Reviews

The Short Version Spike is the most opinionated client on this list after HEY: it strips away subject lines, headers, and quoted history and renders your email as chat bubbles, the way WhatsApp or iMessage would. The bet is that most modern email between people you actually know is messaging, so why dress it up

The Short Version Polymail is not trying to be a gentler, prettier inbox for everyone. It is a sales and business tool. Its reason to exist is knowing exactly when a prospect opened your email, how many times, and which link they clicked—and then nudging the ones who went quiet on their own. The core

The Short Version Mailbird is one of the best email clients on Windows, and it does something most of its peers refuse to do: sell itself outright instead of locking you into a monthly subscription. Pay once, around $99.75 for the Premium tier, and it is yours. No renewal anxiety, no annual bill creeping up

The Short Version HEY is the one product on this list that isn’t an email client. It’s an email service, made by 37signals (the Basecamp company), and it’s deliberately built as the anti-Gmail. No ad tracking, no selling your data, no algorithmic feed. Instead of plugging in your existing mailbox, you get a brand-new @hey.com

The Short Version Newton Mail isn’t trying to be Superhuman, Spark, or Front. It’s none of those—it’s a clean, fast, cross-platform email client with a very deliberate narrow feature set. No AI, no shared inbox, no CRM sidebar. What it does offer is a handful of tools that people actually ask for: Read Receipts (see

The Short Version Front isn’t built for you—at least not for you alone. It’s built for teams: customer-support teams, sales teams, operations teams that share one inbox and need to know who’s replying to what. Its core pitch is a shared inbox paired with a real ticketing system, routing rules, and SLA management. You can

The Short Version Let’s be clear about what Spark is and isn’t. It’s not Superhuman. Superhuman chases raw speed; Spark chases “good enough for free.” Its whole pitch is that you get a genuinely capable email client at zero cost, and you only open your wallet if the AI features actually earn it. Two features

The Short Version Let’s get one thing out of the way: Superhuman is not “just another email client.” It is the fastest email client you can use right now—full stop. Open an inbox with 10,000 messages and scrolling stays buttery. Over a hundred keyboard shortcuts flow so well you’ll forget your mouse exists. Split Inbox