Spark vs Gmail

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. That's why it doesn't score very high as an AI email assistant.

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.

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.