Superhuman vs Shortwave
Superhuman Mail is a premium keyboard-first email client on top of Gmail/Outlook: Starter $30/user/month ($25 billed annually), Business $40 ($33 annual) with Auto Drafts, Ask AI and CRM integrations, no free plan (verified Sep 2026). Shortwave is an AI-first Gmail client: natural-language search across years of email, AI filters and personalized drafting; Business $30/seat/month, Premier $45, Max $120, with a 14-day trial and a limited free plan, and it is Gmail-only with no Outlook support (verified Aug-Sep 2026). Pick Superhuman for raw triage speed, keyboard workflows and Outlook support; pick Shortwave if your bottleneck is finding and understanding old email (deep AI search) and you are all-in on Gmail. No hands-on test was run; no winner declared.
| Decision point | Superhuman | Shortwave |
|---|---|---|
| Best suited to | Founders, executives and anyone processing 100+ emails a day who will actually adopt keyboard shortcuts and follow-up workflows. | Gmail power users whose bottleneck is finding and understanding old email: deep AI search, summaries and drafting matter more than raw speed. |
| Plans and cost | Starter $30/user/month ($25 billed annually), Business $40 ($33 annual), Enterprise custom. Verified September 2026 on official pricing; confirm on superhuman.com/mail/pricing. | Business $30/seat/month, Premier $45, Max $120, with a 14-day trial and a limited free plan. Verified August-September 2026; annual pricing is not published, confirm on shortwave.com/pricing. |
| Limitations | No free plan; entry is $30/month. It is a client, not a provider: you still need a Gmail, Workspace or Microsoft 365 account underneath. Note the suite rebrand: the $15 Pro suite tier does not include | Gmail-only: Outlook.com, Microsoft 365 and Exchange accounts are not supported. Pricing tiers buy different AI capacity (filters, search depth, search history), so the $30 floor is only the entry poin |
Use the same input
You process 150+ emails a day and are willing to pay for email, choosing between 'extreme triage speed' and 'AI deep search and understanding'.
What a successful result must preserve
Compare by speed and keyboard workflows, AI search depth, supported email providers (Gmail/Outlook), free tier and pricing.
Evidence and test status
Pricing and feature comparison based on publicly available information. Plan prices, allowances and feature claims below come from the two vendors' official pricing and feature pages plus recent third-party pricing reads, re-checked October 2026. We did not run a hands-on test on either tool; no quality winner is declared.
- Superhuman — Official website ↗ (reviewed 2026-10-24)
- Shortwave — Official website ↗ (reviewed 2026-10-24)