I need to say this first: Superhuman is the best email client on the market. It'd wildly fast, minimal (not bloated with features), and helps individuals and teams triage through emails most efficiently. So why are you looking for an alternative?
My best guess is price. Most folks feel that Superhuman is expensive and would like something more affordable, because after all, we're all used to email being free.
So if that's the case and you haven't even tried Superhuman, here's a free 30 day trial (actually 2 months free for a limited time), no harm in just seeing for yourself if it's worth it, right?
Before we get into the alternatives, one quick story. When I heard about Superhuman, while I thought it was a cool app, my exact words were "I'll never pay for email". I refused to even try it (back then there was no free trial, you had to pay for the month upfront, without even being able to log into the app).
Alex (my partner) was a huge Superhuman fan, and he was convinced it would help improve my productivity if I just was willing to give it a shot. He said to me "try it for a month, if you hate it, then I will personally pay you back the $30 you spent on your subscription."
Well, that meant I had no risk involved, I told him I'd take him up on his offer and keep him accountable to it. But...nearly 5 years later, I am still using and and paying for Superhuman. Alex never had to fork up the money, he was right, it totally changed how I view email. I LOVE Superhuman, and shutter at the thought of going back to normal email.
The minimal and beautiful interface makes emails more digestible to read. They keyboard shortcuts and phone app gestures seriously help me get through my inbox probably 4 times faster.
Superhuman has so many thoughtful features help me manage my inbox (from AI Search—ask a question in plain text about your inbox and it will answer for you, to more simple things like hitting CMD + Enter for super fast and neat in-line responding, or Inbox Splits to automatically sort emails into categories that allows for faster triaging). Most recently, Superhuman added the ability to even leave private comments for you team within each email thread.
So my 2 cents? I get you're looking for an alternative. That said, Superhuman now has a free trial for 30 days (again, this was not available back in the day!). So try it first (for free), then if you don't get the productivity wins, come back to this page to consider other options.
But since we're here, what are the Superhuman alternatives?
First you have Spark. Spark has a free tier, which if you're only looking at cost, is appealing. Spark is better than Gmail or Outlook, so its a step in the right direction. But will you get the same beautiful interface? No. Will you get the productivity wins? No. You don't get Split Inboxes, the AI Search, responding in-line, among so many other features. I'd say, if you're a student then sure, use Spark over Superhuman. But if you're a professional who values your time, Superhuman will give you way more productivity wins.
Then we have Missive, which is more of a central inbox. You can connect social media channels, WhatsApp, and email into one master inbox. Missive is more so borders the line of a help desk. If you have many emails as a CEO for example, and you want to assign them to different team members so they can answer, then Missive is helpful. That said, with Superhuman you can always just @mention and tag your teammates to get them to help responding (although they can't respond on your behalf - so if that feature is important to you, then Missive would be better). So overall, Missive serves a bit of a different use case than Superhuman.
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Team inbox and chat tool that empowers teams to collaborate around email, SMS & social media messaging apps.
Consider Missive an email alternative if you're a Founder or CEO looking to delegate your inbox or if your team needs a one tool to help consolidate your inboxes across different platforms (email, WhatsApp, SMS, and social media like Instagram).
If your inbox is exploding with sales requests, customer emails and everything in between, then Missive could be the perfect email management tool for you. With Missive you don't need to give your team access to your entire email inbox, you can simply assign specific emails in your inbox that you want them to answer. If they need your help, they can simply use the team chat feature below the email to ask any clarifying questions before responding.
Missive also allows you to have team inboxes. This means you can have your entire team pitch in to answer sales@yourcompany.com or support@yourcompany.com emails. This allows for a better customer service experience as recipients can get a faster reply. Missive also allows for collaborative writing, so if one person on the team starts off the email but needs help with another part, they can simply ask a colleague to jump in via the team chat feature. Missive also swaps out HMTL signatures automatically for the appropriate team member that's responding.
