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. ⤵
Personalized to your work and beautifully designed—Notion Mail is the only inbox that makes life simpler.
Notion Mail is Notion's latest attempt to expand its product suite by adding email, but it’s not entirely original. You see, Notion acquired Skiff, an email client known for its privacy features. However, after the acquisition, Notion removed Skiff’s end-to-end encryption and integrated Gmail and Google Workspace instead, disappointing privacy-conscious users (2 million of them)/
Functionally, Notion Mail is essentially a Gmail wrapper with a Notion-inspired interface. It offers a cleaner, more minimalist experience than Gmail, with added AI features like referencing Notion pages while drafting emails. You can also create customizable inbox views using AI-powered labels, which can help organize your emails. However, it lacks deeper database integrations that many Notion enthusiasts hoped for (the general sentiment from users is that they are quite frustrated you cannot integrate Notion database items with your inbox).
Overall, Notion Mail is a decent free addition to your Notion plan, but it’s not a game-changer in the world of email management.
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.
Curious how this app compares to others?