Superhuman Mail vs Notion Mail

Superhuman Mail is the only app that feels designed for deep work. Its design is incredibly minimal, no clutter, no distractions. It's hands down the best email client.

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.

I use Superhuman Mail's AI email assistant features on a daily basis.

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 Mail 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 Mail write my emails? No. All require significant human intervention while Superhuman Mail requires the least amount of human interaction once it writes the initial draft.

It learns how you would speak to a vendor vs client vs team mate. For example, I am use more emojis and am more warm with people I communicate with all the time vs a sales email or someone that I am writing for the first time. Superhuman Mail knows that difference.

It also automatically auto drafts email replies as they enter your inbox just like an assistant would. I wake up, I see the new emails that have come in, and they already have replies drafted in my tone. I review them and hit send. Sometimes they are spot on (especially if I've answered similar emails before). Other times when it's a new scenario, I need to do more tweaking, but that's expected.

It also notices when I've sent an email and haven't received a response, then automatically drafts a follow-up for me. It's incredibly helpful for staying on top of conversations and making sure nothing slips through the cracks.

With Superhuman Mail, you have auto-label functionality and its super simple to set up and refine - just write your prompt and Superhuman Mail will find emails that fit. What we appreciate about it, is that you actively see Superhuman Mail 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'd expect it to be (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.

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.

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.