The new wave of email clients, compared
You know Gmail, Outlook, Superhuman, and Apple Mail. They've been the default choices for years — and we've compared them already. But a new wave of email clients has emerged in the last couple of years, each trying to fix email in a different way.
Some have some AI. Some are team-first. Some are altering the interfaces. Are any of them actually good? Here's an honest look at the newer challengers — and how they stack up against each other and against Faraday.
Shortwave
What it is: An email client from former Google engineers, backed by Google Ventures. Gmail and Google Workspace only. Available on Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android.Price: Free tier available. Paid plans from $7 to $100/month per seat.
Shortwave's pitch is an AI chatbot for email. It uses Claude models to power an AI assistant that can summarize, draft, and search your inbox via natural language prompts. Features include split inbox tabs, email bundling for batch triage, delivery scheduling, and read receipts. The team collaboration features — shared threads, private comments, assignable tasks — are good for some teams.
The limitation: Shortwave is entirely prompt-driven. You ask the AI to do things — summarize this, draft that, find this. Every action requires explicit instruction. And re-instruction, reprompting. The AI doesn't autonomously process and organize your inbox; it waits for you to tell it what to do. This is Level 2 intelligence (prompted), not Level 4 (inherent). The pricing also scales aggressively — the $100/month Max tier is hard to justify for individual users. And it's Gmail-only, which excludes anyone on Outlook.
Perhaps for: Google Workspace teams who want AI-assisted email with collaboration features and have the budget for it.
Avec
What it is: A new AI email app for Gmail that reimagines inbox interaction as a card-swiping interface. Mobile-first. Think "Tinder for email."Price: Subscription-based.
Avec is a bit novel. Instead of a traditional inbox list, it presents your emails one at a time as cards. Swipe to mark done, swipe to save for later. Prioritizes which emails appear first, learning your preferences over time. Voice compose lets you dictate key points and Avec drafts the full email. But the conversational search ("find my tax documents") is very restrictive!
The limitation: The card-swiping interface is fun but fundamentally sequential — you process emails one by one, which doesn't scale well for high-volume users. You can't scan your inbox at a glance; you must swipe through the stack. It's Gmail-only, mobile-first (the desktop experience is secondary), and the "learning your preferences" AI requires time to calibrate. For users who need to see their inbox as a whole — grouped, categorized, at a glance — the one-at-a-time model is limiting. And how does one find a few specific attachments? Or look at a particular update you just swiped away with an entire group. This over-boiling of all emails across just 3 groups — Done, later, unimportant — is quite impractical and unrealistic to how life and emails truly are.
Perhaps for: Those users with moderate email volume who enjoy novel interfaces and like swiping things on the go.
Odo
What it is: An AI email assistant that reads your inbox and delivers a daily briefing instead of making you open your inbox. Targets founders and executives.Price: Subscription-based (early access).
Odo's concept is nice: stop checking your inbox. Every morning, the AI reads through your email, flags what's important based on your instructions (e.g., "prioritize emails from my team, customers, and investors"), and delivers a 2-minute briefing. It drafts replies in your voice. You can ask natural language questions ("which prospects should I follow-up with?") and get structured answers pulled from your email history. The inbox view, when you do open it, shows pinned important messages with everything else grouped below.
The limitation: Odo is more of an AI layer on top of email than an email client. You still need an email client! The briefing model works well for executives with assistants-style workflows, but for users who need real-time awareness of their inbox throughout the day, a morning-and-evening summary isn't sufficient. The "drafts replies in your voice" claim requires significant trust — and review time. It's early-stage, with a limited user base and unproven at scale.
Perhaps for: Founders and executives who don't want to see their inbox at all and trust AI to triage and draft on their behalf.
Spike
What it is: A conversational email client that turns emails into chat-like messages. Available on all platforms. 3 million+ users.Price: Free tier. Team plan from $4/month. Business from $8/month.
Spike alters email's traditional formality — headers, signatures, formatting — and presents messages as clean chat bubbles, organized by contact. It's like WhatsApp or iMessage, but for email. Built-in notes, tasks, video meetings, and voice messages make it a mini-collaboration platform. Priority Inbox sorts important messages from noise. Multi-account support works across Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and any IMAP provider.
