Superhuman can be described as a light email client on top of Gmail, or Outlook like Airmail, Canary Mail, Mailman or Mailbird. It does, however, offer some extra functionalities to enhance the efficiency of email management.

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Superhuman prides itself on being slick and promising to be the fastest email app in the market. But does it live up to the inbox zero hype?

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Having the right email client in place makes all the difference in terms of speed and productivity. However, when it comes to team collaboration, an email client that was built for individual users can’t perform better than one that was built from the ground up for teams. And that’s the main strength of Missive.

Both Superhuman and Missive are email clients that offer plenty of features to help you manage emails better. While both email clients are designed to boost efficiency and productivity (and our ability to reach inbox zero), Missive’s core feature is that it was designed to make managing emails a breeze for teams (think agencies or service companies deal with 100+ quotes a day). Superhuman, on the other hand, was initially built for individual users and they've since added a few collaboration features like shared email snippets and internal read statuses.

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In this article, we’ll highlight the major differences between Superhuman and Missive and why we confidently believe that Missive offers a more affordable yet better user experience than Superhuman, and is the best email inbox with multiple team members—it's theGoogle Docs to Superhuman's Word. Missive offers a full management solution that goes beyond email management to also include live chat, SMS/WhatsApp, tasks, and social media accounts.

Superhuman is email only

Multichannel communication is now more important than ever. As customers, clients, and stakeholders communicate in a diverse array of channels nowadays, a business communication tool shouldn’t be focused on email alone. Not being able to aggregate the different communication mediums that you use in a single app can lead to lousy customer experiences and decreased efficiency.

With Missive, that’s not an issue you need to worry about. While Superhuman only supports Gmail and Outlook email providers, Missive allows you to collaborate around all these mediums:

• All email providers (Gmail, G Suite, Google Workspace, Office 365, Yahoo via IMAP, regular IMAP, Microsoft Outlook, etc).
• Live Chat
• SMS
• WhatsApp
• Social media (Messenger, Instagram)
• Website Chat
• Custom channels (via the API)

If one day someone sends you an email and the next day they message you via WhatsApp, you can give them a proper follow-up from a single app.

Manage multiple email accounts at the same time

Having to switch back and forth between account inboxes is a big waste of time and a counterproductive way to manage multiple email accounts, and that’s the case with the Superhuman app.

‍Superhuman does not offer a unified inbox view of your different email accounts, but it does have split inbox views which is a close alternative.

Besides being a team-focused solution that enhances productivity and collaboration, Missive’s real power unfolds when you also use it to manage multiple accounts and inboxes. One single Missive account is all you need to store all entered email account credentials. With Missive, you can add personal and business email accounts to one central inbox or multiple team inboxes (your choice!).

With aliases, you can also use the same account to write emails from multiple addresses. You can delegate access to your whole email account or just to an alias to let colleagues send a new email in your name.

This makes Missive the best email client for those that work with multiple brands and clients, all those email accounts can flow into the same unified view while having separate inboxes.

What about speed?

Superhuman justifies its price tag by offering a blazing fast email experience. But is Superhuman’s speed really unrivaled?

Well, why don’t we let users who’ve tried Missive answer that question?

This software has a very nice design, works without any flaws, is very responsive/fast, and has a very affordable price. Cheaper than ANY comparable tool I found so far! Customer support is extremely quick and helpful and all in all it was relatively easy to setup our processes. This is one of the rare examples for a software that I actually like to pay for because I think they deserve my money! (I even took the time to write this review...)

I like how fast emails send and receive. Everything is synchronized and up-to-date at all times.

Jimmy G. on Capterra

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Just wanted to say that we have been LOVING the App, it's not just a game-changer, I really can't imagine working on a team without this again! The price is drastically more affordable compared to Front. Couldn't be happier that we switched and saved so much money. Also I'll say this, the search function is the fastest and most flawless I've ever used!

Chris F. on Capterra

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Missive has an excellent track record on speed and deliverability!

Tim Jack | rise.la

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To make things even faster, Missive and Superhuman both have deep integrations with AI tools to help you draft responses faster, translate messages directly, and more.

Available on all platforms?

Both Missive and Superhuman are available on all platforms. An issue with Superhuman is that it’s a desktop experience first and foremost as the app is heavily reliant on keyboard shortcuts that can’t be changed. Missive offers a native app available for Mac and Windows. Missive is also available on mobile for iOS and Android and available through a web browser, like Safari or Chrome. And you can benefit from every single feature on all platforms.

Missive gives you the flexibility to use the app on any tool or operating system so that you and your team can stay productive and have access to all of your inboxes, while on the go. None of your employees will be left behind because they prefer using Windows over Mac or Android over iOS. Missive also offers a multi-swiping feature that you will undoubtedly enjoy. It lets you apply actions to multiple conversations at the same time with a single finger swipe.

Missive also offers a web version making it a solution that can be used from everywhere, even Linux!

Pricing comparison

Let's see how Missive compares to Superhuman in terms of pricing.

Superhuman costs $30 per month and there’s no free plan or free trial available. What’s more, Superhuman doesn’t let you sign up for their onboarding without entering a valid credit card or a PayPal account.

With Missive, all of your employees and team members can join you on the app at a fair price (starting a $18/month). The collaborative nature of Missive is the key factor that eliminates silos and helps boost your productivity.

Missive also offers a free plan that you can start with. No credit card is needed.

Rules and Automations

Superhuman only offers automation for incoming emails with a configuration called Split Inbox. Missive, on the other hand, takes automation to a whole new level to ensure maximized productivity and fine-grained control.