If you do a lot of business on WhatsApp, Instagram DM's, or SMS and wish there was a way to answer all of your messages from one place, Missive could be the tool you're looking for. It allows you to connect all of your accounts and collaborate as a team on responding.
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Smart. Focused. Email. Fast, cross-platform email designed to filter out the noise - so you can focus on what's important.
Consider Spark mail as an alternative if you're looking for a better version to Gmail and Outlook, but are not quite willing to pay for your email client. Spark is similar to Superhuman, however if you truly want the best email experience, we'd still have to give it to Superhuman (when comparing Spark vs Superhuman, Superhuman just put so much TLC into their user experience and design).
Spark is a great email alternative if you have multiple email addresses, and you want one unified inbox for all of them. Picture emails from your multiple personal and work email addresses, coming into one unified inbox.
Spark automatically groups your notifications, newsletters, and emails from real people into three different areas, making your email much cleaner and easier to navigate. While users report that sometimes Spark makes a mistake when grouping notifications and newsletters, correcting it is super easy with just a few clicks.
On the paid tier of Spark, you get Spark + AI. With Spark + AI, you can ask the AI to generate a reply, change the tone of the email, or shorten or lengthen the response. While it sounds great in theory, we weren't super impressed by the results when we tried it as they didn't take the full email into account all that well and the reply written by AI was quite basic.
For Gmail clients only, Spark allows you to share emails across team members and communicate via the team chat feature if collaboration is needed. The ability to assign deadlines and team members to specific emails helps eliminate that "who is answering this?" feeling.
Email sucked for years. Gmail, Outlook, and Apple took their eye off the ball. Then along came HEY.
If you're on this page because you're looking for an email client to use for work or you're looking for an email client that works with an existing email address, you can go ahead and skip HEY.
We've covered all the limitations that come with HEY when using it for business in the full HEY Email Review, from their outdated SMPT connection to lacking team security controls (your IT department or external MSP provider is going to hate you…)
This is the only area in which we'd even slightly consider saying to check out HEY. Just keep in mind that you're going to be fully switching to a new email address entirely (@hey.com), HEY is not an email client that works atop your existing Gmail/Outlook account unlike that of Superhuman and others mentioned in our Best Email Clients writeup.
Clean up your inbox in minutes: bulk unsubscribe from newsletters, automate your emails with AI, block cold emails, and view your analytics. Fully open-source.
Think of Inbox Zero as more of an open source layer atop of your existing email that adds some bulk unsubscribe and AI filtering functionality.
Inbox Zero is more of an email utility first and foremost, and while has an email client component, it's quite barebones as compared to a full email client like Superhuman.
Inbox Zero is a cool utility that can improve some of your email triaging flow, but is definitely an email utility, not an email client. But if you like the idea of an open source email client, Inbox Zero is a cool one to check out.
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Clean up your inbox in minutes: bulk unsubscribe from newsletters, automate your emails with AI, block cold emails, and view your analytics. Fully open-source.
Gmail is the best email provider out there, and is infinitely better than Outlook (Microsoft 365). We've used it for many years, and in fact solely recommend teams use Google Workspace as the foundation for their business tech stack 🥞
The problem with Gmail? Gmail being as large as it is, has to take into account billions of users.
Just imagine, changing the color of a button can impact so many people (think of when an app you use daily changes their logo and you can no longer "find it" among your apps on your phone even though it's in the exact same place). Because of this, Gmail is not able to innovate much.
So while we use Gmail as the foundation in our business, and do believe it is the best overall email client out there, we love to pair it with Superhuman to modernize our email experience.
Clean up your inbox in minutes: bulk unsubscribe from newsletters, automate your emails with AI, block cold emails, and view your analytics. Fully open-source.
We'd only recommend Outlook as an email alternative for enterprises. That said, most startups and quick growing companies use Google Workspace, so if you're looking into Gmail vs Outlook, we believe Gmail is the clear winner here. It just has a more user-friendly experience all-around, and has significantly more integrated tools (the most modern tools integrate with Gmail over Outlook).
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