Reviewed by Francesco D'Alessio
Superhuman Review
Is this luxury email app worth it in 2024?
Superhuman is the premium email experience offering faster email management and wants to be your base for handling emails with Outlook and Gmail accounts. How does it work, who uses it and does it really boost your productivity?
What is Superhuman?
Superhuman is a premium email app with power features for Gmail & Outlook accounts.
A clean, distraction-free inbox, in under 5 minutes
SaneBox clears the clutter, so you can focus on your highest priorities and get more done.
What do people use Superhuman for?
People use Superhuman for managing their inbox in a faster manner.
Superhuman is one of the most talked-about email applications, and that's because it's rated as one of the more expensive premium options on the market, but also gets a lot of raving fans who use it as their go-to way to manage personal email and handle email in a much smoother way.
There are lots of elements to Superhuman that people like, but primarily, Superhuman is used for managing your inbox more effectively with a combination of quality of life abilities, command bar, speed, and general snappiness for handling your inbox.
One of the reasons we rated it as one of our best email apps.
Best Features inside Superhuman
Let's talk a little bit about the best features within Superhuman and how you can take advantage of it for your inbox, and whether the decision is right for you.
Superhuman Pros: The Best Bits
What core experiences made us impressed with this email app:
- Faster email management - Superhuman is regarded as one of the faster email applications, and from our tests and using it for many years, this actually was the case. There wasn't an email app that we found that actually was faster than Superhuman when it comes to loading emails, managing emails, and being able to search for emails, and be able to populate the search. Apps like Spark Mail were considerably good at all-round management, but the general speed of loading both Gmail and Outlook emails was really rapid on the likes of iOS and Android too.
- Learned email system - Superhuman can be a bit overwhelming when you get started because you have to learn how to utilize your keyboard and some of the more productive features, like filter tabs. Both of these abilities can take your inbox to the next level, primarily because what filter tabs do is allow you to split your inbox into various different types that go much further and beyond the Gmail tab that you get inside of the basic Gmail experience. This is something that can be set up in a "set and forget" type style, allowing you to just focus on the core important emails that land, and you can change the rules and how these apply ongoing.
- Keyboard shortcuts - Another aspect that we really liked in this review was the keyboard shortcuts and being able to use these to save time. While it did take a bit of time to actually learn what all of the Control + K functions did, or probably slightly different on Windows, it allowed us to move through the inbox about 20 to 30% faster than what we could inside of Gmail. This is probably a combination of the loading speed of emails being faster and the fact that we were using the keyboard shortcuts on a Mac device, on the Mac application.
- Time management savers - Inside of Superhuman, there are lots of different time management and quality of life improvements throughout this review. These are small to micro features and experiences that, added up, make the overall management of your inbox much better. These start with things like the pop-up email, as you're reading an email, definitely a nice little thing when you're trying to reply to somebody. There are also abilities like snippets that allow you to capture, create, and manage templates for anything that you send on a routine basis, which is perfect for everything from sales all the way to marketing that you just commonly repeat in an email. Then, a bunch of other abilities like managing your calendar that is connected to either your Gmail or Outlook, allowing you to create a meeting and send people an invite really using the keyboard shortcut as well. A combination of management features spread out the Superhuman experience and with that combination of speediness and pace of the app in terms of its low speed for email and search, then you get a really nice experience overall.
A clean, distraction-free inbox, in under 5 minutes
SaneBox clears the clutter, so you can focus on your highest priorities and get more done.
Superhuman Cons: The Best Bits
What things could be better, or things that you need to know before trying:
- Lacking Unified Inbox: Superhuman allows you to add any email accounts you want that are Gmail and Outlook correlated. There's no way to manage a unified inbox. Now, arguably, for some people, this might actually be a benefit because it actually stops you from having this constant whirlwind of all of your emails in one spot. For many people, this ability is a must-have, so Superhuman doesn't have this, but they do have an easy way on both mobile and desktop to switch between the accounts that you have using keyboard shortcuts. I actually found using this on the go and switching between accounts quite fast, and something I didn't really think about even previously when using the unified inbox in my last application.
