Dove vs Shortwave: AI Email, With and Without Gmail

Shortwave is an AI layer built on top of Gmail. Dove is an AI email client that connects to the mailbox you already have. If your mail does not live in Gmail, that one sentence settles the comparison before you reach a feature list.

Both apps market the same promise — the AI reads your inbox, tells you what matters, drafts your replies — and both mean it. They are two of the few email apps where the AI is the product rather than a sidebar. So the interesting differences are not in the pitch. They are in what each one can connect to, where your mail physically sits while the AI works on it, and what you pay.

Disclosure: Dove is made by the team behind Canary Mail, so weigh the Dove halves of this accordingly. Every price, plan, platform and feature claim below was checked on shortwave.com and dove.email on 25 September 2026.

Key takeaways

• Shortwave signs in with Gmail or Google Workspace only. Microsoft 365 and Exchange are not supported, with no published timeline. Other providers work by auto-forwarding into a Gmail account.

• Dove connects directly to Gmail, Google Workspace, Outlook, Microsoft 365 and any IMAP provider, on unlimited accounts, on every plan.

• Shortwave mirrors your mail into Google Cloud and indexes it, which is what makes years of AI search possible. Dove keeps mail on your device and sends the AI only the text a task needs.

• Shortwave costs more and scales by tier: Free, Pro at $18/seat/month, then $30, $45 and $120. Dove is one plan at $20/month or $200/year.

• Shortwave is the better team product. Shared labels, assignees and comments on a thread have no Dove equivalent.

The short version

The provider question decides most of this

Start here, because for a large share of readers nothing else matters.

Shortwave's own documentation is direct about it. Its page on other email providers says: “Shortwave requires a Gmail or Google Workspace account to sign in.” On Microsoft: “Microsoft 365 and Exchange accounts are not supported at this time. Shortwave only works with Gmail and Google Workspace. We do not have a timeline for Microsoft support, but it's something we're aware of.” The same caveat appears at the top of its Superhuman migration guide.

There is a documented route for other mail, and it is worth understanding rather than dismissing. You auto-forward your real mailbox into a Gmail account, then set up Gmail's “Send mail as” with your provider's SMTP server and an app password, so replies go out from your real address. Shortwave rates Yahoo, iCloud, Fastmail and Zoho as fully working this way. Outlook.com, Hotmail, Live and Proton Mail are listed as forwarding-only: mail arrives, but you cannot send from your own address. Microsoft 365 and Exchange do not work at all.

That arrangement is genuinely fine for some people. It is a Gmail account acting as a hub, and if you were half-minded to consolidate on Gmail anyway, this does it. But be clear about what you are agreeing to: a second account to maintain, an app password to rotate, your archive living in a mailbox that is not your primary one, and a forwarding chain that breaks quietly when a password expires. On a company Microsoft 365 tenant, forwarding to a personal Gmail address is often blocked by policy, and reasonably so.

Dove connects to the mailbox directly. Its pricing page lists Gmail, Google Workspace, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft 365 and any IMAP-compatible provider, with unlimited accounts on every plan including the free one. No bridge account, no forwarding rule, no SMTP configuration. For an Outlook or Microsoft 365 user this is not a feature comparison — it is the difference between an app that works and one that does not.

If your mail is already in Gmail, ignore this whole section. It changes nothing for you, and the rest of the comparison is a real contest.

What the AI actually does

Both apps put AI in front of the inbox rather than beside it, but they aim it differently.

Shortwave's centre of gravity is the assistant and its search. It indexes your mail history and lets the assistant reason over it, which is why the plans are priced around search depth: 90 days of AI search history on Free, three years on Pro, five on Business, unlimited above that, with a ceiling on how many threads the assistant can pull into one answer (15, 50, 100, 150 by tier). Alongside it there are AI filters, which are plain-English rules that label, star, archive or delete new mail; splits, which divide the inbox into tabs; bundles, which group newsletters and automated senders; one-click AI replies; autocomplete; per-thread summaries; AI snooze; and attachment analysis. The assistant can browse the web and reach other tools through integrations and MCP. Shortwave names the models behind its intelligence levels on the pricing page, which is unusually candid, and it tells you the Business quota is roughly 150 to 300 standard requests a day.

