When it comes to the best email app for professionals, there is a clear winner that comes up on top for most people—and that's Superhuman.
Gmail & Outlook are great foundational email clients, but if you significantly want to upgrade your email experience, Superhuman is going to give you the most value (and yes, it's the most expensive also, although you can use this link to try it for free for 30 days).
Why do hundreds of thousands of professionals opt for Superhuman?
It's the same reason anyone chooses any Apple product like an iPhone or MacBook Air. It's got great minimal design, it's fast, and it's features will dramatically improve your email experience.
Take it from me—someone who refused even the idea of paying for email. Then, Alex dared me to try it for only one month. I did, and now 5 years later I am still paying for a subscription. So yeah, it's that good.
We also evaluated Superhuman's main competitors, Spark, Missive, and Hey.
But despite their lower price tags, they didn't come close to the improved efficiency we get from Superhuman.
While Spark offers a better email experience that Gmail or Outlook, it doesn't have automatic email sorting like Superhuman for email, so you're still triaging your email the same old way. The interface is also still very much like regular email.
Where Missive stands out is that they allow you to delegate emails from your inbox to other team members (without needing to share your password), which why certain Founders with exploding inboxes tend to enjoy it.
Hey, another popular email app, is more so for...well (trying to find a way to put this politely 🙃) folks who like really big buttons as a part of the interface and a super simple email experience. Less techy folks. I'd love for my grandmother to use Hey. But as a professional, it just doesn't give you that same sleek/speedy experience.
We go deeper about each app below ⤵
.webp)
.svg){kind=icon}
Get through your inbox 2x as fast (for teams of all sizes).
Superhuman is the best email client made for busy professionals who want to enhance their email experience. If checking your emails is often an overwhelming, dreadful feat and wish there was a way you could spend less time on email, then Superhuman will almost certainly make your day better.
We've been using Superhuman for over 5 years as our email app and couldn't see life without it! And trust me, I used to bet the person that said "would never pay for email" but after trying it for the first month...I couldn't imagine going back, and here I am now 5+ years later, still a paying customer and am happier for it, it's that good.
Superhuman has a beautiful, minimal design and will help you get through your email faster. If you get more than 10 emails a week, we recommend trying Superhuman for at least 30 days (it's free) before committing to another solution.
Sign up here for a free month of Superhuman.
Superhuman is a layer atop of Gmail or Outlook. You no longer have to even log into Outlook or Gmail as when using Superhuman, you navigate your emails straight from the Superhuman web app, desktop app, or mobile app.
On the computer, you can use Superhuman without even touching your mouse, navigating email super fast through keyboard shortcuts alone (you can still use your mouse if you wish though!). If this sounds intimidating, don't let it! When you sign up for Superhuman, a specialist will take you through a 30-minute onboarding call, teaching you in the in's and out's of the tool.
With Superhuman you get through your emails super fast. Easily snooze emails for later, answer quickly using Superhuman's AI feature, and create Inbox Splits to help triage through specific types of emails in chunks. After using Superhuman for 2 weeks, our bet is you won't want to go back to life without it, it's a killer productivity app.
Get a free month of Superhuman.
Not only can you use AI to help you draft responses or write an email "in your tone" (it learns from your previous emails!), but their AI search is also fantastic.
AI search allows you to ask any question about your inbox in natural language, and Superhuman will return with an answer based on your inbox and provide the emails that it is referencing.
I can't tell you how much time I used to spend searching my inbox with "exact keywords". This is now totally elimintated with the AI search feature.
You can share email threads with others (whether they are on your team or not) so you can collaborate under email.
This has come super handy for us when we've had sales negotiations (very helpful to @mention each other and check-in if what is proposed makes sense), or to more thoughtfully respond to a customer. Read our entire Superhuman Team Comments review here.
If you share this link with your entire team, you will all get a free 30 days to test it out together.
There is no discount on annual pricing for Superhuman, although if you sign up using this link you will get your first-month free.
.webp)
Amie is a calendar app that helps you manage tasks and easily add emails as tasks to your calendar.
