This is one of our top picks in the category so we recommend it over others (you're on the right page), read below to learn why we love and recommend it! ⤵
This is one of the better tools in its category, see below if this tool is right for you! ⤵
We believe there are better options available in this category, read below to learn what they do well, and what they could do better. ⤵
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Smart. Focused. Email. Fast, cross-platform email designed to filter out the noise - so you can focus on what's important.
Spark is an email client that is designed to help you get through your inbox faster. Spark has a mixture of both Superhuman and Hey features, with a tiny bit of Missive for team collaboration.
Spark is miles better than Gmail, Outlook, or Apple Mail, both on desktop and on your phone and we can't think of a reason why someone wouldn't use Spark—they even have a generous free tier.
While we can't say Spark wins the category for the best email client (our top pick is Superhuman as they put slightly more TLC into their features and design), Spark is certainly the best email application that offers a free version.
Spark is a great app if you're new to using email productivity software and want to try something that is relatively low-commitment.
If you're wanting a faster, more organized way to triage through emails than Gmail, Outlook, or Apple Mail, with a more minimal interface and fewer distractions, then Spark is definitely worth checking out.
Spark works on both Mac and Windows and works with Gmail, Outlook, Exchange, iCloud, and IMAP.
If your inbox is exploding and you've gotten to the point of considering creating a new email address because of too many newsletters and notifications, then Spark can help clean things up relatively easily. Spark Mail's smart inbox feature will group emails into newsletters, notifications, and emails from real people, making your email more manageable out of the gate.
We love that you can collaborate on emails with team members within Spark email. Simply share emails with team members and tag each other in the comments if collaboration is needed. The ability to assign deadlines and team members to specific emails helps eliminate that "who is answering this?" feeling.
You can also have shared inboxes to manage your info@, support@, or contact@ email addresses. Although, beware — this feature is currently only available for Gmail email clients, Mac, iOS, and Android. The desktop version is coming soon!
If team collaboration is your main pain point, or you're a founder looking to delegate your inbox, also check out Missive as it might be a better fit for you.
If Superhuman, Missive, and Hey had a baby, it'd be Spark. None of Spark's features are super unique or revolutionary; instead, they seem to have taken popular features from other email clients and rolled them up into their own app.
While Spark's interface is miles better than Gmail or Outlook, it still feels—well—like email. For instance, Superhuman gives your entire email app a facelift with its beautiful minimal design, consistent colors, fonts, and automatic resizing of emails to make them readable no matter your screen size. While Spark tries to do a bit of this, it's clear that less TLC went into the interface. For instance, in Spark, emails stretch with your screen, making them more difficult to read.
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Spark Mail is super easy to use 👏. If you're looking for an email client that has little to no learning curve, Spark is it. We love that Spark didn't overdo it with features (like many apps do, trying to do too much at once).
As you go through the Spark onboarding, you get to select your preferences for the email app, and then you're all set to start your better email experience.
Spark mail allows you to have a unified inbox (aka one inbox for multiple email accounts), so you don't need to have multiple tabs open for your emails anymore. If you have several personal and work email addresses, for example, you can easily add them all to Spark so they show up under one inbox.
But say you prefer to not mix your work emails in with your personal, you can simply toggle off your work email so that it's not a part of the unified inbox, but you can still easily jump into that inbox within the left-hand bar (without opening another tab or app).
While using AI to help you answer emails seems super cool off the bat, we found that we don't use it as much as we would have imagined. A lot of the time our emails are highly personalized, so it almost seems like more work to involve AI.
That said, there have been some cases where jotting down some notes and letting AI give us a draft response has served as a helpful starting point in some cases.
On the paid tier of Spark, you get Spark + AI. With Spark + AI, you can ask the AI to generate a reply, change the tone of the email, or shorten or lengthen the response. While it sounds great in theory, we weren't super impressed by the results as they didn't take the full email into account all that well and seemed to be quite basic, not at all sounding like I would write:
With Superhuman, we see it going just one level deeper, training the AI to "write in your tone" based on your previous emails. While we don't use AI a ton for writing emails, the "write in my tone" feature in Superhuman is the one we tend to lean on the most. It also seems that Superhuman takes in far more context from the entire conversation than Spark does, but that also makes sense because there is a cost associated with this, and since Superhuman is a premium product, they can spend more on AI tokens (giving the prompt more context).
With any email AI features, we tend to see them more as a bonus rather than the sole reason to upgrade to a paid tier, which is why we appreciated that with Superhuman it was just something that was included rather than something we had to decide if we wanted to "upgrade to".
The area using AI that we do appreciate is with the email thread summaries functionality. You can set it up to automatically summarize depending on who the email is from, and even the type of summary.
Spark mail will group together your notifications, newsletters, and 1:1 emails from people, allowing important emails to stand out. A miss here is that there doesn't seem to be a way to customize these groupings to your desire, and some claim that Spark makes mistakes with these classifications, although they are easy to fix with a few clicks.
Spark's mobile app is everything you'd expect from a fast email app. If you're a heavy swipe gesture user, then you will love the mobile app as you can customize your top used actions (e.g. archive, delete, snooze, mark unread).
Some folks said they exclusively check their emails via the Spark mobile app!
Spark's integrations are focused around note-taking and to-do apps that seem to be more consumer-focused than B2B apps. For instance, you can integrate Spark with Evernote, Bear, TickTick, Todoist, or Apple reminders — but these are not apps commonly used by professionals for work. The only B2B-focused integration seems to be Asana at the moment.
When comparing Spark vs Superhuman, most folks fixate on the price difference. Spark has a free version (or is $60 per year on the paid tier), while Superhuman comes in at $30 per month, so you may be wondering, is Superhuman really worth the extra cost?
The truth of the matter is that while Spark and Superhuman seem to have similar features on the surface, Superhuman does go that extra mile with TLC into each feature and is built more for professional use.
Spark took one of Hey's most popular features, "The Screener," and made their own version of it called "The Gatekeeper." It's the same idea, giving users the ability to thumbs up or thumbs down a sender, indicating if you want to allow emails from this sender in your inbox or not.
If email delegation or team collaboration is the main reason you're looking for an email client, we'd say Missive might be the best to check out. The reason? Missive allows you to have a central inbox for any business-related messages (beyond email) — from social media apps, to SMS, to WhatsApp. Missive's collaborative features are also more established than Spark's, so you'll get a more reliable experience.
Is Spark mail worth it? Even though Spark mail isn't our top pick for professionals who heavily rely on their email (we prefer Superhuman due to their more refined features and design), Spark is the best free alternative available.
It provides a significant improvement over traditional email clients like Gmail, Outlook, or Apple Mail, so if you're not willing to pay for Superhuman, we definitely recommend at the very least using Spark.
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If you are a VC, investor, or professional who deals with a ton of email and a lot of intros, we'd recommend considering Superhuman instead. Superhuman offers a premier email experience that is the best in class (and is what we've used here at Efficient App for over 5 years).
Superhuman has gone that extra mile with each feature, and for professionals who live in their inbox, we say the extra TLC is worth the extra cost. Read our full Superhuman Review.
Some users report that the performance of Spark Email can be a little touch and go. Users report that since the update to Spark 3, the app has become more slow and unreliable with a bit of crashing.
Another complaint we've heard is that Spark sometimes makes mistakes when classifying emails that are notifications as newsletters, and vice versa, but that isn't something we're too worried about as you can easily correct Spark by letting it know the right category for the future.
We've tracked and verified the above companies are using this software in their team's stack.
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