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 make the same promise: the AI reads your inbox, tells you what matters and drafts your replies. 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 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. If you are weighing more apps than these two, our guide to the best AI email apps compares the wider field.

Key takeaways

• Shortwave signs in with Gmail or Google Workspace only. Microsoft 365 and Exchange are not supported, with no published timeline. Outlook.com can only forward mail in; you can't send from that address.

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

• Shortwave stores your mail in Google Cloud and indexes it, which is what makes years of AI search possible. Dove's privacy policy says email content is stored on your device when possible, with limited metadata on Dove's servers, and that only the minimal text a task needs goes to its AI providers.

• Price depends on how you pay. By the month, Shortwave Pro is cheaper for one person: $18 against Dove's $20. Over a year Dove is cheaper, $200 on its annual plan against $216 for twelve months of Pro, because Shortwave bills monthly only. Shortwave's team tiers are $30, $45 and $120 per seat.

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

The short version

Prices, plans and features below were checked on shortwave.com and dove.email on October 9, 2026.

What Shortwave does better

Shortwave is ahead in five places, and it's worth saying so before the provider question takes over.

Teams are the big one. Shortwave has shared threads, comments, assignees, shared labels and channels, and Dove has none of them. It also goes deeper inside Gmail, because it only has one provider to care about: years of mail indexed for AI search, splits, bundles and AI filters, and nothing in Gmail changes if you leave. Pro costs $18 a month, $2 less than Dove's monthly price. Shortwave has a published audit (CASA Tier 2, reviewed every year by a third party) and will send SOC 2 Type II and GDPR documentation on request; Dove publishes nothing like it. And Shortwave tells you which model sits behind each tier, so you can pay for a stronger one.

If you're on Gmail and one of those settles it, pick Shortwave. Most of this page will back you up.

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 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 (Yahoo and iCloud included), with unlimited accounts on every plan including the free one. No bridge account, no forwarding rule, no SMTP setup. 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 center 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 on Free, 50 on Pro and Business, then 100 and 150). Alongside it there are AI filters, plain-English rules that act on 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. AI filters and attachment analysis sit on Business and above. The assistant can browse the web and reach other tools through integrations and MCP. Shortwave names the models behind its intelligence levels on its pricing page, Claude Haiku 4.5 on Free up to Claude Opus 4.6 on Max. Few vendors tell you that much. It also gives quotas: roughly 75 to 150 standard requests a day on Pro and 150 to 300 on Business.

Dove's center 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 keeps rewriting it; below the summary are Needs you, Schedule, FYI, Later 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 in 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 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. Its security page says "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 is a vector index, which fits a product that sells 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." Employee access to data requires 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 privacy policy describes a different design. It says email data is "stored on your device", and, more precisely, that "Email content is stored locally when possible; limited metadata may be stored securely on our servers." Some machine learning runs on the device itself: the models that sort your inbox are "stored and trained locally", and "Training data never leaves your device."

Don't read more into that than the policy says. For drafting, summaries and chat, Dove "may send text snippets to trusted third-party AI providers", limited to "the minimal required text", under agreements that bar them from 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 keeps a lasting server-side copy of the mailbox and indexes it; Dove keeps email content on your device when it can and sends the text a given task needs.

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 document 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, so a year of Pro costs $216. One useful detail: a paid plan is one flat rate per person and covers your other accounts signed in on the same device, so a second mailbox of your own does not cost a second seat. Our Shortwave pricing guide goes through every tier and quota.

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 across unlimited accounts; one action is one prompt, search or draft. 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.

Compared at the level most individuals will buy: Pro at $18 a month is Shortwave's cheapest paid tier and $2 a month less than Dove. It caps AI search history at three years and runs the standard model, with stronger ones on the tiers above. Dove at $20 a month has one level, which is its top level, and on the annual plan it works out cheaper than a year of Pro. Compared as a business buyer, Shortwave's $30 Business tier is where its team plans start, 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 Mac, Windows, iPhone, iPad, Android and web apps, and one plan covers every platform with no per-device charge; the download page has them all. 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 if your team is on Google Workspace.

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, on Business and above, 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 to a sister product, Tasklet, for automation beyond AI filters, including drafting replies automatically.

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 email content kept on your device when possible rather than in a vendor's cloud index.

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.

If Dove doesn't fit either, here are three other Shortwave alternatives. Superhuman Mail works with Gmail and Outlook and is built around keyboard speed, though it starts at $30 a month ($25 billed annually) with no free plan. Spark has a free plan and works with almost any provider, with paid plans from $10 a month. Missive is built for teams sharing inboxes across Gmail, Outlook and IMAP, from $18 per user per month ($14 billed yearly). Our best AI email apps guide covers all of them in depth.

If neither fits, our guide to Shortwave alternatives covers the other options, from Superhuman to a shared team inbox.

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 the lowest monthly price for one person: Pro is $18 against Dove's $20.

• 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, Yahoo 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 email content stayed on your device where possible 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 only work with Gmail? What about Outlook?

Yes, for sign-in. Shortwave's documentation says it requires a Gmail or Google Workspace account to sign in, that Microsoft 365 and Exchange accounts "are not supported at this time", and that there is no timeline for Microsoft support. Other providers can be auto-forwarded into a Gmail account, with Gmail's "Send mail as" and an app password so replies come from your real address. Outlook.com, Hotmail and Live are forwarding-only: you can receive that mail, not send from the address. Dove connects to Outlook and Microsoft 365 directly.

Is Shortwave free, and which is cheaper, Shortwave or Dove?

Both have an ongoing free plan. 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 runs the standard rather than the advanced model, and it is billed monthly only. Dove is $20 a month or $200 a year, so over a year Dove costs $200 against $216 for Pro. Shortwave's team tiers start at $30. Prices checked October 9, 2026.

Is Shortwave safe? Does it store my email on its servers?

Shortwave does store your mail, by design: its security page says all Shortwave data is stored in Google Cloud, encrypted at rest with AES256 and in transit with TLS 1.2+, which is what makes AI search across years of mail possible. It holds CASA Tier 2 compliance with an annual third-party audit and says your data is never used to train third-party models. Dove's privacy policy says email content is stored locally on your device when possible, with limited metadata on Dove's servers, and that it sends only the minimal text a task needs to third-party AI providers for things like drafting and summaries.

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 security page says actions you take in Shortwave (archive, label, delete) are reflected in Gmail as they would be from any client, your original email content is never modified, and if you stop using it your Gmail inbox remains exactly as you left it. That makes trying it low-risk, which is a fair point in its favour.

Shortwave vs Superhuman: which is better?

It depends on your provider and what you want the AI to do. Shortwave signs in with Gmail and Google Workspace only; Superhuman Mail works with Gmail and Outlook. Shortwave is cheaper and easier to try: a free plan, a 14-day trial and Pro at $18 a month, against Superhuman Mail Starter at $30 a month ($25 billed annually) with no free plan or trial. Pick Superhuman for keyboard speed. Pick Shortwave for AI search over your mail history, or for team features on Google Workspace. Our guide to Superhuman pricing breaks down its tiers, and our list of Superhuman alternatives covers the wider field.

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.