Dove vs Spark Mail: Two Ways to Sort the Same Inbox

Spark groups your mail so there is less of it in front of you. Dove reads your mail and tells you what to do about it today. Most of the choice between them comes down to which of those two jobs you actually want done.

They look similar on a feature list. Both sort incoming mail instead of showing you a plain reverse-chronological pile, both run on Windows and Android as well as Apple hardware, both have an AI assistant that can search your inbox and write replies. The difference is what the sorting is about. Spark's categories describe what a message is — a real person, a newsletter, a notification, a sender you have bundled. Dove's categories describe whether it needs you, and its Today view goes further and writes your day out before you open anything.

Disclosure: Dove is made by the team behind Canary Mail. Every Spark fact below comes from Spark's own site, and every Dove fact from Dove's, both checked on 25 September 2026. Prices and AI limits at both companies have moved in the last year, so check them again if you are reading this much later.

Key takeaways

• Spark's free plan includes Smart Inbox, but not Priority or Gatekeeper. Dove's free plan is the other way round: you get 10 AI actions a day, and Smart Inbox and Today are paid.

• Spark sells four tiers per user: Free, Plus at $10/month or $99/year, Pro at $20/month or $199/year, and Enterprise on request. Dove sells one plan at $20/month or $200/year — no cheaper tier, and within a dollar of Spark Pro annually.

• Spark sorts by sender and message type. Dove sorts into Focus, Feed and Noise by whether something needs you, then builds a Today brief split into Needs you, Schedule, FYI and Waiting on.

• Spark is also a team product: shared inboxes, assignments, read statuses, private comments. Dove ships none of that — it is a single-user app.

• Spark runs on Windows, Android, Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, and connects iCloud accounts directly. Dove runs on Web, macOS, iOS, Android and Windows — a browser instead of a watch.

The short version

How each one decides what you see first

This is the part worth spending time on, because it is the only thing in the comparison you cannot change your mind about later without changing apps.

Spark: priority on top, the rest folded away

Spark's Smart Inbox splits new mail into personal, newsletter and notification categories, and puts mail from real people at the top. Newsletters and notifications collapse into their own expandable folders, so they are present but take up one line instead of twenty. Priority pins messages from senders you care about to the top of the inbox with a highlight. Gatekeeper screens first-time senders and lets you block them before they land. Group by Sender and Domain bundles everything from one source. Smart Notifications only buzz for priority mail.

Two things about that list matter for the price comparison. It is an effective set of tools, and the categorisation needs almost no setup — you do not train it before it helps. But Priority, Gatekeeper, Group by Sender, Smart Folders and Mute Threads are all on the paid plans. The free plan gets Smart Inbox's newsletter and notification sorting, not the priority layer.

The other thing: after Spark has sorted, you still read the personal mail and decide what each message needs. Spark has made the pile shorter and better organised. The judgement is still yours, message by message.

Dove: three labels, then a brief

Dove classifies every message into one of three categories. Focus is important and personal mail that needs your attention. Feed is newsletters, updates and subscriptions — worth knowing about, not worth a reply. Noise is low-priority mail, collapsed out of the way but still there. Marking something Done takes it off the list, and you can re-sort anything and teach Dove why, with rules you write in plain language that sync to every device. Labels are applied mainly to mail from the past seven days, so an old archive does not get relabelled retroactively.

Today is the part with no Spark equivalent. It writes a one-sentence summary of what arrived and then splits the day into Needs you, Schedule, FYI and Waiting on, with drafts offered against the items that need a reply and a list of what you have already handled. It rewrites itself as the day moves. Dove also scores every message for risk and quarantines what looks like phishing or impersonation before it reaches Today.

The trade is straightforward. When the classification is right, you have skipped the triage entirely. When it is wrong, something you cared about was one tap further away than it would have been in a plain inbox, and you have to correct it. Spark never makes that mistake because Spark never makes that decision.

Dove's own help article on how Focus, Feed and Noise work is the most specific description of the classifier, including which mail gets labelled and how the sections group by time.

