Hiver vs Thena: Which Is Better in 2026?

Hiver is a help desk and shared inbox tool that works entirely inside Gmail, letting teams manage customer support, shared mailboxes and collaboration without leaving the familiar interface they already use every day. For the many businesses that run on Google Workspace and handle support, sales or operations through shared addresses like support@ or info@, Hiver offers a way to add structure, accountability and collaboration to those inboxes without migrating to a separate, complex help-desk platform.

Because Hiver lives within Gmail, adoption is nearly effortless — there's no new system to learn. It transforms a shared Gmail inbox into a proper team workspace where emails can be assigned to specific team members, given statuses and tags, and tracked to ensure nothing is missed or double-handled. Team members can leave internal notes and collaborate on responses right alongside the email, avoiding messy forwarding and separate chat threads, so everyone has context and customers get consistent answers.

On top of this, Hiver provides the capabilities support teams need: automation and rules to route and organize emails, SLAs and analytics to measure performance and response times, and additional channels and a knowledge base to broaden support beyond email. This combination delivers much of the power of a dedicated help desk while keeping the simplicity and comfort of Gmail. It's especially popular with small and mid-sized teams in customer support, operations, finance and IT who manage shared inboxes and want better organization without the overhead of heavyweight tools. For Google Workspace users who want to handle shared inboxes and support collaboratively, efficiently and accountably — all within the inbox they already know — Hiver offers an elegant, practical and easy-to-adopt solution.

Thena is a customer support and operations platform built for B2B companies that support their customers through shared Slack and Microsoft Teams channels. As more B2B relationships move communication into Slack Connect and Teams channels, support requests, questions and issues increasingly come through chat rather than traditional ticketing — and managing that effectively is hard. Thena turns these conversations into a structured, trackable, AI-assisted support workflow, so nothing gets missed and teams can deliver excellent, organized support where their customers actually talk to them.

The platform sits on top of your shared channels and helps you manage them like a real support operation: detecting and tracking requests, assigning and prioritizing them, ensuring timely responses, and giving visibility into what's happening across all your customer channels. It uses AI to help triage and respond, surface insights, and reduce the manual overhead of keeping up with many conversations. By bringing ticketing-like structure and intelligence to chat-based support, Thena solves a real problem for B2B teams whose customers expect to reach them in Slack or Teams but who need the accountability and tracking of a proper support system.

Thena is aimed at B2B SaaS companies and others whose customer relationships and support happen heavily in shared messaging channels, and who want to manage that professionally rather than letting requests slip through informal chats. It connects to the broader support and CRM stack so customer context and data flow where they're needed. As B2B communication continues shifting into Slack and Teams, and as AI makes managing those conversations smarter, platforms that bring order and intelligence to channel-based support are increasingly valuable. For B2B companies that support customers in Slack or Teams and want a structured, AI-assisted way to manage it, Thena offers a focused, modern and genuinely useful solution.