Superhuman Mail vs Gmail

Superhuman Mail is the only app that feels designed for deep work. Its design is incredibly minimal, no clutter, no distractions.

Superhuman Mail's triage system is based on Inbox Splits, aka mini inboxes that are segmented based on rules you set up. You can have an inbox for team emails, notifications, accounting-related emails, customers, etc. That means you're never staring at one overwhelming wall of emails. You always know exactly where you're needed and you can triage each group of emails with full focus and what can wait for later.

It's the ONLY tool that protects your attention and keeps you focused.

Superhuman Mail's mobile app is minimal like on the desktop, and your inbox splits are clearly laid out for you.

So if you're waiting for a train or have a quick 5 minutes to spare, you can use your time wisely by immediately going to where you are needed first to action.

Superhuman Mail is completely keyboard first and the team has put in so much more thought into the experience. You can switch Inbox Splits without thinking and simply hitting tab on your keyboard. You're in a FLOW.

Snoozing and scheduling in Superhuman Mail is extremely fast. You can write in natural language and even remind you or schedule to send in another time zone. This feature is SO HELPFUL and used SO OFTEN because they make it easy.

Superhuman Mail even allows for Smart Send, which sends your email based on when someone is most likely to open it. It takes into account time zones, business hours, and individual habits (like if someone tends check their emails more in the mornings or night).

You can also schedule an email later into the future and set to send "if no reply" or "regardless" saving you from embarrassing mistakes... unlike the other tools which only allow you to send emails regardless so if someone replies, your email is still going out, yikes!

Replying to emails in-line in Superhuman Mail is easy. Simply highlight the text you want to reply to and hit enter... and it's done. We're talking about seconds and it does not break your flow. Superhuman Mail encourages you to quote others and reference other threads which allows you to give more comprehensive and thoughtful replies. When you want reference your thread or another email while replying, you can easily pop out the compose screen with shift + enter, and you'll notice how it actually makes room for the email thread to easily reference.

In terms of Snippets, you hit the semi-colon on your keyboard and they appear. You can save default to, cc, bcc fields. Superhuman Mail goes further and gives you analytics for their snippets — aka seeing the number of times you sent the snippet and the % of opens and replies, which is incredibly helpful if you're using them often for something like sales.

Superhuman Mail's offline mode is awesome. We can't say how many times we've lost internet and not even noticed with Superhuman Mail. It has super fast offline search, and you can compose, snooze, archive, and schedule emails offline.

With Superhuman Mail, you have auto-label functionality and its super simple to set up and refine — just write your prompt and Superhuman will find emails that fit. What we appreciate about it, is that you actively see Superhuman pulling in emails that match your prompt as you write it. And if you want to refine the prompt or change the label name in the future, you can easily do that within the same console making it the most user friendly experience compared to other email clients. Superhuman also takes it one step further to also lets you auto-archive certain labels — aka skip your entire inbox which can be super helpful to clear out unnecessary clutter.

Superhuman Mail's AI Search works like Gemini but it appears right where you expect - the search bar - making you more likely to remember to use it when quickly searching for something. You can ask any question about your inbox in natural language and it will give you a response with the emails it sourced its information from as a reference.

In Superhuman Mail, I was impressed to see just how much better and more personable my email was written by AI. But it makes sense, because Superhuman AI learns your tone from ALL of your other emails, so it has so much more to work with. You don't need to configure it or set it up, it just does its thing... and it's REALLY good. Would I let Gmail, Notion Mail, Spark write my emails? No. All require significant human intervention while Superhuman requires the least amount of human interaction once it writes the initial draft.

Superhuman Mail includes clean, built-in read receipts. You’ll instantly know when your email was opened, and how many times it was opened so you can follow up at the perfect time or relax knowing your recipient is thinking about your email. We lean on this feature heavily, and it provides SUCH helpful context on a daily basis.

Superhuman Mail also helps you follow up with auto-drafts. It automatically uses AI to draft replies IN YOUR TONE to emails that need a follow-up!! All you need to do is quickly review, and hit send. AND they are working on getting it to the point of drafting replies for any email that needs a response, taking into account your previous emails, website, wiki or any other set of documents you connect.

Superhuman Mail allows for team comments and shared drafts as well (although you can't yet collaborate on editing in real-time yet). You can @mention team members AND even non-team members to have them participate in the comments without even being a Superhuman Mail user, making it a more integrated experience than any other email client. We find this especially helpful when working with contractors, which we do a lot and can't imagine not having this feature.

In addition to having Team Snippets, Superhuman Mail also has two features that we can't live without. The first is Team Read Receipts. This means if Alex on my team sends an email, I don't need to ask him if the recipient opened it, I CAN SEE IT for myself which is incredibly helpful especially if we're waiting for a reply.

The second is Team Reply Indicators, aka I can see if Alex is replying to an email which saves me from doubling up... the amount of times I've gone to reply to an email, to see he's already writing a reply and backed out has saved me a ton of time.

If you have a team that uses email a lot, you are losing so much productivity by not having these features. Oh and as a bonus if you're team is using a CRM like HubSpot or Pipedrive or Salesforce, Superhuman Mail also has a native integration.

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.