8 Best Email Apps 2023

Why We Love Superhuman

If you get more than 10 emails per week and you enjoy beautiful software, you'll want to seriously consider Superhuman. Superhuman app claims to be the fastest email experience, and we tend to agree.

Sign up here for a free month of Superhuman.

You might be thinking "why pay for email management when you can use any email client for free?" 🤔

While I've spoken to many about the sheer simplicity and power, I find that either someone "gets it" or "doesn't", and if you don't, it's not for you.

Prior to Superhuman we were using Gmail. And Gmail is great as a free email experience, but once we tried Superhuman we found it made the entire "checking and answering emails" experience way more enjoyable—and fast.

If you highly value your time, and are willing to pay a bit extra for enjoyment, Superhuman is the tool that will do just that, while get you through your email inbox 2x as fast.

Saves Time, Increases Enjoyment

In summary, if you’re on email A LOT and want to optimize for enjoyment/ease/speed, Superhuman is 100% worth it. We’ve been paying for it for years and can't see life without it It's thoughtful, fast, and powerful. The way email should have been.

Sign up here for a free month of Superhuman.

Keyboard Shortcuts

I'm not kidding, I'm talking like those 3-5 seconds you often need to wait for Gmail to load—yeah, Superhuman is literally instant. Want to write an email? Open Superhuman and press _[c] and you'll be in a compose window a solid 2 seconds before Gmail loads.

Superhuman also allows you to triage through your inbox using only keyboard shortcuts.

I was a skeptic for years, until I finally gave it a shot. Learned some of the simple keyboard shortcuts like _[e] for archive and _[h] for snooze + some additional fun shortcuts like _[#] for delete, and _[!] for spam.

Don't like memorizing keyboard shortcuts to get through your email more quickly? Great, then just press _[CMD] + _[k] for the command bar → the Superhuman key, which allows you to do absolutely anything from anywhere just by typing.

Sign up here for a free trial of Superhuman.

Key Features We Love

Reminders

Set reminders to be returned on your emails if someone hasn't responded, mark messages as done with hitting a button and label messages with ease. Since we started using Superhuman, we see inbox zero way more often.

Read Statuses

Read statuses are super helpful for our team too (if I send an email and Andra (my Co founder) is cc'd, she can also see if the recipient opened the email or if I am in the middle of typing a reply. This has been so helpful for collaboration 🤜 🤛).

Split Inbox

Set filters so that you can have different inbox splits (for example, filters for emails that are Important, Newsletters, Calendar Alerts, and Notifications). This creates a unified inbox that is more orderly.

Social Profiles

Want to access more info quickly on the person that just emailed you? Superhuman's right hand bar will pull in the social media profiles of the person your writing to for easy access.

Snippets

Use their advanced features like saved snippets for a re-usable bit of text that you use often and you'll save a ton of time.

AI Features

Their *new* AI features are impressive and a fantastic use of AI. Write your emails quickly as a blurb, then ask AI to re-write with commands like "shorten", "lengthen", "simplify" or "improve writing". Even cooler? Superhuman learns your voice from your previous emails and you can ask Superhuman to re-write something in your voice 🤯

Sign up here for a free trial of Superhuman.

Mobile App

Rating: _A-

Oh, and the mobile Superhuman app. You can mark messages as done in literally one second on the go via the Superhuman mobile app. Triaging your inbox on the go has literally never been easier. You can also go ahead and "snooze an email for when you're on your computer", because sometimes you just want your full keyboard.

One thing to note is, this rating is for the Superhuman iOS mobile app (Android was released more recently and is still a few features behind, e.g. read statuses, the calendar and customizable swipe actions are still to come along with a few others).

Final Thoughts

Superhuman email works with Google Workspace (G Suite) or your Outlook account. As a part of Superhuman's onboarding process, you'll get a 30 minute call with one of their reps to show you how to get the most out the tool. You can then add multiple email accounts (e.g. personal + work) and it's super easy to flip between email accounts making it even more worthwhile as now you never have to use Gmail or Outlook again.

At the end of the day, I'll never leave Superhuman, because it makes me dread email less. Enjoy it even. I told my wife Andra about Superhuman and while she resisted the idea of paying for her email experience, after a month of using it she couldn't see herself not using Superhuman again.

Our advice? Try it and you'll be unable to see yourself using Gmail ever again too.

Sign up here for a free month of Superhuman.

Superhuman use to have a waiting listing, but not any more. You can sign up and get access right away.

We've used just about every single marketing and transactional email sending tool on the market, and we believe that Loops is the most simple and modern solution, poised to take much of the market share in time.

You're probably exploring tools like Mailchimp, Hubspot (Marketing Hub), ConvertKit, and even Postmark, and you're probably banging your head against the wall because you're overwhelmed with options and not quite sure of the difference.

And that's totally fair! Believe us, we've used them all and more. Dive into Mailchimp and you'll be introduced to what feels like 20 different areas to accomplish basic things—they used to be the most user-friendly solution on the market, but with growth has come complexity and segmented products (like why are they trying to get me to create a website...?)—sending email shouldn't be so complicated.

I mean come on, you have contacts (an audience), and then one-off bulk emails (campaigns) you want to send to your contacts, and sequences (Loops) which are re-usable emails (e.g. like a newsletter or customer onboarding sequence):

The main differentiation point of Loops is that it is just super simple and straightforward to use. You can easily segment down your audience (contacts) by defining in the campaign or sequence whatever filtering criteria you'd like specific to the actual one-off email or sequence you are sending out—super straightforward:

What we like to say is the best email tool is one you rarely need to open up. Wait, what? Yeah create your email sequences once, and then use their flexible API to easily pass these contacts from your CRM to Loops.

