Fyxer is the AI email assistant most people have heard of. It sits on top of Gmail or Outlook, files your mail into folders like To Respond and FYI, drafts replies in your tone and writes notes from your meetings. For a lot of people it is the right answer.

People go looking for an alternative for a handful of specific reasons, and the right alternative depends on which one is yours. So instead of a ranked list, here are the six tools we would put in front of you, grouped by the problem you are trying to solve. We build one of them, LetterLeaf, and we say so where it comes up.

The short version

• Your mail is not on Gmail or Outlook: LetterLeaf, SaneBox

• A shared support@ or sales@ inbox: LetterLeaf, Missive

• Pure volume, you just want less in the inbox: SaneBox

• You want a faster email client, not an assistant: Superhuman, Shortwave

• You want the assistant to do things, not just draft: Lindy

• You need to know where your email is processed: LetterLeaf

1. LetterLeaf

Best for: IMAP mailboxes, shared inboxes for small teams, and anyone who needs to know where their mail is processed.

LetterLeaf is its own inbox app rather than a layer inside Gmail. Connect Gmail, Outlook, Microsoft 365 shared mailboxes and any IMAP account, and every message is tagged with a category from a template for your business, scored Happy, Neutral or Negative, and placed in Smart Views such as Needs a reply and Requires attention. Focus Mode walks you through that queue one email at a time until it is empty. Replies are drafted in a voice learned from your own sent mail, with facts pulled from Smart Docs, the files, snippets and website pages you give it, and an Email Agent beside the draft rewrites it on request: shorter, more formal, a polite decline. On Business, a workflow builder triggers on new mail, sentiment or an SLA and can forward, reply, send or re-categorise on its own.

What it does that Fyxer does not: it works over IMAP (Fastmail, Zoho, your own domain), it has its own triage-first inbox instead of folders inside Gmail, it scores sentiment on every email, it automates with workflows and SLAs, and it runs its AI processing inside Microsoft Azure’s EU data zone. It is built and operated from Sweden.

What it lacks compared with Fyxer: no meeting notes and no HubSpot integration.

Price: $25, $40 or $55 per month on annual billing ($29, $49, $69 monthly). Seven-day free trial with 100 AI credits, no card.

2. Fyxer

Best for: one busy Gmail or Outlook inbox plus a calendar full of meetings.

Since it is the benchmark, it belongs on the list. Fyxer’s strengths are a very quick setup, sensible default folders, drafts that pick up your tone within a few days, and meeting notes that land in your inbox after each call. If you live in one account and take a lot of meetings, it is hard to beat.

Where it falls short: Gmail and Outlook only, no sentiment scoring, and shared inboxes are really “multiple inboxes” on the Professional plan rather than a team workflow.

Price: $30 per user monthly for Starter, $50 for Professional, 25 percent less on annual billing. Seven-day trial.

3. SaneBox

Best for: volume. You do not want drafts, you want 60 percent of your mail out of the way.

SaneBox does not write anything. It watches what you open and reply to, then moves the rest into SaneLater and similar folders. It works with any IMAP provider, which makes it the other realistic choice for Fastmail, iCloud and custom-domain users. If your bottleneck is reading rather than writing, it can be the whole solution.

Price: from $7 per month. Fourteen-day trial.

4. Superhuman

Best for: people who want a faster client and are happy to switch apps.

Superhuman replaces your email client rather than sitting on top of it. It is keyboard-driven, very fast, and its AI features (summaries, drafts, auto-labels) are built into that client. The trade-off is that it is Gmail and Outlook only, and you have to move your daily habit into a new app.

Price: about $30 per user per month.

5. Shortwave

Best for: Gmail users who want AI search and thread summaries in a new client.

Built by former Google Inbox engineers, Shortwave is a Gmail-only client with excellent AI search, bundling of similar mail, and a capable assistant for summaries and drafts. If you are on Google Workspace and want something more modern than Gmail itself, it is worth a week’s trial.

Price: free tier, paid plans from around $9 per month.

6. Missive

Best for: teams who want a full shared inbox with chat, assignments and SMS or WhatsApp channels, and are ready for a helpdesk-shaped tool.

Missive is a team inbox first and an AI assistant second. It supports Gmail, Outlook, IMAP and several messaging channels, and the AI can summarise, categorise and draft. It is more product than a two-person shop usually needs, but for a support team of ten it is a serious option.

Price: from about $14 per user per month.

How to choose in ten minutes

1. Write down where your mail actually lives. If any of it is on a non-Google, non-Microsoft host, half the list drops out.

2. Decide whether the pain is reading or writing. Reading pain points to SaneBox or good sorting. Writing pain points to a drafting tool.

3. Count the people who touch the inbox. One person: Fyxer, Superhuman or Shortwave. Two to fifteen on a shared address: LetterLeaf or Missive.

4. Ask where the AI runs. If you are in Europe and your customers’ mail is in that inbox, this is not a small question.

5. Take the trial with real mail for five working days. Every tool on this list has one.

Prices and features checked on 28 September 2026. If we got something wrong about a competitor, tell us and we will fix it.