Dove vs Superhuman: Two Answers to the Same Inbox

Superhuman makes you faster at email. Dove does more of the email for you. That one sentence settles this comparison for most people, usually before they get as far as a feature list.

Both apps start from the same complaint: default email is bad enough that people will pay to fix it. They disagree about what fixing it means. Superhuman hands you a faster set of tools and assumes you will be excellent with them. Dove reads what arrived, decides where each message belongs, and shows you the decision so you can correct it.

Disclosure: Dove is made by the team behind Canary Mail. Superhuman's plans have changed more than once in the past year, so open the live pricing pages before you buy, including ours.

So skip the feature count and ask where your bottleneck sits. If you're slow at email, Superhuman is a good purchase and this article will probably tell you to buy it. If you're buried in email, speed is the wrong lever: two hundred messages at twice the pace is still two hundred messages. And if neither app fits, we compare ten other Superhuman alternatives, from Spark to Missive, in a separate guide.

Key takeaways

• Price. Superhuman Mail starts at $25 per member per month billed annually ($30 billed monthly). The AI most people want it for (Ask AI, Auto Drafts, custom Auto Labels) sits on the $33 Business tier, not the entry one. Dove is one plan at $20 a month or $200 a year.

• Trying it first. Superhuman Mail has no free plan, and its help centre says the suite offers no free trials. Dove has a free plan with 10 AI actions a day and a 7-day trial that asks for a card.

• Providers. Superhuman Mail works with Gmail and Outlook, and nothing else. Dove also takes Yahoo, iCloud and any other IMAP account.

• Platforms. Both ship native Mac and Windows apps plus iOS and Android. Superhuman adds a Chrome extension; Dove adds a full web app.

• The real split. Superhuman gives you faster tools and you keep the triage. Dove does the triage and you keep the corrections.

• Who owns Superhuman. After Grammarly's 2025 acquisitions and rebrand, Superhuman Mail is one of four products under the Superhuman name, alongside Grammarly, Docs and Go.

The short version

Prices and features below were checked on superhuman.com, Superhuman's help centre and dove.email on 7 October 2026.

Read that table as two philosophies rather than a scorecard. Superhuman's column is full of things you operate. Dove's column is full of things that have already happened by the time you open the app.

What Superhuman Mail does better

Superhuman won its argument. Email clients were slow, mouse-dependent and cluttered, and Superhuman proved that a fast one feels like a different category of software. That reputation was earned.

The keyboard model is the heart of it: a shortcut for nearly every action, a command palette (Cmd+K or Ctrl+K) for anything that isn't bound to a key, and an app built so it doesn't lag behind your hands. People who've used it for years talk about muscle memory, not features, and for a tool like this that's the right compliment. Dove has keyboard shortcuts and a command centre; it is not trying to win on raw interaction speed, and it doesn't.

Split Inbox is the other pillar. You define lanes (your team, your VIPs, tools like Google Docs, Notion and Asana) and Superhuman Mail files incoming mail into them, so you process a category at a time instead of a chronological pile. Auto Labels extend that with AI-assigned tags.

Then there is everything built around sending rather than sorting, which is where Superhuman is unusually complete: follow-up reminders if nobody replies by a date you pick, Snippets that insert whole emails with attachments and CC rules, Send Later, snooze, autocorrect while you type, and one-tap event creation from a thread. Dove matches some of this (read receipts, aliases, custom signatures, undo send) but not the reusable snippets, the scheduled follow-up nudges or the calendar integration.

Its team features are a real advantage. You can share a live view of an email with colleagues and let them comment on it even if they don't use Superhuman, share Snippets across the team, and see when a teammate is already replying so you don't collide. Dove publishes nothing like this. If email is a team sport where you work, that's a good reason to pick Superhuman, and it won't change by next quarter.