What the AI does, and how much of it you get

Both apps have two kinds of AI: something that writes for you, and something that answers questions about your inbox. The capabilities overlap heavily. The metering does not.

Spark

• Spark +AI handles composing, quick replies, rephrasing, shortening, expanding, tone changes, proofreading, translation and thread summaries in short, detailed or action-point form.

• AI Assistant searches across email, attachments (PDF and TXT), calendar and meeting notes, answers questions, drafts, and can schedule meetings. How far back it can look depends on the plan: one month of history on Free, a year on Plus, and the whole mailbox on Pro and Enterprise.

• Meeting Notes transcribes and summarises meetings on any platform: 5 for the lifetime of a free account, 40 a month on Plus, unlimited on Pro.

• Monthly credits cap all of it, described as Extended on Plus and High on Pro rather than as a number. Meeting notes draw from the same quota.

• Workflows, Auto-Drafts and Auto-Labels — rules, draft replies written in your voice, and Gmail-style categories — are listed on the Pro plan as coming soon, not shipped.

+AI runs in Spark 3 on desktop, iOS and Android.

Dove

• Wingman pulls the thread you are reading together with related conversations elsewhere in your mail, so a renewal quote arrives next to the rate you agreed earlier.

• Ask Dove answers questions about your inbox in plain language and can turn the answer into a draft.

• Summaries run per section of the inbox and update in real time, so you can catch up without opening threads.

• Drafts, replies and Writing Style compose in your voice, with a review pass before sending. Deep Search and full inbox history cover finding things.

• Task and meeting detection builds a task list out of your mail, which is what feeds Needs you and Schedule in Today. Memory keeps your preferences between sessions.

• On the paid plan none of this is metered — no credits, no monthly allowance. On free you get 10 actions a day, where one prompt, search or draft is one action.

So: if you use AI heavily inside email, Dove's flat allowance is the simpler deal, and Spark's credit pool is the thing to check before committing. If you barely use it, the AI budget is not what should decide this — the sorting model and the price are.

Price, compared like with like

Spark has four tiers, billed per user, and shows monthly and yearly side by side. Free is $0. Plus is $10 a month per user, or $99 a year, which Spark displays as $8.25 a month. Pro is $20 a month per user, or $199 a year, displayed as $16.58 a month. Enterprise is a sales conversation. Plus and Pro both come with a seven-day trial when you subscribe in the app, and Spark notes that people on its older legacy plans have different features and limits.

Dove has one plan: $20 a month, or $200 a year. There are no tiers under it and no lifetime deal. There is a seven-day trial, it needs a card, and if you cancel before day eight you move to the free plan rather than losing the account.

Comparing those honestly means holding the billing period still. Month to month, Dove costs the same as Spark Pro and twice Spark Plus. Annually, Dove at $200 and Spark Pro at $199 are the same price within a dollar, and both are roughly double Spark Plus at $99. So the question is not which is cheaper — at the top tier they are the same — but whether Spark Plus would have covered you, because that is where Spark undercuts Dove by half and Dove has nothing to offer in reply. For a team you also multiply Spark by seats, while Dove has no team plan to multiply at all.

Dove's pitch is that there are no tiers to work out and nothing metered, so one price buys everything the app does, read receipts included. Spark's is that you can pay half as much and still get priority sorting, the writing AI and the assistant. Current numbers are on Dove's pricing page and Spark's pricing page; both companies have changed them before.

The free plans are not comparable either

Spark's free plan is a usable email app: Smart Inbox, unlimited accounts, unified inbox, search, snooze, set aside, reminders, send later, swipe actions, calendar, and the AI Assistant limited to a month of history. Dove's free plan keeps unlimited accounts and the core inbox but does not include Smart Inbox or Today, and caps AI at 10 actions a day. In other words, Spark's free tier is a smaller version of Spark, while Dove's free tier is a holding pattern that does not include the thing Dove is for. If you want to evaluate Dove properly, you are evaluating it during the trial.

