We believe there are better options available in this category, read below to learn what this software does well, and what they could do better. ⤵
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.
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 😅
Rating: A-
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.
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.
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:
Curious how this app compares to others?