Two honest caveats. First, Split Inbox lanes are configuration: someone has to decide what the categories are, describe them, and revise them when the work changes. You pay that cost up front and again every few months. Every rules-based mail system has charged it since the first filter. Second, the shortcuts are optimised for US QWERTY keyboards, and the help centre lists substitute keys for Belgian, Czech, Danish, French, German, Italian and other layouts. If you type on one of those, some of the speed you're paying for arrives with an asterisk.

If you love keyboard control, you live in Gmail, and your honest complaint is that you are not fast enough at a workflow you already trust, buy Superhuman. Nothing below is likely to change your mind, and it shouldn't. Our Superhuman review goes deeper on what it is like to live with day to day.

Who does the triage: the actual difference

This is where the two apps really differ, and most comparisons skate over it because both use the word "AI" for things that aren't alike.

Superhuman: faster tools, your categories

Superhuman is an excellent instrument played by you. Split Inbox routes by lanes you wrote. Auto Labels tag messages, which helps you find things. Ask AI answers when you ask it. On Business, Superhuman's AI also works on its own more than it used to: Auto Drafts writes a reply to emails that need one, and a follow-up to emails still waiting on an answer, so the draft is there when you open the thread. That is real help with the typing. But the structure of your inbox, which lanes exist and what goes in them, is still something you design and maintain. The judgement about what deserves your next twenty minutes mostly stays at your desk; it just gets a better keyboard.

Worth knowing before you compare AI: on the Starter plan you get "Superhuman AI", but Ask AI, Auto Drafts and custom Auto Labels are listed under Business. The AI features people quote in Superhuman reviews are above the entry tier.

Dove: the decision arrives already made

Dove reads everything that arrived and sorts it before you look. Focus is a real person with a real ask and a real deadline. Feed is worth knowing but not worth a reply: approvals, gate changes, heads-ups, one line each. Noise is newsletters, promotions and bulk mail, kept out of the way but still there. When you have handled something you mark it Done, and you can re-sort anything to teach Dove what matters to you.

On top of that sits Today: a one-sentence summary of your day that rewrites itself as the day moves, grouped into Needs you, Schedule, FYI, Later and Waiting on. "Waiting on" is the quietly useful one: you replied, they owe you something, and it does not lapse silently.

Two AI features do the heavier lifting. Wingman brings in related conversations from elsewhere in your mail, not just the thread you have open: a routine renewal lands, and Wingman surfaces the original agreement from two months ago showing the new quote is higher than the rate you signed off. The contradicting fact is almost never inside the thread you are reading, which is why reading that thread harder does not find it. Ask Dove takes a question in plain words (what do I need to know for next week's trip?), answers it from your mail, and then drafts the follow-up the answer implies.

Teach Dove is the correction loop: say "emails from my accountant always need me" and it becomes a rule that syncs to every device. Smart Notifications follow the same sorting, so only Focus is allowed to buzz your phone.

Dove's caveat is the mirror image of Superhuman's. Dove is making judgement calls, and judgement is sometimes wrong. You will find a message in Feed that you wanted in Focus, and the fix is to correct it rather than to configure it in advance. Some people hate that trade, and they have a point. Dove is also new, so its track record is short and the ecosystem of integrations and community guides around it is thin next to Superhuman's.

Superhuman's AI mostly makes you better at email tasks. Dove's AI mostly decides which email tasks exist. Both are fair approaches, and they make for different products.

Price

Superhuman Mail sells per member. Its pricing page lists Starter at $25 per member per month billed annually or $30 billed monthly; Business at $33 annually or $40 monthly, with a discount for teams of five or more; and Enterprise on request, adding admin security controls, SSO, a customer success manager, team analytics and priority support. The split that matters is Starter to Business: Ask AI, Auto Drafts, custom Auto Labels, the Superhuman Mail MCP and the HubSpot and Salesforce integrations are all on Business.