One person, or a team

Spark treats shared mail as core. Even the free plan lets you create a team and use private comments, shared threads, shared drafts with two active collaborators, 10 assignments and 5GB of team storage. Paid plans lift those limits and add shared templates and team administration; Pro adds shared inboxes for addresses like sales@ and read statuses, plus a HubSpot integration and a CLI with triage access for agents. Enterprise adds security controls and a success manager.

Dove has no equivalent. There is no shared inbox, no assignment, no comment thread, no team billing. One thing does cross over: Spark's read statuses are a Pro-tier team-collaboration feature, while Dove includes read receipts in its single plan, so you can see when a recipient opens what you sent without moving up a tier. If two people need to work the same mailbox, this comparison is already over and Spark wins it. Dove's cross-device story is about one person on five devices, not several people on one mailbox: Today, your rules and every Done sync between Mac, iOS, Android, Windows and the web.

Platforms and accounts

Spark lists Windows, Android, Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. There is no web app. Spark also still offers Spark 2 as a separate download for people who do not want Spark 3, and it says openly that it is working towards feature parity across platforms, so the experience on Windows or Android may differ from the Mac one. For accounts it covers Gmail and Google Workspace, Outlook and Microsoft 365 including Exchange Online, iCloud, Yahoo and any standard IMAP account.

Dove lists Web, macOS, iOS, Android and Windows, with the download page also naming iPad, and one plan covering every device with no per-device fee. Accounts are Gmail and Google Workspace, Outlook and Microsoft 365, Yahoo and IMAP, unlimited on every plan including free. Dove does not name iCloud; an iCloud address would go in as IMAP, and if iCloud is your main account Spark's direct support is the safer bet. If you live in a browser on a work machine where you cannot install software, Dove's web app is the one that matters. Both are listed on Dove's download page with setup guides for Google, Microsoft and IMAP accounts.

Privacy

Neither app is a zero-knowledge system, because neither kind of AI can work without some of your mail being read somewhere. What differs is how much leaves the device and what each company commits to.

Spark indexes your mail locally for the AI Assistant and says the index stays on your device. When you ask a question, the query and a small number of related messages go to its AI provider, which holds them for up to 30 days for abuse monitoring and then deletes them; Spark says they are not stored on Spark's servers and are not used to train models. Login credentials are held as a token Spark says it cannot retrieve. Some features do process mail server-side by design, including send later, shared emails and shared drafts.

Dove says email and calendar content is stored locally where possible with limited metadata on its servers, that authentication uses OAuth 2.0 with no password stored, and that revoking access deletes tokens and erases server-side data within 30 days. Content is encrypted in transit and at rest, and nothing is stored unencrypted. It uses different AI models for different jobs and says no provider trains on your mail.

Both policies are worth reading rather than summarising, and both are short: Dove's privacy policy and Spark's app privacy policy.

One thing neither app offers: end-to-end or PGP-encrypted mail. Dove encrypts in transit and at rest and stores nothing unencrypted, but it is not an end-to-end system, and Spark makes no end-to-end claim either. If you need mail that only you and your recipient can read, this is the wrong pair of apps to be choosing between.

Is Dove a Spark alternative?

It is a real alternative for one specific reason and not for others, so it is worth being precise.

Dove replaces Spark cleanly if what you want changed is who makes the triage decision. Both are cross-platform, both take unlimited accounts on every plan, both handle Gmail, Microsoft and IMAP, and switching does not involve moving mail anywhere — you connect the same accounts. The daily brief and the task extraction are things Spark does not have an answer to, and Dove's AI is not rationed on the paid plan.

It is not a Spark replacement if you share a mailbox with anyone, if you are on iCloud, if you want an Apple Watch app, if you are spending your own money and $99 a year for Spark Plus is the level you are comfortable at, or if you specifically like deciding for yourself what is important. Those are not small objections, and three of them have no workaround in Dove today.

Choose Spark if… / Choose Dove if…

Choose Spark

• Two or more people work the same mail: shared inboxes, assignments, read statuses and comments have no Dove equivalent.