Dove's centre of gravity is the decision. Every message is sorted into Focus, Feed or Noise, and you mark things Done as you clear them. On top of that sits Today, which writes your day as a sentence and then keeps rewriting it — below the summary are Needs you, Schedule, FYI and Waiting on. Wingman pulls the rest of the relevant history around a thread so the context is on screen when you answer, rather than something you go looking for. Ask Dove handles questions and search in plain language. Teach Dove turns a sentence like “emails from my accountant always need me” into a rule that syncs to every device. Smart Notifications only let Focus mail interrupt you. There are also drafts trained on your writing style, deep search, attachment analysis, task management, read receipts and risk scoring on suspicious mail.

The practical difference: Shortwave gives you more powerful instruments and expects you to aim them. Dove makes a first pass and shows its work, and you correct it. If you enjoy building filters and splits until the inbox behaves exactly as you want, Shortwave will reward that and Dove will feel like it is deciding things you wanted to decide. If you have never built an email filter in your life, the opposite.

Shortwave has the clear edge on one AI capability, and it comes straight from the architecture in the next section: an assistant that can search and reason across years of your mail is doing something Dove's local-first design does not try to do.

Where the AI runs, and what it can see

This is the part that gets skipped in comparisons, and it is the part that is hardest to change later.

Shortwave documents its model plainly. “All Shortwave data is stored in Google Cloud's highly secure & compliant data centers,” encrypted at rest with AES256 and in transit with TLS 1.2+. Its sub-processors, besides Google Cloud, are OpenAI, Anthropic and Pinecone — Pinecone being a vector index, which is consistent with selling AI search over years of mail. Your data is never used to train third-party models, and notably “the vast majority of our AI workloads use open source models that run on hardware we control.” Access to customer data is audit-logged and gated behind hardware security keys. Shortwave holds CASA Tier 2 compliance with an annual third-party audit, and offers SOC 2 Type II and GDPR documentation on request.

That is a well-run version of a server-side design, and it should be judged as one rather than as a flaw. The trade is explicit: to answer a question across five years of mail in a second, something has to hold five years of your mail in a form it can search. Shortwave holds it, tells you where, and gets audited on it.

Dove's published design keeps the mailbox local. Its privacy policy says email content, attachments and metadata are “stored on your device”, and that “email and calendar content are stored locally when possible; limited metadata may be stored securely on our servers.” Some machine learning runs on the device itself: the Smart Inbox models are “stored and trained locally”, and “training data never leaves your device.”

It is important not to overstate that, and Dove does not. For drafting, summarising and chat, the policy says Dove “may send text snippets to trusted LLM providers (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, Google)”, limited to “only the minimal required text”, under terms that forbid training on it. So Dove is not an all-local AI email app, and nobody should buy it believing that. The difference from Shortwave is one of scope and persistence: Shortwave holds a durable server-side copy of the mailbox and indexes it; Dove sends the text a given task needs and keeps the archive on your machine.

Two corrections worth making, because both are commonly assumed. Neither app offers end-to-end encryption, and Dove has no PGP support — it encrypts in transit and at rest, and that is the accurate description. And Dove publishes no third-party security audit, where Shortwave publishes CASA Tier 2 and an annual review. If you need a compliance artefact to hand to a security team, Shortwave has one today and Dove does not.

What you actually pay

Shortwave prices per seat, per month, and the tiers are about how much AI you get rather than which features exist. There is an ongoing free plan — basic intelligence, a limited daily quota, 90 days of history, 15 threads per AI search, and a “Sent with Shortwave” signature on your mail. Paid, the Individual option is Pro at $18 per seat per month. The business tiers are Business at $30, Premier at $45 and Max at $120, each buying a stronger model, more daily requests, deeper search history and more AI filters. The trial is 14 days. New subscriptions are billed monthly, and no annual price is published. One useful detail: a paid plan is one flat rate per person and covers all of your own accounts signed in on the same device, so a second mailbox of your own does not cost a second seat.