There is also the Superhuman suite, which bundles Mail with Grammarly, Docs and Go. On Superhuman's suite plans page, Mail first appears in the Business tier; the Free and Pro tiers include Grammarly, Docs and Go but not Mail. Mail is still sold on its own. For the full breakdown of tiers, billing and the suite, see our guide to Superhuman pricing.

Dove is $20 a month, or $200 a year, one plan, everything in it, on every platform, with unlimited email accounts. There are no tiers to compare and nothing held back for a higher one, which also means there is nothing to negotiate: no volume discount, no lifetime licence, and no enterprise contract if you need one.

On trials: Dove offers seven days, requires a card, charges on day eight, and drops you to a free plan if you cancel. That free plan keeps core mail and unlimited accounts but is deliberately limited: 10 AI actions a day, and no Smart Inbox, Today, Memory, custom rules, read receipts or risk scoring. It is a way to keep your account alive, not a way to use the product for free. Superhuman Mail has no free plan, and its billing FAQ says: "We don't currently offer discounts or free trials for the Superhuman suite." You pay before you know whether it fits.

One caution on per-seat arithmetic: five people on Superhuman Business annually is meaningfully more per month than five Dove subscriptions, but you are not buying the same thing. Superhuman's price includes the shared views, comments and admin console. Dove has none of that, so the cheaper number is also a smaller purchase.

Platforms and email providers

Superhuman Mail runs as a native Mac app, a native Windows app, a Chrome extension, and mobile apps for iOS, iPadOS and Android. The old line that Windows users are stuck in a browser is out of date.

The limit is the account, not the device. Superhuman Mail is, in its own words, built for teams that use Gmail or Outlook. That is the complete list, and Outlook support is not at parity: thread muting, for instance, works on Gmail accounts but not Outlook ones, on desktop and mobile alike. If your mail lives at Fastmail, iCloud, Yahoo, a university domain or your own server, Superhuman is ruled out at step one and nothing else in this comparison matters.

Dove runs on macOS, Windows, iOS, Android and the web, all included in the one plan, and connects Gmail, Google Workspace, Outlook, Microsoft 365, Yahoo and any IMAP account (iCloud included), with unlimited accounts on every plan, the free one too. Classification is shared across devices, so the same sorted Today appears wherever you open it rather than being rebuilt per device.

Privacy and security

Dove scores every incoming message Safe, Suspicious or Dangerous and quarantines the dangerous ones (domain spoofing, phishing links, impersonation) before they reach Today. Your mail is encrypted in transit and at rest, no unencrypted email content is stored, and nothing you receive is used to train models, by Dove or by any of the model providers it routes work to. Risk scoring is a paid-plan feature.

One limit worth stating flatly, because it is easy to assume otherwise from the family resemblance: Dove does not do PGP or end-to-end encryption. Encrypted in transit and at rest is not the same guarantee, and if encrypted mail between you and a correspondent is a requirement, Dove is the wrong tool. Canary Mail is the product in this family that does that.

Superhuman's AI help article says that with Ask AI turned on, Mail stores your emails with a SOC 2 compliant third-party vendor, encrypted in transit and at rest, and that neither Mail nor any vendor trains on your data. Its privacy policy is worded differently: it describes a training control in your account settings that decides whether Superhuman can use your content to train its own AI models. If that matters to you, check the setting. On the admin side, security controls and single sign-on are listed on the Enterprise tier.

Multiple accounts, and whether you are buying for a team

Dove is a single-person tool that happens to handle many mailboxes: unlimited accounts on every plan, sorted into one view. If you run a personal address, a work address and a side project, that is the cheaper and simpler answer.

Superhuman is sold per member and built for groups: shared snippets, commentable email threads, collision indicators, unified admin and billing, CRM integrations on Business, and admin controls at Enterprise. If the actual problem is that four people are handling one stream of mail, Superhuman answers it and Dove does not, and a dedicated shared-inbox tool may answer it better than either.

Is Dove a good Superhuman alternative?