• You want the cheapest capable paid tier. Plus at $99 a year covers Priority, Gatekeeper, the writing AI and the assistant.

• iCloud is your main account, or you want mail on an Apple Watch.

• You want a properly usable free plan rather than a trial.

• You would rather software organised your inbox than judged it. Spark's categories are predictable and you stay the one deciding what matters.

• The downside to accept: the AI runs on monthly credits rather than being unlimited, three of the Pro plan's AI features (Workflows, Auto-Drafts and Auto-Labels) are still marked coming soon, there is no web app, and Spark says platform parity is still a work in progress.

Choose Dove

• Your problem is volume, not speed. You do not want a shorter list to read, you want to be told what needs you today.

• You want a written brief of your day, with tasks and meetings pulled out of the mail, rather than an inbox to work through.

• You use AI in email constantly and do not want to think about credits.

• You work across a Mac, a PC, a phone and a browser, and want the web app included in the same plan.

• You want one price with nothing held back behind a higher tier, read receipts included — Spark keeps its read statuses on Pro.

• The downside to accept: there is no cheaper tier, so if Spark Plus at $99 a year would have covered you, Dove costs twice that. There are no team features at all, the free plan does not include the triage so the trial is your real evaluation window, and the product and its ecosystem are much newer than Spark's.

FAQ

Is Spark Mail free?

There is a genuinely free plan: Smart Inbox, unlimited email accounts, unified inbox, search, smart notifications, snooze, set aside, reminders, send later, swipe actions and calendar, plus the AI Assistant limited to one month of history and five meeting notes for the lifetime of the account. Priority, Gatekeeper, the +AI writing tools and shared inboxes are paid.

Does Dove have a free plan?

Yes, but a narrow one. After the seven-day trial you move to free automatically if you do not subscribe, keeping unlimited accounts and the core inbox with 10 AI actions a day. Smart Inbox and Today, which are the reasons to use Dove, are on the paid plan.

Is Dove cheaper than Spark?

Not against Spark Pro: $200 a year for Dove against $199 for Spark Pro is the same price, and $20 a month against $20 a month is the same again. Against Spark Plus, Dove is twice the price — $200 a year against $99 — so if Plus covers what you need, Spark is the cheaper app by a wide margin.

Does Spark have a web app?

No. Spark lists Windows, Android, Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. Dove has a web app included in the same plan as the desktop and mobile apps.

Do Spark and Dove work with iCloud and Yahoo?

Spark names iCloud and Yahoo directly, along with Gmail, Workspace, Outlook, Microsoft 365, Exchange Online and IMAP. Dove names Gmail, Workspace, Outlook, Microsoft 365, Yahoo and IMAP, but not iCloud specifically, so an iCloud account is an IMAP connection.

Can Dove be used by a team?

Not as a shared-mail product. Dove has no shared inbox, assignments or comments. Spark does, including on the free plan for small cases, with shared inboxes on Pro.

Does either app train AI on my email?

Both say no. Spark sends only the messages related to your query to its AI provider, which holds them up to 30 days for abuse monitoring; Dove says neither it nor its providers train on your mail. Both process some mail off-device for AI features.

Can I try both before choosing?

Yes, and it is the sensible thing to do since they are not the same kind of app. Spark's paid tiers have a seven-day trial from inside the app, and there is a free plan to fall back to. Dove has a seven-day trial that needs a card, then drops to free. A week is long enough to find out whether you trust another program to decide what matters.

Sources

All checked 25 September 2026.

• Spark pricing — tiers, monthly and annual prices, and the full plan comparison table

• Spark Smart Inbox, Priority Email and Newsletters & Notifications

• Spark +AI and AI Assistant — capabilities, platforms and data handling

• Spark teams pricing and Spark downloads

• Spark privacy policy (app)

• Dove pricing — the single plan, the free-tier limits and the feature table

• Dove home and Dove downloads — Focus, Feed, Noise, Today, Wingman, platforms and providers

• Smart Inbox in Dove and Manage notifications in Dove

• Dove privacy policy