Dove is one plan: $20 a month, or $200 a year. There are no tiers to compare, which is either the appeal or the limitation depending on how you buy software. The free plan continues indefinitely with 10 AI actions a day — one action per compose, Wingman, summary or Ask AI request — across unlimited accounts. The trial is seven days and requires a card up front; you are charged on day eight unless you cancel, at which point the account drops to free rather than locking you out. Full detail is on Dove's pricing page.

Compared at the level most individuals will buy: Pro at $18 a month is Shortwave's cheapest paid tier and it caps AI search history at three years, with the stronger models above it. Dove at $20 a month has one level, which is its top level. Compared as a business buyer, Shortwave's $30 tier is where teams start and where its collaboration features switch on, so the honest comparison there is $30 against $20 — for a product that does not do collaboration at all.

Dove's paid plan also gates more than its marketing suggests. On the free plan, Smart Inbox, Smart Notifications, Memory, Smart Labels, custom rules, Today, task management, handoff briefs, risk scoring and read receipts are all paid-only, and the AI features that do work are metered at 10 actions a day. The free tier is a look at the product, not a way to live in it. Shortwave's free tier is thinner on AI but leaves more of the email client itself intact.

Platforms, accounts and devices

Close to even. Shortwave ships Mac, Windows, iOS and Android apps plus the web app and an installable PWA. Dove ships macOS, Windows, iOS, Android and web, and one plan covers every platform with no per-device charge — the download page has all five. Neither has a Linux app.

On multiple accounts the mechanics differ in a way that matters if you juggle mailboxes. Both are generous on price: Shortwave's flat rate per person covers your own accounts on one device, and Dove allows unlimited accounts on every plan. The difference is what you can connect. Dove will take a Gmail account, a Microsoft 365 account and an IMAP account side by side. Shortwave will take several Gmail accounts, and everything else has to be forwarded into one of them first — so a mixed Gmail-and-Outlook working life is straightforward in one app and a construction project in the other.

Teams: Shortwave's clear win

Dove has nothing here, and it is the strongest reason to pick Shortwave even if you are not on Gmail today.

From its Business tier up, Shortwave lets a team share a live thread with its full history and attachments at a stable URL, comment on it privately with @-mentions, assign an owner and a done state, apply shared labels that build an AI-searchable archive the whole team can query, and see when teammates' sent mail was read. Combined with the assistant searching across that shared archive, it turns a set of inboxes into something closer to a shared workspace — the useful middle ground between everyone having their own inbox and buying a separate help-desk tool. Shortwave also points at a sister product, Tasklet, for automation beyond AI filters.

Dove is a single-player product. It has no shared labels, no assignees, no comments and no shared threads. If your problem is that four people need to work one inbox, Dove does not solve it and Shortwave does.

Is Dove a good Shortwave alternative?

For an individual, and especially a non-Gmail individual, yes — it is arguably the closest like-for-like on the market, because it competes on the same ground: the AI decides first and you review. You give up years of server-side AI search, the team features and the choice of model tiers. You gain direct Outlook, Microsoft 365 and IMAP support, a single price, and an architecture that keeps your archive on your own machine.

For a Gmail-based team, no. Nothing in Dove replaces shared labels and assignees, and pretending otherwise would waste your time. Stay with Shortwave, or look at a shared-inbox tool instead of an email client.

Choose Shortwave if… / Choose Dove if…

Choose Shortwave if:

• Your mail is in Gmail or Google Workspace and you have no plans to move.

• You want an assistant that can search and reason across years of mail history — this is the thing Dove does not do.

• You work an inbox with other people and need shared labels, comments, assignees or shared threads.

