A standalone Hiver alternative for UK teams.

Hiver and Solves are both email-first, but they sit in different places. Hiver adds shared inboxes and team features on top of Gmail, so your support work happens inside the Gmail you already use. Solves is a standalone helpdesk: a separate queue your team logs into, with tickets, owners, SLAs, brands and permissions of its own. Switch to Solves when you want support to stop being a busy inbox and start being owned, timed work.

The clearest reason to move is multi-brand. If you answer email from more than one support address as more than one identity, a Gmail-layer tool keeps you living in a Gmail account; Solves gives you one login that runs every brand, each with its own mailbox and signature, in a single unified queue with brand badges and filters. The composer is locked to the ticket's brand and mailbox, so a reply for one brand cannot accidentally go out as another.

The second reason is SLAs and reporting that treat support as work, not just mail. Solves runs first-response and resolution SLA timers against per-brand or organisation targets, and surfaces a breaching view so nothing quietly slips. Reports cover open backlog, ageing, waiting, first response, resolution and created-versus-resolved, with brand filters. If you want that structure without per-agent pricing punishing the helper who picks up overflow, Solves uses GBP team bands instead.

A third reason is keeping support out of personal email entirely. When a shared inbox lives inside Gmail, the boundary between your own mail and the team queue is thin: messages, labels and notifications mingle, and handovers depend on who has which account open. A standalone workspace draws a hard line. Support has its own login, its own queue and its own permissions, so a new teammate can be given exactly the brands and the visibility they need without touching anyone's personal mailbox, and someone leaving does not take half the context with them.

And if none of that applies, if your team is happy in Gmail, wants a permanent free plan, and does not run multiple brands, then Hiver is very likely the better fit, and we say so plainly further down this page.

We are not going to pretend Solves wins for everyone. There are clear cases where Hiver, not Solves, is the right call, and you deserve to hear them before you spend a single pound.

If your team wants to stay entirely inside Gmail, Hiver is purpose-built for exactly that. It adds shared inboxes, collaboration and assignment to the Gmail interface your team already knows, so there is no second tool to log into and almost no new interface to learn. For a small Gmail-first team, that familiarity is a genuine advantage, and moving to a standalone workspace like Solves would be a change for change's sake.

If a permanent free plan is a hard requirement, Hiver has one. Its forever-free tier covers shared inboxes with email and knowledge-base support, collaboration and Slack. Solves only offers a paid Starter, so a team that needs to run on a free plan indefinitely should choose Hiver and its free tier, not Solves.

If you only run a single brand

Solves earns its keep when you juggle several brands or want first-response and resolution SLA timers and reporting. A team with one brand, one support address and no SLA pressure may not need that structure at all, and a Gmail-layer tool will feel lighter. Pick the tool that matches how complicated your support actually is, not how complicated it might one day become.

If you depend on Gmail-native add-ons

Teams that lean on Gmail extensions, labels and existing Google Workspace habits get those for free by staying in Gmail. Solves is a separate workspace by design, so it does not slot into the Gmail interface. If that integration is central to how you work, a Gmail-based tool such as Hiver, or another in that category, is the more natural home.