Amie doesn't try to hide what it is and isn't. It's a calendar at the core and like many of the other best daily planners on the market, they've gone and added some basic task creation functionality.
Where they've gone a step further is actually pulling in email to the mix. Depending on the type of person you are, maybe you want to turn emails into tasks and schedule them directly on your calendar in a time blocking fashion.
Amie is definitely not a full email client, although it is listed on the best email clients page, that's because it allows you to time-block on your calendar emails, and then respond to those emails from right within Amie.
That said, view it as more of a "feature" and less of a software category. When comparing Superhuman vs Amie for example, there's no match—Amie is not a full-fledged email app.
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.
Inbox Zero (not to be confused with what Superhuman refers to getting through all your emails) is a layer atop your Gmail that helps you to easily unsubscribe from newsletters and automate label/forwarding flows all via AI.
The area that we use and love with Inbox Zero is where it helps us tame our email inbox, sort of like Mailman, but it focuses more on actually leveraging AI to automatically take action on your email (or unsubscribe if you're getting many newsletters but not reading any of them:
Inbox Zero has a relatively basic email client built in, it's marked as "beta" and feels quite beta, so be warned, it looks quite clean, the simplicity is appreciated.
We just think you might feel like quite a bit is missing if you were to consider even using Inbox Zero vs Gmail. It's clear that Inbox Zero is more built as an email tool, a layer in-between your email and your email client, and to that it does a good job.
One thing to keep in mind with Inbox Zero (and how it differentiates from its competitors) is that it is an open source email client with thousands of stars on GitHub, so go and check out the code yourself if you'd like:
Mailman is a Gmail plugin that allows you to control when and what emails should land in your inbox.
What if you could have your email delivered on a regular cadence (say once a day) similar to the way that your physical mail is delivered. You'd be able to focus more, not get distracted by that random newsletter, but you could still have priority emails come immediately through when necessary. That's Mailman.
If you're using Gmail, especially Gmail alongside Superhuman, then it's definitely one of the best productivity tools to check out, because what's more productive than having more control over your email?
.webp)
Secure business email, that makes it easier to stay on top of the work that matters (for teams of all sizes).
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 🥞
For personal use, Gmail is free so of course, there's the clear benefit there.
For professional use, Gmail integrates seamlessly into the entire Google Workspace ecosystem, making it unbeatable. You have access to many of the apps you use daily alongside Gmail like Google Sheets, Google Docs, Google Meet, etc.
But the reason we love Gmail most is because it has some of the most extensive integration capabilities and natively integrated apps of any email software on the market.
Overall, Gmail is a great email client and will work wonderfully as a part of the Google Workspace suite. But if you want supercharge email and have a faster email experience that is build more for professionals who enjoy beautiful UI/UX, then check out Superhuman.
Also, be sure to check out the integrations area for some of the tools that work with Gmail we love most like Superhuman and Mailman.
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.
Gmail is also focused on building features for the masses that you might not need. For instance, the masses want a chat that easily allows you to talk to others, while you might already use Slack for this purpose and not need the feature at all. This leaves you with a widget that is not particularly helpful in anyway.
This leads to the final problem with Gmail. Because of the bloated features, Gmail has become so slow. It takes a few seconds to load, and with a simple distraction you can forget why you were going into your inbox in the first place 😅
The Gmail mobile app has a significantly better experience than even the web app in many ways. It's easy to navigate, loads relatively quickly, and is an overall good experience.
It also works great cross-platform and is quite stable overall. They let you also set swipe actions (Archive/Snooze/Delete) and get quite granular on the notification settings as well.
Although it has limitations around creating hyperlinks and other functionality when composing emails, which is where the mobile app features missing are another area where we feel like there could be some improvement, especially when comparing Gmail vs Superhuman.
Team inbox and chat tool that empowers teams to collaborate around email, SMS & social media messaging apps.
While we don't think Missive is the best email app, it does solve two problems really well. The first being that it helps consolidate all your inboxes across different platforms (email, WhatsApp, SMS, social media).
The second, is that it helps team members collaborate on answering to messages. Whether it's via assigning messages to the best person suited to respond, or discussing the best way to respond privately internally via the team chat feature.