• You want to build the inbox yourself with filters, splits and bundles, and you will actually enjoy doing it.

• You need a published third-party security assessment, or SOC 2 and GDPR documentation for a review.

• You want a free plan you can sit on for a long time, and can live with a signature on your outgoing mail.

• You want to know which models you are paying for and to choose among them.

Choose Dove if:

• Your mail is in Outlook or Microsoft 365, or with any other IMAP provider such as iCloud or Fastmail — this is the decisive one.

• You run several mailboxes across different providers and want them in one inbox without a forwarding chain.

• You would rather the app made the first pass and let you correct it than build rules yourself.

• You would rather your mail archive lived on your device than in a vendor's cloud index.

• You want one price and no tier decision, at $20 a month or $200 a year.

• You want the day assembled for you — Today, plus what needs you, what is scheduled and who you are waiting on.

Choose neither if: you need end-to-end encrypted or PGP mail. Neither of these apps does it, and no amount of AI is a substitute.

Frequently asked questions

Does Shortwave work with Outlook or Microsoft 365?

Not directly. Shortwave's documentation states that Microsoft 365 and Exchange accounts “are not supported at this time” and that it has no timeline for Microsoft support. Outlook.com, Hotmail and Live addresses can be auto-forwarded into a Gmail account, but Shortwave lists those as forwarding-only: you can receive that mail, not send from the address. Dove connects to Outlook and Microsoft 365 directly.

Can I use Shortwave without a Gmail account?

No. Signing in requires Gmail or Google Workspace. If you use another provider, the documented route is to create a Gmail account as a bridge, forward your mail into it, and configure Gmail's “Send mail as” with your provider's SMTP server and an app password so replies come from your real address.

Which is cheaper, Shortwave or Dove?

Shortwave's cheapest paid plan, Pro, is $18 per seat per month, $2 less than Dove's $20 — but it caps AI search history at three years and uses the standard rather than the advanced model. Shortwave's team tiers start at $30. Dove has one plan at $20 a month or $200 a year. Both have an ongoing free plan.

Does either app store my email on its own servers?

Shortwave does, by design: it states that all Shortwave data is stored in Google Cloud, encrypted at rest with AES256, which is what makes AI search across years of mail possible. Dove's privacy policy says email and calendar content are stored locally on your device where possible, with limited metadata on Dove's servers, and that it sends only minimal text snippets to its AI providers for tasks like drafting and summarising.

Is either app end-to-end encrypted?

No. Both encrypt mail in transit and at rest, and neither offers end-to-end encryption. Dove does not support PGP. If encrypted mail is a requirement, you need a client built for it.

Can Dove or Shortwave handle several email accounts at once?

Both allow multiple accounts without charging per mailbox — Shortwave as one flat rate per person for accounts signed in on the same device, Dove as unlimited accounts on every plan including free. The difference is which accounts: Dove mixes Gmail, Microsoft and IMAP in one inbox, while Shortwave's accounts all have to be Google ones.

Does Shortwave change my Gmail if I stop using it?

No. Its documentation says actions you take in Shortwave — archive, label, delete — sync to Gmail as they would from any client, your original content is never modified, and if you stop using it your Gmail inbox remains as you left it. That makes trying it low-risk, which is a fair point in its favour.

What is Dove's relationship to Canary Mail?

Dove is a new product from the team behind Canary Mail, which has more than two million users. Canary is a privacy-first email client with AI added to it; Dove was built AI-first. They are separate apps with separate pricing, and Canary's encryption features — including PGP — are Canary's, not Dove's.

Sources

• Shortwave — Use Shortwave with other email providers

• Shortwave — Pricing

• Shortwave — Security & Privacy

• Shortwave — Billing

• Shortwave — Migrating from Superhuman

• Dove — Pricing

• Dove — Privacy Policy

• Dove — Download

All pages checked 25 September 2026. Prices and plans change; if you are reading this much later, confirm on each vendor's own pricing page.