Missive vs. Shortwave
Shortwave and Missive are two of the best email platforms. Their smart inboxes, coupled with modern interfaces and feature-rich tools, make managing the deluge of emails we receive a breeze.
But though the Shortwave app focuses on Gmail inboxes, Missive is built as a swiss-army knife for business communication and teams — supporting Outlook, Gmail, and any other email provider you might use.
While Shortwave and Missive share plenty of similarities and both are capable of supercharging your inbox, it’s vital to understand their differences to decide which one’s more suited to you and your team.
Missive vs Shortwave: team collaboration
The Shortwave app is designed by a bunch of ex-Googlers, and it borrows ideas from Google’s defunct email client,Inbox, to offer a smarter Gmail client for individuals. Since it's inception, it's been building more and more capabilities for team collaboration, including a heavy focus on AI.
Missive, on the other hand, is a remarkably versatile email platform designed for teams first. It allows teams to collaborate and balance their communication workload without getting overwhelmed. This doesn’t mean Missive can’t handle personal inboxes. Its rich built-in facilities, such as the ability to block those invasive email trackers and schedule messages for later, are handy for everyone.
Both Shortwave and Missive has the simple team collaboration features like being able to converse internally within an email, assign someone to an email, and shared labels.
Shortwave has shared email templates that are AI powered and can go beyond just "insert first name".
Missive has real-time collaborative drafting, with AI built in to help you edit and translate as you work through your inbox.
Shortwave Office 365 support?
One of the downsides of Shortwave is that it’s restricted to Gmail inboxes. This is why Missive is an excellent Shortwave alternative, as it not only allows you to accomplish inbox zero, it can do so for practically every email service provider, including Gmail, Microsoft Office 365, and IMAP.
That’s not all: Missive lets you import emails from a variety of mailboxes into a central inbox so that you can triage them in one go -- minus the hassle of going back and forth between accounts.
Shortwave desktop apps
You can access Shortwave either as a website or on your phone via its iOS and Android apps. In line with its minimal approach, these apps, however, are barebones in nature, and there’s not much you can customize. Even if you want to change what swiping on an email does on Shortwave’s mobile app, you will have to do that from its website.
This is another aspect where Missive holds an upper hand and proves it’s the ideal Shortwave alternative. It has full-fledged programs for all major operating systems, including macOS, Windows, Android, iOS, and the web. More importantly, you have the option to tweak Missive apps’ experience per your preferences. If there’s a section you or your team doesn’t need, for instance, you can instantly hide it.
Shortwave automation
One of the highlights of Missive is that it enables you to automate your repetitive email tasks. It’s incredibly convenient for enterprise teams, such as customer support, who can automate their routine activities and dramatically cut back their load. The process to set up automation rules is straightforward too. All one has to do is define the parameters that should trigger a particular action, and Missive takes care of the rest.
Automation is not a focus of Shortwave's email client. They have basic workflows like singular follow-up emails but their automations are relatively narrow and rigid.
Shortwave canned responses
Shortwave has really leveraged AI in their canned responses, in what they called Shared AI Snippets.
For instance, you might create a canned response that begins with:
"Hello {recipient’s first name}, thank you for getting in touch about {product}…"
and includes a placeholder like: "{add a concise, one-sentence recap referencing our last discussion}."
When you use this template, Shortwave’s AI automatically fills in the placeholders with real information. It scans your email history to locate your most recent conversation with the contact and generates a brief summary, or it reviews your calendar to suggest available meeting times if needed.
Missive also has canned responses with flexible variables that will save you a lot of time. Especially if you tie those canned responses to automatic workflows using Missive's rule engine, creating auto replies.
One of the unique benefits of Missive's canned responses, is it's ability to use them in channels outside of email. If you also have incoming messages from WhatsApp, LiveChat, SMS, or Messenger, you can access the same canned responses for those channels as well.
Missive vs Shortwave: communicate beyond email
Businesses can transform Missive into a command center for all their communications. Alongside email, Missive allows businesses to integrate their business profiles on Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and even SMS from their company-managed phone numbers. Team members can discuss communications from any of these sources and handle customer inquiries right inside Missive instead of jumping across several different apps.
Missive’s expandable interface not only fosters a far more productive workplace, but its well-indented design prevents an information overload while retaining a healthy volume of text density.
Shortwave is merely restricted to Gmail at the moment.
Shortwave calendar
Shortwave's calendar feature pulls in your Google calendar. Their AI assistant is able to access the calendar and help with scheduling.
Missive houses a calendar intelligently programmed to spot appointment conflicts and offers an exclusive eagle’s eye overview of the person’s next week or months, unlike competitors, which are still stuck with traditional, complicated layouts.
Apart from letting individuals schedule their lives, set reminders, and whatnot, Missive enables teams to share their company calendars across the board so that everyone always stays on the same page. It currently supports Office 365 and Google Calendar.