If you're looking to delegate your inbox and get your team to help respond to messages, Missive is the ideal solution. You don't need to give full access to your email inbox to team members, just simply assign the emails you want taken off your plate!
Do team members typically need your input when responding? With Missive they can easily send you a private chat message to get your help, right on the platform. All of this makes Missive great for remote teams.
If you're wanting team collaboration on emails, Missive will be a better choice as Superhuman doesn't have these features (yet anyway!). Also, if you're wanting a unified inbox for emails, SMS messages, WhatsApp, and social media DM's, Missive will also be a better choice for you.
ButiIf you're comparing Missive vs Superhuman for solo-use (without a team), Superhuman has a much more beautiful minimal UI and the user experience is also a lot more smooth. Superhuman's interface isn't designed like every other email app out there, they put a lot of thought into making email more simple to use, yet more powerful.
If you're a professional who wants the best email experience, Superhuman is going to be your best bet (it's what we've used here at efficient app for 5+ years).
That said, if you're someone who wants something more budget friendly, Missive is a good choice since they have a free plan.
Missive is a great entry into having a more established Help Desk. We might recommend it for small teams, but for larger teams there are more established tools we'd recommend.
Missive is great for Founders who perhaps are at the point of scaling their business and wanting to bring the greater team in to help support email and messaging tickets. Missive will allow you to start delegating your inbox, and in the meantime, we recommend setting up specific email addresses for different business functions (e.g. [email protected], [email protected]). Missive will be a great tool to help you start to experience this segmentation.
Once your processes are more established, you might want to switch over to a proper Help Desk. The team who built Missive is small (about 3 people), so if you're a more established business, a larger help desk company is probably what you need.
A proper help desk will allow you to have chat features right on your website and separate inboxes for different email addresses (with different team permissions). You will also get great collaboration features like assigning emails to different team members, and leaving notes for one another if further collaboration is needed. Further you get a knowledge base for creating self-service content for customers. Read about the help desk we use, Help Scout or if you want something similar to Missive, check out Front.
All this being said, if you use WhatsApp, SMS, and social media DM's as core messaging components to your business, Missive will be a better choice.
Email sucked for years. Gmail, Outlook, and Apple took their eye off the ball. Then along came HEY.
Finally someone trying to innovate within the email space, something that is completely dominated by Google and Microsoft (and I suppose Apple mail). For better or worse, you'll get your very own hey.com email address, which means it's likely to have very little spam. That said, you'll have to let all of your family and friends know of your new email address.
The biggest problem is that unlike that of Superhuman (a smart layer atop of Gmail/Outlook), with Hey, you're giving complete control of your email (and calendar) over to Hey. All of this in exchange for a snazzy new @hey.com email address.
After you've gone and given everyone your new hey.com email address, you'll quickly realize that you're now locked in to Hey... Forever. Using it for personal usage and don't want to pay for it anymore? You now need to somehow let everyone know that you're switching email addresses again.
As you keep going deeper, you'll realize that you're actually giving up a lot by having Hey essentially manage your personal data and email. So all I'd say is you'd better love their email service early on if you're going to go through all the work switching over.
If you're on the site right now, you're probably more B2B and productivity-focused, and if so, you've probably also heard of Zapier (maybe? If not, it's cool, go check it out).
Anyway, yeah, Hey has no API, you can't use Zapier with it, but not just that, all of the awesome email tools that upgrade functionality to your email like Mailman, or heck, even your CRM (with automatic email ingesting like with Copper and Gmail + Google Calendar). Gone gone gone. So if you're even slightly considering using Hey for your business email (which you can for $12/user/mo, bring your own domain, and lose all integration with that). Yeah, it just doesn't make sense.