While they advertise themselves as "better email for SaaS", we've been able to use them for our evergreen CRM-focused newsletter, which has nothing to do with integration into our products, it really just means that they have a robust API, allowing you to easily trigger one-off or sequences of emails (Loops) to go out at various points in the process.

These other email sending tools like ConvertKit, MailChimp, and Hubspot have just added so many additional "features" to try and extract more money (with the blink of an eye you'll be spending $20k/yr with Hubspot to unlock all of their marketing automation features). Loops on the other hand just has simple pricing and "gets out of the way", with a clean email editor, powerful API, and a great user-experience.

P.S. We use and love Postmark for sending transactional via our Communicate app, but that's only because it's more of a product, in most cases, companies shouldn't really be looking at an email sending tool like Postmark for marketing automation. Not to mention, Loops has actually just added transactional (one-to-one) email support, which should be able to take care of most transactional emails (like password reset emails, etc.)

Why We Love Gmail

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.

Problems with Gmail

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 😅

Mobile App

Rating: _A-

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.

Final Thoughts

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.

Why We Love Hey

Finally someone trying to innovate within the email space, something that is completely dominated by Google and Microsoft (and I suppose Apple mail). For better or worse, you'll get your very own hey.com email address, which means it's likely to have very little spam. That said, you'll have to let all of your family and friends know of your new email address.

Problems with Hey

The biggest problem is that unlike that of Superhuman (a smart layer atop of Gmail/Outlook), with Hey, you're giving complete control of your email (and calendar) over to Hey. All of this in exchange for a snazzy new @hey.com email address.

After you've gone and given everyone your new hey.com email address, you'll quickly realize that you're now locked in to Hey... Forever. Using it for personal usage and don't want to pay for it anymore? You now need to somehow let everyone know that you're switching email addresses again.

As you keep going deeper, you'll realize that you're actually giving up a lot by having Hey essentially manage your personal data and email. So all I'd say is you'd better love their email service early on if you're going to go through all the work switching over.

If you're on the site right now, you're probably more B2B and productivity-focused, and if so, you've probably also heard of Zapier (maybe? If not, it's cool, go check it out).

Anyway, yeah, Hey has no API, you can't use Zapier with it, but not just that, all of the awesome email tools that upgrade functionality to your email like Mailman, or heck, even your CRM (with automatic email ingesting like with Copper and Gmail + Google Calendar). Gone gone gone. So if you're even slightly considering using Hey for your business email (which you can for $12/user/mo, bring your own domain, and lose all integration with that). Yeah, it just doesn't make sense.

Gosh was I excited for Hey when it was first coming out... Had I actually thought about all of the above though, I would have surely been a bit less excited by what I'd ultimately be giving up by using Hey 😅 okay, let's now get into the meat of the Hey.com review ⤵

User Interface (UI)

Rating: _C-

It's so clear who Hey was building for when finally seeing the big hyped up reveal, was it the software lover? The tech founder? The designer? Nope! But rather my mother, and maybe children? And yet here I am, someone that was happy and willing to pay the $99/yr (well for a 4+ character email address, but more on that in the pricing section)

The product uses huge icons, childish text, and bright color gradients everywhere. They even tried renaming the features that we all know and understand like Inbox and Snooze to "Imbox" and "Bubbleup" for no reason other than to try and be "cute". It just doesn't connect with me, the UI was not built for me, and it's an awful use of screen real estate everywhere you visit in the app. I continually got frustrated when using it, asking why, why, oh why? 😢

User Experience (UX)

Rating: _C+

If you love big buttons and big text, you'll love the UX of Hey email. We'll get more into the UX in bits and pieces more in the features section below.

Features

Rating: _B

Credit where credit is due, the thing that Hey did focus on was "how do we simplify the email app experience and re-think how we can make ideas like inbox zero core to the experience?

They have some cool features around blocking new emails before they come through (requiring you first approving access). Essentially baked in functionality that you'd have to use a tool like Mailman + Gmail or Superhuman to get working out of the box.

Mobile App

Rating: _C

I have a friend that uses and loves Hey for his personal account, and uses Gmail (Google Workspace) for his work account. Believe it or not, he has all of his Hey emails forward to Gmail, and he checks/triages his emails in Gmail on mobile. He doesn't like the Hey mobile app, but the truth of the matter is that just sounds like a lot of extra work 😅

Pricing

Ultra-short 2-character addresses like ab@hey.com are $999/year, and 3-character addresses like abc@hey.com are $349/year. All other @hey.com email addresses, 4-characters or more, are $99/year.

You're probably exploring tools like Mailchimp, Hubspot (Marketing Hub), ConvertKit, Loops, and even Postmark, and you're probably banging your head against the wall because you're overwhelmed with options and not quite sure of the actual differences.

You're probable checking "does it integrate with my CRM?" and the most confusing bit of it all is that what you think integrating with your CRM and what the marketing sites list as integrating are two totally separate things.

Mailchimp is the 800lb gorilla in the space—has been around the longest, has the most "integrations" out of the box, but as they've grabbed more and more of the market, they've had to expand their product offering to generate more revenue. Even expanding to offering websites, stores, and appointment booking (only to get worse with their recent acquisition by Intuit—how do you become a $100bn email sending company? You don't, you expand to everything but the kitchen sink):

So dive into Mailchimp and you'll be introduced to what feels like 20 different areas to accomplish basic things (even just on the sending email front)—sending email shouldn't be so complicated.

They also focus heavily on "beautiful email templates that match your brand", well the open-rates and click-through of highly templated/branded emails have fallen off a cliff in recent years. Would you believe that with so much automated emails, people actually prefer receiving emails that feel like they were sent by a human? Big shocker, right? 😅

We highly recommend checking out a more simple tool like Loops to build out and manage your marketing emails (it's what we use for our CRM-focused evergreen newsletter).