Third-party integrations in Shortwave app
Businesses generally have a range of teams, all of which depend on separate productivity tools to organize their projects. Email plays a central role in these various projects as it’s where teams come together to collaborate, prioritize, and strategize.
On Missive, you can plug those productivity tools into your email inbox so that you can quickly manage and respond to updates. It supports a wide array of services, including Asana, Dropbox, Trello, Shopify, and more. With third-party integrations, the possibilities are endless on Missive.
In addition to that, Missive’s flexible API also allows you to embed rich content from platforms like Github right inside your conversations. For example, you can have a section for keeping a tab on Github master commits and, based on your needs, discuss and delegate any events to team members.
Shortwave kind of integrates with HubSpot and Saleforce CRMs using a BCC feature, but it isn't a true API integration.
Missive vs Shortwave: navigation
Of course, when you have so many tabs and integrations to multitask between, navigation can become a nightmare. On Missive, that’s not a concern, thanks to its command center function. With a simple keyboard shortcut, you can pull up a universal search bar on Missive that lets you look up anything in your email inbox and even perform actions directly.
Missive’s command bar is compatible with third-party integrations too, which means you can link and execute actions on other services from it. For example, if you have set up your Todoist or Asana account on Missive, you can create a new task from the command bar.
Shortwave’s search can only sift through your email threads, messages, and contacts. Their AI assistant can help with deeper topics like "what emails are most urgent" but it is strictly through the conversational AI interface which might take longer to process and identify than looking at your inbox.
Canary Mail vs. Shortwave
Canary Mail was originally less focused on collaboration and more focused on top-notch privacy and security features around email.
Unlike Shortwave, you can use Canary Mail with a wide range of email providers outside of Gmail, like Outlook or Apple Mail.
If you're an individual looking for email features like built-in spam filtering, end-to-end encryption, and zero knowledge architecture (where nobody, not even the service provider, can access your email contents) — then Canary Mail might be a great option.
Recently, Canary Mail has been building more team features like shared templates and team reporting.
Pricing for Canary Mail starts at $0 for personal plans, and increase to $10 per user per month for their team plans.
eM Client vs. Shortwave
eM client is an incredibly robust email client.
It's essentially an enterprise option of Outlook and Microsoft Teams with their full suite of tools including email, contacts, internal chat, and full calendar capabilities.
It's mostly built for enterprise which means it has enterprise level encryption, but unlike Shortwave, it doesn't have many features around team collaboration or transparency.
Similar to our other alternatives on the list, eM Client supports email providers outside of Gmail like Yahoo Mail, Apple Mail and Outlook.
Pricing for eM Client starts at $0 for personal use, and increase to €39.95 per user per device for their annual business plans.
Thunderbird vs. Shortwave
Mozilla Thunderbird is a favorite email client amongst the Outlook crowd.
Thunderbird is an open-sourced email client that is highly customizable through it's add-ons and themes.
It offers comparable security and privacy features to Canary Mail, like built-in spam filtering and phishing protection.
Although it doesn't have as many collaborative email features as Shortwave, it does offer the ability to manage multiple email inboxes in the same interface.
If you're looking for very light collaboration features and prefer an open-source option — Thunderbird might be a great option.
Pricing for Mozilla Thunderbird is free!
Mailbird vs. Shortwave
Mailbird is an email client that is known for their unified inbox capabilities.
The ability to manage and use multiple email accounts from the same interface — ideally on desktop, for Windows or Mac.
It does support both Outlook and Apple Mail.
Though Mailbird can be used for teams, it's mostly built for the individual email experience and lacks many of the collaboration features of Shortwave.
Pricing for Mailbird starts at $0 for personal use, and increase to $4.03 per user per month or a one-time fee of $99.75.
Airmail vs. Shortwave
Airmail is one of the most well designed email apps for Apple users.
It's designed for a great individual inbox experience but lacks the ability to communicate or collaborate with others within email.
Even though it's designed for iOS and Mac, Airmail supports a wide variety of email providers including Microsoft's Outlook, Gmail and Yahoo Mail.
Pricing for Airmail Pro is $29.99 per year.
Which Shortwave alternative is right?
Whether you're looking for a simpler alternative to Gmail or something more robust and collaborative for businesses and teams — we hope we were able to provide an Shortwave alternative that fits well with your use case.
We're a little bias, but we think Missive is the perfect choice for many. Its scalable interface enables both individuals and teams to customize the experience per their preferences. So whether someone wants a flexible inbox to simply stay on top of their most important emails or a powerful platform to centralize all their communications, Missive is the app to beat.
You can try Missive for free.
Note If Shortwave 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 Outpost, Missive compares to Spark or Missive compares to Slack.
