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. ⤵
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.
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.
Curious how this app compares to others?