Superhuman Email Review: A 2024 Must-Have or Overpriced Hype?
The $30 per month email service wants to unlock productivity.
Superhuman has been raved about but also touted as an over-hyped email app, but what does it truly bring to the table for people who want to email?
Many people say this is the most expensive email app on the market at $30 per month when tools like Gmail offer a $0 per month running cost, but what features do they offer, and is the quality of life that much better?
DEAL: Get free months of Superhuman here >
Who is Superhuman best for?
Firstly, Superhuman isn’t a Gmail replacement for those doing email in and out of the day for casual use. Superhuman targets busy professionals and those who spend around 2–3 hours on email daily. Like a supercar, it might not be practical for dropping the kids off at nursery.
Best Features of Superhuman
There are three main focuses in this email app:
Speed & Power
This is one of the fastest email apps for loading emails, searching emails, and accessing mobile emails. Everything is just snappy. This is ideal when you rush or want emails to load and open faster.
Apparently, this is because the Superhuman team designed the experience to be like a game that focuses on game animation and speed, allowing the app to be fast and easy to use.
This impacts how fast you use email and keep it refreshed. The Superhuman team states that people reply 2x faster with it.
Keyboard First Thinking
Using a keyboard is easy for Superhuman thanks to the Command Bar, which allows users to quickly take action, whether snoozing or creating a calendar event. Everything is much faster if you learn and implement keyboard shortcuts.
Focus on AI
Superhuman is a technology startup based in San Francisco. Do you think they’d ignore the use of AI? Superhuman is investing heavily in what AI means for its email experience, and it has already started.
Superhuman now allows you to ask your search for information in your email based on a prompt like “When was the last influence deal that I made?” or “When is the next product team meeting?” that your emails have got inside.
Superhuman’s Smaller Features
There are a lot of more minor features that just make Superhuman more enjoyable to use, quality of life features, not vital, but useful:
- Follow-up email reminders
- Snippets for replying back faster, like templates
- See when an email has been opened and read
- Send later abilities (you get this in Gmail)
- Snooze emails
- Popup emails when replying
- Unsubscribe from emails
- Calendar for creating and managing events
Features I like in Superhuman
I have been using Superhuman for over three years now; here are my favorite things about it:
Email Triage
Before, I used an email app called Tempo 2, and I loved it. Superhuman was around, but I loved Tempo for the email triage abilities. Well, Tempo shut down, and I turned my eyes to Superhuman.
Superhuman worked almost as well as Tempo 2 for email triage, allowing me to conquer the inbox better by organizing them into the right places. Still, the benefit to Superhuman was that it was snappier and faster.
Mobile Apps
I hated email apps on mobile before. Much like calendar apps, sometimes, they try to do too much. Superhuman changed my thoughts on handling email on mobile. The speed of actions, the ability to do things with gestures, and the sync between devices were the best I’ve ever used.
Maybe I was weird, but the email desktop style has never been translated into mobile until now, and I feel brave enough to email in a cab without feeling underwhelmed by the email experience.
The Negatives of Superhuman
Price
Many people see the price as an obvious negative. It is a step more expensive than most available email apps. $30 per month is a lot to commit to an email app, just one app, so here are my criteria for whether this is worth it or not; you have to be:
- Using email for more than 2–3 hours a day
- Can correlate the output of handling more emails to your work — whether this career development, increase in opportunity & income.
No Domain
Tools like Hey Email give you a free domain. For the price, it would be nice to have a @ superhuman domain email. You can plugin Outlook and Google Workspace & Gmail with Superhuman, but bypassing the popular sites and tools would be excellent for teams.
Is Superhuman worth it?
If you use email more than 2–3 hours a day and find it valuable, whether for use or income, then Superhuman is worth considering.
If not, Superhuman isn’t worth it. Like all things, you might find the need for a Ferrari to drop the kids at school a bit much, whereas a nice SUV goes much further in terms of use. So make sure you match the tool to your needs for the situation.
I’ve been using Superhuman for ages now, and considering how much time I spend on email, it does make life so much easier. I get a lot more emails done than I did before.
What is Superhuman doing with AI?
Superhuman is aiming to be the leader in email AI.
So they’ve added some good features so far, like AI search, Ask AI, and new AI responder features that allow you better ways to write emails faster.
It also just launched several email collaboration features that allow teams to collaborate in real-time and leave notes for each other.
