It sounds unreal, but the right email client for gmail can make your work and life (much) easier.
gmail is an amazing communication tool for teams and businesses, but any tool built to serve everyone will always have its pros and cons. it lacks productivity and collaboration features, making email management take longer than necessary.
That’s where third-party email clients built around gmail can make it better and make life easier.
Third-party email apps increase productivity by bringing all your email accounts under one roof, integrating with your favorite apps, and enabling more effective team collaboration.
These are the best email clients to help you manage your personal email and organize your team’s inbox for an efficient work experience.
best picks by use case
- missive: best for teams, collaboration, and productivity
- spike: best for conversations that revolve around people, not threads
- superhuman: best for people who don’t need collaboration features
- front: best for large teams looking for features of the help desk
missive
missive is the easiest way to send emails. is a chat and inbox app for teams that allows you to collaborate on email services like gmail, microsoft outlook, icloud and other external communication channels like sms, facebook and live chat.
At the individual level, you can use it to centralize all communication and achieve the coveted zero inbox using rules to automate workflows for things like:
- reduce notifications by grouping when emails should arrive in your inbox
- use tags, sub-tags, and shared tags to classify, organize, and delegate your messages as neatly or simply as you like
- reduction of newsletters and other spam usage rules (useful when brands don’t honor unsubscribe requests)
delegating emails to your assistant or a colleague with the click of a button is another great feature. no need to share or forward passwords!
Missive also integrates the app with many popular productivity tools like Asana, Google Drive, Chargedesk, Dropbox, and Zapier.
While these core features are great for boosting personal productivity, Missive is a game-changer for teams.
benefits for teams
missive was designed with an enterprise-centric collaboration experience in mind. streamlines communication and improves collaboration.
You get everything you need to be more productive with flexible inbox settings that let you manage private conversations alongside those shared with your team, rules and automations, collaborative writing, and internal chat.
You can centralize customer messages on social networks, email and chat. so, whether you receive an email, a facebook message or a whatsapp message, you will receive it directly in the missive. you don’t have to switch between apps to read, reply, and delegate emails.
Suppose you receive an email and want help from another co-worker. in traditional email clients like gmail, you’ll need to forward the message to them.
not in letter.
missive allows you to add notes and have conversions on emails like this:
Just “@” message a colleague and ask them for more information. Your co-worker will see the email in their inbox and can chat back and forth with you around the email chain.
no need to copy and paste links into slack or deal with emails back and forth.
And that’s just scratching the surface!
missive gives you a host of other great team collaboration features, like:
- rules that allow you to automate team workflows to boost team productivity
- email sharing to view private emails alongside shared emails
- collaborative email and shared inboxes
- live chat to resolve time-sensitive technical issues to maintain customer relationships
- shared labels to organize team conversations structurally
- internal chat rooms for more effective team conversations across multiple communication channels
security features
Security and authentication features, such as two-factor authentication (2fa), are available on all plans. missive also supports saml single sign-on and ip restriction. You can read more about missive’s security and data encryption here.
availability
missive is available for macos, windows, apple ios, android and modern web browsers like chrome, safari and mozilla firefox. mobile apps for ios and android also provide a full experience.
You can set up rules, create templates, delegate emails, comment, and create replies using rich text from your mobile device, just like you can from the desktop app or the web versions.
price
Missive’s pricing is also competitive compared to other email clients for Gmail—especially for small businesses that want to collaborate around email.
Start with the free version to try out the features and see if it’s worth upgrading to one of the paid plans.
- Free Tier: Free for up to 3 users (with 15 days inbox history)
- Initial: $14/month per user
- Productive: $18 /month per user
- company: $26/month per user
limited history?
Messages and comments older than your plan’s history limit are hidden from the interface, not deleted. you can still access all your emails in your email provider’s interface.
spike
spike is a conversational and collaborative email client tool that turns your email into a text messaging-like experience.
eliminates repeated headers, signatures and threads that make emails difficult to read, emulating real-time chat for faster conversations.
At spike, conversations revolve around people, not conversations. this can be a useful feature, as many other email clients don’t support grouping by sender and require you to use search to find conversations with specific people.
This user interface attempts to change the way you communicate with people by removing common and awkward email artifacts like polite greetings and closings. is working, to be seen…
A smarter inbox feature lets you prioritize important messages, while notepads allow you to create, edit, collaborate and share notes in a way similar to Google Docs.