With Missive, you can use Rules, which are programmable conditions, to automate your workflows and thus save time on repetitive tasks for the following:

• Incoming messages (Gmail, Office 365, SMS, etc.)
• Outgoing messages (Gmail, Office 365, SMS, etc.)
• User actions (New comment, applying a label, assigning/closing a conversation, etc.)

With Missive Rules, the sky's the limit. Here are just a few examples of what you can do with this powerful, nifty feature:

• Properly categorize conversations by applying labels upon reception.
• Delegate emails to specific team members based on the email content.
• Incorporate an SLA program to provide an exceptional customer experience.
• Achieve a better work/life balance by snoozing emails that arrive outside of business hours.
• Share a message upon a label modification.

Essentially, you can get to inbox zero even faster. If that's not best email client potential, I don't know what is.

What about AI? 

Both Superhuman and Missive have an OpenAI integration. They both allow you to use AI to draft responses, adjust your tone and voice, translate emails, and create email summaries based on email threads. 

Here's where it differs:

Superhuman has distinct AI features like auto archiving promotional emails, auto-labeling certain email determined by you, and auto reminders for emails you might've forgotten about. Essentially their AI features are limited to specific functions. 

Missive allows you to use AI within it's automations, letting you create everything you could do in Superhuman, custom to your workflow.

That means you can do things like: 

• Identify whether this email is about buying or selling property. 
• If it's about buying, add label "buyer".
• Then assign these users to the email.
• Then create these tasks with these due dates.
• The create a summary of the email and include the key points. 

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Designed for team?

As we’ve mentioned earlier, Superhuman’s main focus is to enhance individual productivity, it’s wasn't intentionally designed to be a collaboration app. If you need an app that offers better email management and also allows teams to collaborate around email, then you should definitely choose Missive over Superhuman.

In Missive, everything external is email, and everything internal is chat. Both are merged in unified conversations.

If, for example, you received an email from a partner asking to change the terms of your partnership and you needed to consult your teammates before agreeing, you and your team can discuss the proposed partnership changes right in the context of the email via live chat.

Read more about the internal chat feature and all its use cases.

Share your canned responses

A crucial part of boosting productivity is reducing the time that you and your team spend on repetitive tasks. One of the many ways that Missive helps you do that is by offering canned responses. This feature allows you to compose and reply faster to frequently asked questions with pre-written snippets or templates, including support for variables.

Like most modern email clients, Superhuman also offers customizable snippets to create templates for common responses. And like Missive’s canned responses, they can be shared with the rest of the team. You benefit from the work of your team and they benefit from your work.

Missive allows you to preview full responses before inserting them into a draft. This is important as not everyone in the team can be expected to know the content of all responses written by other team members.

The search option makes it easy to find and add any response to a draft.

You can quickly find responses by searching their title, subject, and content. For example, to find a response named “How to be a better person?” you can input many different words:

“ho bet pers”✅   “How to be a better person?”“pers better”✅   “How to be a betterperson?”“person?”✅   “How to be a better person?”

You don't have to input every character from a word to see the matching results. You can also refine your search as you type.

Missive canned responses can also be classified using labels.

We encourage you to read more about Missive’s Responses & Variables feature. We revisited something commonly found in help desks and made it 10 times better, right in your inbox.

What about calendar?

Another essential feature that helps boost productivity and efficiently manage workflow is the calendar feature.

In Superhuman, the calendar feature is more like a scheduling widget that they describe as a “deeper” calendar integration. It’s essentially a simplified version of Google Calendar’s quick add pane where you can type in a date and time and invite others to join your event. Uniquely, Superhuman doesn’t show most of the other calendar fields, including location and event details.

Missive offers a full-fledged calendar section that helps you schedule meetings and video calls, get reminders about upcoming events and planned tasks, and much more. As with all Missive features, Calendar was conceived with teamwork in mind. You can easily share events or entire calendar accounts.

Integrations and third-party apps

Plugins and integrations with third-party apps allow you to work directly and seamlessly with the tools you are already in the habit of using. Both Missive and Superhuman offer a wide ecosystem of integrations with some of the popular SaaS providers, AI tools, and task management solutions.

With that said, making the most of these integrations takes more than just exporting emails to different apps. With Missive, you can see data from Asana, Pipedrive, Todoist, Trello, Dropbox, Shopify, and more right next to the conversation. You can also connect Missive to your CRM and other systems using Zapier. All to help you automate your work, get a better context, and provide customized in-depth replies.

You can also create custom integrations using the Javascript API that are tailored to your business’s exact needs. This will enable you to effectively bridge the gap between your team inboxes and your business data and allow communication between your systems without migrating or disrupting data.

Just like all Missive integrations, your custom integrations will work on the mobile and desktop apps and web versions of Missive.

Read more about all the integrations that Missive offers.

Is Missive the right Superhuman alternative for you?

Missive is more customizable than Superhuman and can be tailored to your team’s needs and requirements. With Missive, you can collaborate around the really important emails that you receive at any of your email addresses (not just Gmail or Outlook ones).

To give you an exceptional team collaboration experience, Missive still has a lot to offer. Missive’s other great features include but are not limited to:

• Pinned conversations
• General, team, and 1-to-1 chat rooms
• Conversation assignment
• Collaborative writing for real-time feedback
• Powerful live chat
• Workload balancing
• Out of office statuses
• And more!

Why settle for Superhuman email when you can go for a better, more affordable alternative that will benefit your whole team, including those who don't want to use keyboard shortcuts?

‍Try Missive for free and explore all the ways by which Missive can revolutionize how you communicate and collaborate with your team.

Note: If Superhuman gets an update and this article becomes outdated, email us and we will update it.

Check out how Missive compares to Front, Missive compares to Spark Mail, Missive compares to Shortwave or Missive compares to Slack.

Or follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn, to follow our journey!

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