Notion Mail vs Spark

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.

Spark has optimized for more focus, although there are still some UI elements that are cluttered, like in their compose screen there are too many buttons.

Spark's emails also stretch way across the screen causing fatigue when reading, while the other platforms format emails to be more narrow to help with readability.

Spark tries to simplify triage by auto-sorting your inbox into categories like Newsletter and Notifications but you cannot customize it further so most of your mail appears in the main inbox as one big pile to get through, which is where it loses points.

Spark was built to be used with a keyboard, you can hit CMD+K to go anywhere. With Spark you can fully navigate snooze and send later features without a mouse but it doesn't support natural language and this is where it got a bit clunky as if you want to snooze on a custom date, you need to count the exact days into the future rather than being able to type it in.

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.

Spark has templates, and you can access them via your keyboard using the shortcut Cmd + Shift + T, and it has placeholder functionality. You can also save any To, CC, and BCC fields to your template turning them into a bit of a workflow.

Sparks offline mode is good, it doesn't need to be enabled although it only caches recent emails and users complain its quite slow.

Spark automatically categorizes your emails just based on notifications and newsletters, but you can't set up custom auto-labels.

Spark also doesn't have AI search, but they do have pre-defined AI summaries. You can ask AI to summarize an email, or translate it..but you can't ask it any specific questions about your inbox or emails. Summaries aren't really efficient in our experience, especially when you can't go deeper and ask your own questions about the context.

In terms of AI drafts, the email started to sound a bit more like me. That's because Spark has a feature where it will scan 3 of your emails and learn a bit about the tone you typically write in. While this is better, it's still limited.

Spark supports read receipts on the paid tier only. Spark does not have any features that help with follow-up.

Spark allows for team comments and sharing drafts allowing team members to collaborate on emails in real-time. You can also assign emails to team members so they know they are responsible for responding. If you want to share an email with a non-team member, Spark allows you to generate a link to share emails and comments externally. However, external team members can't jump in and leave a comment themselves, so this is more to bring them up to speed on a conversation.

You can assign emails to team members in Spark, which is a great way to indicate that they are responsible for taking over.