Spike supports live collaboration on email and sports a sidebar area where you can chat and collaborate with colleagues without leaving notes.
Like other tools on this list, spike supports a unified inbox that brings all your emails from different accounts together in one place.
Notable Features & Integrations
tasks: spike supports tasks with a built-in to-do list.
video conferences: you can share the screen via zoom within spike.
Voice Memos: Recording and sharing voice memos within the app can be helpful, especially when you want to avoid confusion and don’t want to go through the hassle of jumping into a zoom call.
price
spike is designed with small businesses with budget constraints in mind. therefore, it is not an ideal solution for large organizations, especially considering that many of its advanced features still require a lot of work, making collaboration difficult.
Pricing is reasonable, starting at $7 per user per month. a free plan with 1gb storage is also available.
superhuman
Superhuman is a light email client for Gmail and Outlook email accounts, modeled like Thunderbird and Mailbird. But it offers extra functionalities that can significantly enhance email management and productivity.
The tool promises to deliver the fastest email experience ever, but you have to shell out $30 a month to get it. superhuman claims to harness artificial intelligence to automatically classify your emails, with its algorithm quickly learning which emails are most urgent and placing them at the top.
You can also create a vip list to make specific lists for specific senders. this is basically like adding a filter rule that applies a tag in gmail.
superhuman also has a feature where you can easily delete an email from your inbox and have it come back at a designated time in the future, which is just a fancy way of saying superhuman has a snooze feature . the problem with its repeat feature is that it can quickly create a mess in your inbox if you open your email in a different client.
has an individual approach in handling your emails more efficiently. that’s why superhuman is more suitable for individual users and not for teams.
if you want your email client to have features like shared inbox, chat, comments, and collaborative writing, superhuman is not the tool for you.
why people use superhuman
a big reason people use superhuman is other people talk about the fact that they use superhuman. there’s a bit of zeitgeist around it. That being said, superhuman does have some distinctive features that make it ideal for a particular group of people:
- keyboard shortcuts make sorting and processing email super quick and easy
- read receipts to stay on top of things you need a response for
- contact data enrichment via clearbit
- smart scheduling features that bring your email and calendar together in one view so you don’t have to navigate between different interface windows
Pricing
superhuman starts at $30/month, but you can’t just sign up for the email app; you must be invited by an existing user or sign up for the waiting list through the website.
You will then have to complete an extensive questionnaire and a personalized onboarding call to ensure you are the right customer for the product.
While exciting, this may seem tedious and time-consuming. Also, Superhuman is only available for Mac, iPhone, and iPad users (not Android or Windows), which is another limitation that can work against you. especially considering that tools like misive offer greater flexibility, more collaboration features, advanced automation, and blazing-fast speeds, all at a more affordable price.
front
front allows you to assign messages to your teammates (only one at a time), eliminating the hassle of forwarding and copying, similar to missive.
With front, you can chat with team members over emails without leaving the app to free up space in other team chat apps and make communications easily accessible to everyone. you can also create automation rules and canned responses to process email more efficiently.
Although front is a robust tool, it is not the right gmail email client for everyone. If you’re looking for a tool that is first and foremost a help desk, front is a great option.
everything up front is task oriented. gives customer support use case emails (info@, help@) a higher priority over personal/private inboxes.
Analytics give you insight into your team’s performance and impact on the business. If you have a business that handles high volumes of email, you can use this data to keep up with operations. Please note that this feature is only available if you opt for the scaling plan which requires a minimum annual contract of $11,880.
Integrations
An extensive list of integrations means you can use Front with other applications depending on your workflows. the most popular include tools like asana, hubspot, guru, clickup, and github.
price
Front’s main users are people who manage help desks at enterprise companies, and its pricing model reflects this.
front’s starter plan is priced at $19 per month, but it’s very basic compared to starter plans offered by other solutions like misive. If you want to unlock enterprise-wide rules that allow you to centralize rule management, analytics, and individual integrations, you must upgrade to the Advanced plan starting at $990/mo with an annual contract.
Don’t Let Gmail Lower Your Productivity
With several easy-to-install plugins and integrations with imap email providers, gmail’s lack of robust and comprehensive collaboration features stifles what’s possible for email.
If you need to collaborate with coworkers, sort through email faster, be distracted less often, and automate your workflows, you’re better off with a third-party email client.
Regardless of the tool you use, what matters most are the processes and systems you put in place to manage email. don’t forget that when selecting which tool to incorporate into your workflow.