Notion Mail vs Gmail

Notion Mail’s triage system uses views that let you build inbox filters so your emails can be better segmented. That said, there’s no real flow when triaging your inbox. You need to pause and click into each view since there’s no quick way to jump between them with a simple keyboard shortcut, which kills productivity.

That said, you can look at Notion Mail as a less cluttered version of Gmail. They’ve stripped back a lot of the chaos, but some design elements still cause friction. For example, the compose window is locked to a side panel with no full-screen mode, making longer replies feel cramped.

With Notion, some helpful shortcuts exist. That said, simple things like switching inbox views still requires mouse usage or opening up their command centre via CMD + K and writing where you want to go, causing a bit of friction.

And while Notion's snoozing and send later features were more user friendly than Gmail's, they still required mouse usage to get the most out of the features.

If you want to reply in line, the process is that you need to copy the entire email, format it, and then use their quoting feature and then write your reply. This is tedious.

Notion Mail's snippets are enabled by default and they even give you some pre-set options with placeholders. You can easily access them by hitting / and selecting your snippet which is super handy. We also liked their placeholder functionality - its super easy to use as it guides you through each part that needs to be filled out with just hitting tab.

Notion Mail offers super basic offline mode but on their desktop app only and its limited to reading and composing emails only.

Notion Mail's auto-labels were promising at first, you can easily prompt in natural language and we like the initial interface they built for approving emails that fit the criteria. But you can't actively test the prompt or refine your labels once you've set them up. We've found that as time goes on, you want to change the criteria or the name of the label, but you can't do this in Notion Mail without starting from scratch... which is a total headache.

Notion does not have AI search, and they actually don't have AI summarizes or the ability to ask any questions about an email thread.

Notion Mail's AI drafts were underwhelming. It didn't know how to write in my tone or take any other feedback in the prompting. Given the main thing you're upgrading in Notion Mail is AI, I expected it to be better.

The only advantage Notion Mail has is if you're a hardcore Notion user and you want to reference Notion pages when writing an email. Given we don't use Notion and have never felt the pain point of needing our emails to reference our knowledge base, we can't say we recommend this.

Notion Mail doesn't support read receipts at all, so you’re flying completely blind once you hit send. It does not have any features that help with follow-up.

Notion does not offer team collaboration features so they are immediately disqualified from the entire Team Collaboration Category.

Gmail is visually cluttered. There is a lot popping up at you, colors, and even other products like their chat and meet features. It's chaos but most people don't even realize it until they use something more minimal.

It’s not just distracting it's SLOW to load. While you're waiting, you probably hop into another tab... and just like that you forgot what you were even going to do. Right?

Even after setting up labels - Gmails triage system - they clutter your sidebar by default, and you need to dig to even find what you're looking for because Gmail doesn't natively let you only see labeled emails in a dedicated view without them appearing in your main inbox so you're always thrown into the deep end of your inbox every time you log in.

Gmail is not good for focus, so if you're a business owner or high-performer who gets a lot of emails, you'll gain back hours by using another tool.

With Gmail you get basic keyboard shortcuts but they're inconsistent and NOT intuitive. For example, you can hit E to archive an email, R to reply, C to compose or hit X to select a group of emails, but to even find what shortcuts do what, you need to go to a separate document to memorize them. When trying to navigate through keyboard shortcuts only, it feels like a constant start-stop friction and the experience feels piecemeal.

For example, Gmail's snoozing and scheduling features are incredibly mouse heavy and tedious, it requires a dreadful amount of effort to even use these features so my guess is many of you don't. I certainly didn't when using Gmail.

If you want to reply in line, the process is that you need to copy the entire email, format it, and then use their quoting feature and then write your reply. This is tedious.

In terms of Templates, if you don't know to look for them, you'll never find them. You have to dig into Advanced Settings just to turn them on.

Once enabled, using them felt like clicking through a cockpit... The compose window is already cluttered with icons, and inserting a template takes three clicks, every time. It works… but not without friction.

While Gmail offers offline mode, you need to remember to enable it... so by the time you actually remember you need offline mode, oops its too late!

In Gmail you don't get AI auto-labels - thats wishful thinking.

Gmail uses Gemini for search, so this is one of Gmail's strongest areas. You can ask Gemini, in natural language, any questions about your inbox, like "When is the last time I met with so and so?" and it will give you an answer and source the emails it got it from. But if you haven't used this yet... it's because its not the most intuitive. It doesn't appear in...well..search where you'd expect. You have to specifically know and remember to click the Gemini button.

In Gmail, I prompted Gemini to help me write my email and while it did, it was quite cold and not something that I would typically write.When trying to prompt it to make it more friendly, instead it just gave me an entirely new email talking about friendliness. Not what I was intending. I could only choose a pre-set prompt, and instead of replacing my original email, it just wrote an entirely new one underneath, creating more steps to cut out what I didn't want. That said, Gmail did announce that soon it will have Gemini integrated, and it will help write your emails based on your tone that it learns from previous emails which we anticipate will be a big improvement.

Gmail technically supports read receipts but you need to request it from the recipient... which is just awkward. We can't even consider this an available feature because of the clunkiness. Gmail also does not do anything to help with follow-up.

Gmail does not offer team collaboration features so they are immediately disqualified from the entire Team Collaboration Category.