Multiple instances of Front

If your company has multiple, distinct departments, you might be considering whether or not to create multiple instances of Front.

We generally recommend against creating multiple instances of Front at the same company. Front is a collaboration product. It works best when one instance is available company-wide. We recommend using Front’s workspaces feature to create multiple workspaces within one instance.

However, there may be exceptions to this, where multiple Front instances will be a better fit for your organization than having multiple workspaces within one instance.

Your departments may already use separate instances for your other tools, such as Salesforce. Since some third-party integrations in Front are enabled at the company level, your different teams would not be able to sign into their own separate integration accounts at the workspace level. If your company has multiple instances of one of our partnered services, then you could create multiple Front instances to connect these separate instances to Front.

An alternative to creating multiple instances, would be to use middleware which connects data through APIs to a single instance of Front. This would allow you to connect multiple instances of a partnered service to one instance of Front. Middleware can be expensive, and as such makes the most sense for organizations with appropriate IT resources. 

If your organization contains multiple arms that function completely independently and don’t collaborate, you may consider creating multiple Front instances instead of creating one instance with multiple workspaces.

The drawback is that while your departments may work separately today, they may end up functioning more collaboratively in the future. If members of teams end up needing access to more than one instance, this can be cumbersome to implement on the admin-side. For the end user, it can be impractical to work out of multiple Front instances. Therefore, we recommend using a single instance of Front wherever practical.

If you started using Front before the workspaces feature was released, you may already have separate instances of Front, and want to keep using this workflow.

Login emails can only be associated with one Front instance. If you need to add the same teammate to multiple Front instances, they will need to log into each instance with a different email address.

Yes, one channel can be connected to multiple Front instances.

Front does not offer any native tools to merge multiple instances of Front. If you’d like to migrate teammates, inboxes, rules, and other resources from one instance to another, you will need to manually recreate them or utilize the API as described in the FAQ below.

If you wish to export your Front instance’s account data for record-keeping purposes, you can contact Front support to do so. Check out this article for full details on exporting your instance’s account data.

Front does not offer any native tools to migrate data from one instance to another; however, every plan has access to Front's APIs which you or your developers can use to fetch the relevant data from one Front instance, and import into another via your own custom code. Feel free to reach out to our team at api@front.com if you have any specific questions about migrating your data via the APIs.

If you still have questions about whether multiple Front instances are right for you, please don’t hesitate to contact us.