Gosh was I excited for Hey when it was first coming out... Had I actually thought about all of the above though, I would have surely been a bit less excited by what I'd ultimately be giving up by using Hey 😅
It's so clear who Hey was building for when finally seeing the big hyped up reveal, was it the software lover? The tech founder? The designer? Nope! But rather my mother, and maybe children? And yet here I am, someone that was happy and willing to pay the $99/yr (well for a 4+ character email address, but more on that in the pricing section)
The product uses huge icons, childish text, and bright color gradients everywhere. They even tried renaming the features that we all know and understand like Inbox and Snooze to "Imbox" and "Bubbleup" for no reason other than to try and be "cute". It just doesn't connect with me, the UI was not built for me, and it's an awful use of screen real estate everywhere you visit in the app. I continually got frustrated when using it, asking why, why, oh why? 😢
If you love big buttons and big text, you'll love the UX of Hey email. We'll get more into the UX in bits and pieces more in the features section below.
Credit where credit is due, the thing that Hey did focus on was "how do we simplify the email app experience and re-think how we can make ideas like inbox zero core to the experience?
They have some cool features around blocking new emails before they come through (requiring you first approving access). Essentially baked in functionality that you'd have to use a tool like Mailman + Gmail or Superhuman to get working out of the box.
I have a friend that uses and loves Hey for his personal account, and uses Gmail (Google Workspace) for his work account. Believe it or not, he has all of his Hey emails forward to Gmail, and he checks/triages his emails in Gmail on mobile. He doesn't like the Hey mobile app, but the truth of the matter is that just sounds like a lot of extra work 😅
Ultra-short 2-character addresses like [email protected] are $999/year, and 3-character addresses like [email protected] are $349/year. All other @hey.com email addresses, 4-characters or more, are $99/year.
Outlook is an email client and calendar for companies and individuals built by Microsoft
If you're a larger enterprise, you're likely using Outlook instead of Gmail (Google Workspace), to manage your email and calendar for work.
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).
In addition, you'll get deep Single-Sign-On with Google that you don't get with the Microsoft 365 suite, which just makes logging into many other tools significantly easier.
With that, Microsoft did acquire the beloved Sunrise calendar back in the day before killing it off and rolling it into Outlook. So the Outlook calendar should be quite decent in theory, although they seemed to strip some of the best things we miss about Sunrise from Outlook. We've looked elsewhere to fill our Sunrise void, now with Motion.
Formerly email client, Skiff is joining Notion and shutting down.
Notion as acquired Skiff and is shutting down their entire product line. You will need to look for a Skiff alternative email client.
.webp)
Smart. Focused. Email. Fast, cross-platform email designed to filter out the noise - so you can focus on what's important.
Spark is an email client that is designed to help you get through your inbox faster. Spark has a mixture of both Superhuman and Hey features, with a tiny bit of Missive for team collaboration.
Spark as an email app is miles better than Gmail, Outlook, or Apple Mail, both on desktop and on your phone and we can't think of a reason why someone wouldn't use Spark since they have a generous free tier.
While we can't say Spark wins the category for the best email app (our top pick is Superhuman as they put more TLC into their features and design), Spark is certainly the best email app that offers a free version.
Spark is usually the tool that people consider when they aren't looking to spend money on email. That said, there are some things to consider.
While Spark's interface is miles better than Gmail or Outlook, it still feels—well—like email. Superhuman gives your entire email app a facelift with its beautiful minimal design, consistent colors, fonts, and automatic resizing of emails to make them readable no matter your screen size.
Overall, if you're a professional who wants the best email client, doing a 30-day free trial of Superhuman is probably worth it alongside Spark, to really compare the two tools and see which one you get the most out of.
Spark took one of Hey's most popular features, "The Screener," and made their own version of it called "The Gatekeeper." It's the same idea, giving users the ability to thumbs up or thumbs down a sender, indicating if you want to allow emails from this sender in your inbox or not.
If email delegation or team collaboration is the main reason you're looking for an email client, we'd say Missive might be the best to check out. The reason? Missive allows you to have a central inbox for any business-related messages (beyond email) — from social media apps, to SMS, to WhatsApp. Missive's collaborative features are also more established than Spark's, so you'll get a more reliable experience.
.svg)
.svg)
.svg){kind=icon}
.jpg)
%20YouTube.webp)
-1080p-FINAL.webp)
.svg)