It's a good alternative to Superhuman for one kind of person and a poor one for another.

Choose Superhuman if you live in Gmail or Outlook, you want keyboard control over every action, you are willing to design and maintain your own Split Inbox lanes, your team needs to share and comment on mail, or your honest complaint is that each message takes too long. You are buying the best-executed version of that idea and you will get it.

Choose Dove if your complaint is volume rather than speed, you would rather correct a decision than make one, you need a provider Superhuman does not support, you want one flat price with nothing held back for a higher tier, or you want to open your mail and find the day already assembled.

Choose neither if your inbox is quiet. Forty messages a day from people you know is a problem free Gmail already solves. Both of these are for people whose mail has become a second job. If you are leaving Superhuman for another reason, such as wanting a shared team inbox or a Gmail-only Mac app, our list of Superhuman alternatives covers those cases.

And some people try Dove and go back to Superhuman. If you get thirty emails a day, nearly all from people you recognise, and you enjoy the keyboard flow, then nothing is being decided on your behalf that you minded deciding yourself. That's the right call. If you want to find out which one you are, Dove's seven-day trial runs on your real mail alongside the app you use now, with no migration.

For more, see Superhuman vs Spark and our guide to the best AI email apps.

FAQ

How much do Dove and Superhuman cost?

Dove is $20 a month or $200 a year, one plan, everything included. Superhuman Mail is $25 per member per month billed annually or $30 billed monthly for Starter, and $33 annually or $40 monthly for Business, with Enterprise quoted by sales. Both were checked on 7 October 2026.

Does Superhuman work with any email provider?

No. Superhuman Mail supports Gmail and Outlook only, and some features, thread muting for example, work on Gmail accounts but not Outlook ones. Dove works with Gmail, Google Workspace, Outlook, Microsoft 365, Yahoo and any IMAP account, including iCloud.

Is there a free version of either app?

Dove has one: after the seven-day trial, an account that does not subscribe moves to a free plan with core mail, unlimited accounts and 10 AI actions a day, without Smart Inbox, Today, Memory, custom rules or risk scoring. Superhuman Mail has no free plan, and Superhuman's help centre says the suite offers no free trials. The suite's free tier includes Grammarly, Docs and Go, not Mail.

Does Superhuman have a Windows app?

Yes. Superhuman Mail ships a native Windows app as well as a native Mac app, a Chrome extension, and iOS and Android apps. Dove covers macOS, Windows, iOS, Android and the web.

What happened to Superhuman after Grammarly bought it?

Grammarly acquired Coda and Superhuman Mail and relaunched the whole company as Superhuman in 2025, with Superhuman Go as a new AI assistant, according to Superhuman's about page. "Superhuman" now names a suite of four products: Go, Grammarly, Docs (formerly Coda) and Mail. The mail app is still shipping and still sold on its own. When you read a review or a headline user number, check whether it describes the suite or the mail app: the 40M+ daily active users figure on Superhuman's about page is suite-wide.

Do Dove and Superhuman track whether an email was read?

Both do. Superhuman's read statuses tell you whether a message was opened and on which device, which is the more detailed version. Dove has read receipts on its paid plan. Neither is a reason on its own to pick one over the other.

Does Dove support PGP or end-to-end encryption?

No. Dove encrypts your mail in transit and at rest and stores no unencrypted email content, but it does not offer PGP or end-to-end encryption. If encrypted mail between you and a correspondent is a hard requirement, look at Canary Mail instead; that is the product in this family built for it.

Is Dove a good alternative to Superhuman?

It depends on your bottleneck. Dove is a strong alternative if volume is what buries you, because it triages every message before you open the app, and if you need a provider or a flat price Superhuman does not offer. It is a weaker one if what you value in Superhuman is keyboard-driven speed or its team collaboration features, because Dove is not competing on either. For options built around those, see our roundup of Superhuman alternatives.