- No Meeting Scheduling: Superhuman has some abilities to create calendar invites directly from an email panel that you're writing in, which makes it easier to suggest a meeting time and even book a Zoom call or conferencing right from there, as well as be able to see other events on your calendar to make things easier. However, one of the things that is somewhat painful is you can't actually schedule meetings inside of your email. This would be a really nice addition to the experience, and to be honest, with a considerable amount of to-do list applications introducing this feature, I was expecting Superhuman to have something like this within their roadmap, but sadly they don't. It's something that I think they should definitely add in the next few years.
- No IMAP or iCloud: When it comes to adding your accounts, you can add Microsoft Outlook and Gmail, and this applies to Google Workspaces as well. I have four Google Workspace accounts attached to my inbox and an additional Gmail one, and all of them run pretty smoothly. However, there are no ways to add IMAP or iCloud support, which does limit you. However, they have more recently added a Windows edition, allowing you to access it on a Windows desktop, which makes things a lot easier for those using Microsoft Outlook.
- Pricier & education-heavy: One of the biggest pain points with Superhuman is the pricing. This is something that is just constantly brought up whenever I do a review or even look at tools around the space. Superhuman is definitely a step more expensive. It's also quite education-heavy because I think you can only maximize it if you learn the keyboard shortcuts, which don't take a considerable amount of time, but at the same time, might be something to consider when you're starting out with Superhuman. Now, I would say the Superhuman pricing is on the steep side, but if you are a freelancer, entrepreneur, or somebody that correlates their workload on email to the output that they spend or generate based on income, I think the quality of life that you get with Superhuman as an email experience—something that a lot of people spend 3 to 4 hours a day on—is actually pretty decent. So again, I think email is one of these experiences that people are willing to pay for because it does save them time, and weight aside from using the likes of Gmail, which is free, but this is a consideration to have when it comes to your budget.
How much does Superhuman cost?
Superhuman costs $30 per month, per user, paid monthly.
Superhuman Pricing: Explained
Superhuman is priced at the steeper end of the market. Let's unpack.
For teams, there are plans for up to 5 users. For those looking to save money with Superhuman Email, you can get the annual plan and pricing for $25 per month (a $300 per year payment) which shaves off a bit of the cost of Superhuman.
A clean, distraction-free inbox, in under 5 minutes
SaneBox clears the clutter, so you can focus on your highest priorities and get more done.
Is Superhuman worth it?
One of the biggest questions that I get when doing reviews is about email applications, and one of the biggest arguments is whether I can use the free email experiences like Gmail to manage my inbox and coordinate it.
A lot of the time, it's the whole conversation about whether you would buy a regular Toyota Prius or Ferrari. Some people do want the ability to have a smarter, more uniform, and more experiential email application, and that is definitely where you are in the market for something like Superhuman.
Typically, I've been using Superhuman for about four years now, and the experience is something that I don't feel like I could go back to a regular email application. The speed of the application is and has always been one of the fastest in the market. It has a bunch of really speedy functions that just save me a bunch of time, like snippets for communicating with particular sponsorships or external parties, and it saved me a bunch of time having to go and find those bits each time—it's a keyboard shortcut away.
And a bunch of other smaller things like calendar management for booking meetings via an email panel, and also the general functionality of the application on mobile devices, which I find to be outright the best email experience on the go thanks to the gestures and use. So, I would say Superhuman is worth it if you're looking for an experience that is premium and you spend more than 2 to 3 hours on email every single day.
That is where you should be considering something like Superhuman. If you don't weigh a great deal of importance on email, then Superhuman might not be suitable for you, in which case, I would look at some of the other alternatives below.
Best Superhuman Alternatives
Hey Email, Spike and Spark Email are all good Superhuman alternatives.
- Hey Email - The perfect productivity based email developed by 37Signals
- Spike Mail - Great for real-time collaboration on email & documents
- Spark Mail - Developed by Readdle, this is a great all-round email application
For those who are looking for more team collaborative inbox functions, try Missive.