The limitation: The chat-style interface is polarizing and honestly, quite poorly done. It could've been mighty pretty. But it isn't. For casual communication, it's refreshing. For formal or professional email — contracts, detailed proposals, legal correspondence — stripping away formatting actively harms readability. The "conversational" metaphor also implies immediacy, which can increase the pressure to respond quickly rather than thoughtfully. Priority Inbox sorting is basic compared to genuine AI classification. And the collaboration features, while handy, compete with dedicated tools like Slack and Notion rather than excelling beyond them.
Perhaps for: Users who primarily use email for casual, back-and-forth communication and want a chat-like experience at a low price.
Exo
What it is: An open-source, AI-native desktop email client for macOS. Requires a Gmail account and your own Anthropic API key. Built by developers, for developers.Price: Free (open-source). You pay for your own Claude API usage.
Exo is still atleast a bit ambitious. Claude analyzes every incoming email and assigns priority (high, medium, low, skip). Smart drafts consider thread context, sender background (via automatic web lookup), and your writing style. The agent system (Cmd+J) lets you ask Claude anything about the current email, or delegate to external agents via MCP. Keyboard-driven navigation with Gmail keybindings. Fully local, with offline support.
The limitation: Exo is a developer tool, not a consumer product. Requiring users to bring their own Anthropic API key is a non-starter for 99% of email users. It's macOS-only, Gmail-only, and the setup requires technical comfort. There's no team behind it offering support, no mobile app, no web interface. The AI quality depends entirely on your API tier and usage. For technically inclined users who enjoy tinkering, it's fascinating. For anyone who just wants their email to work, it's not ready.
Perhaps for: Developers who want maximum control, don't mind technical setup, and want to experiment with agentic email on macOS.
Missive
What it is: A team inbox platform that combines email, SMS, and social media into a shared collaborative workspace. Available on Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android.Price: From $14 to $36/month per user. 30-day free trial.
Missive isn't trying to reinvent email for individuals — it's solving team email coordination. Shared inboxes, internal comments within email threads, collaborative drafting, task assignment with workload balancing, and rules-based automations. It supports Gmail, Outlook, IMAP, plus SMS, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and live chat. The analytics dashboard shows response times, team capacity, and conversation volume.
The limitation: Missive is alright even for teams, irrelevant for individuals. If you're a solo user looking for a smarter personal inbox, Missive is not useful — you're paying for collaboration tools you won't use. The email experience itself is traditional: chronological, manually organized, with rules-based automation rather than intelligence. The AI features (via OpenAI integration) are add-ons, not core architecture. For businesses managing shared inboxes across channels, it's fine. For individual email intelligence, it's pointless.
Perhaps for: Small-to-medium businesses that need shared inbox collaboration across email, SMS, and social channels.
Faraday
What it is: An AI-first email client where intelligence is the architecture, not an add-on. Works with Gmail, Google Workspace, and Outlook.Every client above solves one piece of the email problem: Shortwave adds AI prompts. Avec tweaked the interface. Odo makes briefings. Spike has made an email chat. Exo gives developers some edge. Missive helps teams. Each is a bit useful for some users.
Faraday solves the fundamental problem: your email client doesn't understand your email. Every message is automatically processed, classified, extracted, and re-presented — without prompts, without swiping, without briefings, without configuration. The intelligence is inherent, running from within the core, working across every email before you even open your inbox.
Layered categorization and genre recognition distinguish a booking confirmation from a newsletter from a personal message — even from the same sender. Threads are reconstructed into clean, chronological conversations using a proprietary algorithm. Search understands context and meaning, not just keywords. Relevant information (typically just 12% of any given email) surfaces immediately.
AES-256 encryption, zero human processing, no AI training on your content, no data sales. ESOF-certified and Google-verified. Works with Gmail and Outlook — not locked to one provider.
Perhaps for: Anyone who wants email that genuinely thinks for them — organized, intelligent, private, and beautiful — without learning a new interface or configuring anything.
The bottom line
The new wave of email clients proves that people are hungry for something better. Each of these products was born from the same frustration: traditional email is broken. But most of them fix one symptom — speed, interface, collaboration, AI drafting — while leaving the core problem untouched: your inbox doesn't understand what's in it.Shortwave gives you another chatbot. Avec gives you a way to swipe. Odo gives you a briefing. Spike gives you chat bubbles. Exo gives you an API. Missive gives you team tools. Faraday gives you an inbox that's miles ahead.
The best email client isn't the one with the most novel interface or the most powerful prompts. It's the one where you open your inbox and everything is already organized, surfaced, and clear — because the intelligence was there all along.