telephony integration with call logging, at least one messenger (WhatsApp, Signal or similar) with its consent handling stated, and a customer portal where a requester can see their own tickets.

10 — Channel is an implementation detail: every channel including voice and messengers writes to one conversation with one history, agents answer from one screen, and the customer can move between channels mid-issue without repeating themselves.

Report an error

The Support Lead

Email, chat, Slack, voice, SMS and WhatsApp are all named as channels managed from one workspace, and voice plus WhatsApp in the same queue is real breadth. We found no public information on a customer portal where requesters see their own tickets, on consent handling for WhatsApp, or on call logging for voice, so the breadth is claimed without the harder proof points. 1

Report an error

Knowledge base & deflection

How this is scored

Whether the product reduces the number of tickets as well as organising them: public help centre, article workflow, suggestions to agents and to customers.

0 — No knowledge base; answers live in agents' heads and old tickets.

3 — A basic article list, public or internal, with no editorial workflow, no versioning and no link between articles and tickets.

5 — A searchable public help centre with categories, draft and publish states, and agents able to insert an article into a reply.

8 — Article suggestions to the customer before they submit and to the agent while they answer, multilingual articles, review dates that flag stale content, and reporting on which articles deflect.

10 — Knowledge is a managed asset: gaps identified from unanswered tickets, article performance measured against ticket volume by topic, versioned content with approval, and deflection reported as a number the team can act on.

Report an error

The Support Lead

A help centre is a named product module, with AI claimed to turn resolved conversations into new articles, surface knowledge gaps and keep content current — a working link between resolved tickets and knowledge, and the copilot's answer-finding supports the agent side. We found no public information on deflection reported as a number, multilingual articles, review dates, or suggestions shown to customers before they submit, and AI-powered claims on a single page still have to be checked against the queue. 1

Report an error

Customer data protection

How this is scored

A ticket archive is personal data written by the data subject. Retention, deletion, access control, subject rights, and what the vendor does with attachments — judged on what executes rather than what is promised.

0 — No retention policy stated, no deletion path, agents all see everything, and no DPA is published.

3 — A DPA on request and coarse roles; deletion is described as something the customer arranges, and there is no stated retention period.

5 — A signable DPA published, configurable agent roles and queue-level visibility, a stated retention period, and deletion of a requester's data that can actually be executed.

8 — Automatic retention rules per queue or data category, attachment handling stated, an audit log of who opened which ticket, documented support for access and erasure requests, and pseudonymisation or redaction of ticket content.

10 — Built for a data-protection audit: retention executed and evidenced per category, field-level redaction, full audit trail, subprocessor list published, and the vendor's own support access to customer instances documented and consent-gated.

Report an error

The Support Lead

The captured page is silent here: we found no public information on retention, deletion paths, agent roles or queue-level visibility, audit logs, or a signable data processing agreement. A ticket archive is personal data written by the data subject, and with nothing on any of it to evaluate, this sits at the bottom of the scale. 1

Report an error

Integrations & API

How this is scored

The systems a helpdesk has to reach — CRM, shop, order management, identity — and whether the API is documented for building or gated behind a partner conversation.

0 — No API and no named integrations; context is copied in by hand.

3 — A handful of native integrations and a read-mostly API, with no webhooks and no documented rate limits.

5 — Named integrations for common CRM and shop systems, a documented REST API with keys, webhooks for the core ticket events, and SSO.

8 — Maintained bidirectional integrations, customer context from other systems shown inside the ticket, SCIM provisioning, documented rate limits and a sandbox.

10 — A component rather than a destination: versioned API with a deprecation policy, event streaming both directions, an app framework for in-ticket extensions, and integrations the vendor maintains rather than lists.

Report an error

The Support Lead

The integrations named on the captured page are Asana, Jira and Slack, while CRMs, ecommerce platforms and data warehouses appear only as generic categories the AI works across — no named CRM, shop or identity system. We found no public information on an API, webhooks, SSO or rate limits, so I cannot credit more than a handful of native connections. 1

Report an error

European sovereignty

How this is scored

Where the ticket archive lives, who the contracting entity is, which subprocessors touch it, and whether vendor support can read customer data. Independently sourced by the sovereignty pipeline; scored here as this buyer weighs it.

0 — Non-EU vendor and contracting entity, hosting unstated or non-EU, subprocessors unnamed.

3 — EU hosting offered as an option while the contracting entity is non-EU, or the subprocessor list is absent.

5 — EU hosting as standard and an EU contracting entity, but parts of the chain — support tooling, analytics, AI features — are non-EU without an explained safeguard.

8 — EU or DACH hosting with a named data-centre provider, EU contracting entity, full subprocessor list published, and any non-EU processing named with its legal basis.

10 — Sovereign end to end and evidenced: vendor, entity, hosting and every subprocessor in the EU, certification published, and a self-hosted or private-cloud option for buyers who need the archive on their own infrastructure.

Report an error

The Support Lead

No sovereignty attributes are on record, and we found no public information on hosting location, the contracting entity, subprocessors, or whether vendor support can read customer data. Where the ticket archive lives is not a nice-to-have for this buyer, and there is nothing on any of it to weigh. 1

Report an error

Pricing transparency not rated — the vendor publishes no price

How this is scored

Whether a support lead can compute the real annual invoice for their agent count — including the channels and features they actually need — from public pages alone.

0 — No public prices at all; every tier is a sales conversation.

3 — A per-agent headline exists, but the tier where the needed channel or SLA feature begins is unstated, or light-agent and contact limits are not mentioned.

5 — Per-agent prices public for the main tiers with billing period stated, but at least one commonly needed capability (telephony, messengers, SLA policies) sits in an unpriced bundle.

8 — Every tier and add-on priced publicly with per-agent maths, billing period, minimum term and VAT treatment stated; only genuinely custom enterprise work lacks a number.

10 — Complete price computability: a calculator or table producing the annual invoice for a given agent count and channel selection, including usage-metered channels and overage.

Report an error

The Support Lead

The captured page names two editions, Hiver Omni and Hiver in Gmail, with no figures of any kind; we found no public information on per-agent prices, billing period, or where channels and AI features sit by tier. I cannot begin to compute an annual invoice for my agent count from what is captured. 1

Report an error

Questions about Hiver

Is Hiver European?

Not determined: the vendor’s pages as captured do not say where Hiver is based.

Where does Hiver store data?

Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 13 Oct 2026.

Does Hiver have a free plan?

Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 13 Oct 2026.

What are the best alternatives to Hiver?

As of 21 Oct 2026, the panel rates Zendesk (3.5/5), Intercom (3.5/5) and HubSpot Service Hub (3/5) highest among the other 28 Customer Service & Helpdesk products evaluated. Ratings that look equal are rounded to half stars; the order uses the unrounded rating, then the name. The highest-rated European alternative is Zammad (EU-Made). Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: how scores are made. The full list, with European products first: Hiver alternatives.

Where this could be wrong

What we left out

A claim that does not survive our checks costs us the claim, not the page. This is what was taken off this one.

Sources (1)

The pages every claim on this page was read from — each one checked, dated, and kept verifiable.

  1. 1 Vendor page hiverhq.com Checked 13 Oct 2026 Details →