Gmail is a great email platform for basic emailing: sending, receiving, and replying to emails is simple and fast.
But, Gmail doesn’t do much more than that. If you want to really be productive, you need to use other apps and tools to get things done in addition to Gmail for emailing.
Or, you can look for an alternative to the Gmail app for Windows or Mac that has more built-in features and functionalities.
When you use a more robust email app that has other productivity tools built in, you can hack your work day and minimize the amount of time you spend switching from app to app to do certain specific activities.
This article will go over some of the best Gmail app alternatives that you can use on any device.
5 Apps To Use Instead of Gmail for More than Just Emailing
1. Spike
Spike is the world’s first conversational email app that turns your email threads into chat-style conversations. By doing so, it eliminates repetitive clutter from threads and makes it much more natural and time efficient to reply to high-priority messages.
If you’re a Gmail user, syncing your Gmail account to Spike is fast and easy. You can even sync multiple accounts if you want to manage your personal and professional emails in one place, as well as sync multiple Gmail calendars in the app.
But the Spike app isn’t just for turning your emails into chat conversations and managing your Gmail calendars in one place.
Spike was designed to minimize contextual switching, or the amount of time you spend switching between different apps, tabs, and screens to get things done throughout the day.
As such, the app has tons of other built-in features to make you more productive, including video meetings, voice messages, collaborative notes, tasks and to-do lists, group chats, and more.
When you use Spike as an alternative to the Gmail app, you no longer need to use so many different apps for different activities.
With Spike, you can seamlessly switch from replying to emails, to holding video meetings, to creating and assigning tasks. Spike is the ultimate unified workspace for getting more done in less time.
2. Microsoft Outlook
If you’re someone who spends a lot of your day working in the Microsoft ecosystem, Outlook is probably a good alternative to Gmail for you.
Outlook integrates seamlessly with all of Microsoft’s other productivity apps and tools, including Office 365, OneDrive, Team, Skype, and others.
Though you still technically have to use different Microsoft apps for different activities, like holding video conferences, it’s easy to switch to a different Microsoft platform from within Outlook.
Also, since you use a single Microsoft account for everything, you can add things like your Microsoft Teams meetings to your calendar in Outlook. This makes it easier to stay organized and on top of everything on your schedule.
3. Zoho Mail
Zoho is an email client designed specifically for collaboration. It integrates closely with Microsoft Office and also comes with Zoho Docs, a native tool for storing, sharing, and collaborating on text documents, spreadsheets, and slideshow presentations.
Depending on the version of Zoho you choose, it can also come bundled with Zoho’s chat and web meeting platforms, so you and your team can communicate all within the Zoho ecosystem.
4. iCloud Mail
For the heavy apple users reading this, iCloud Mail is an alternative to Gmail available for iOS, macOS, and watchOS.
The cloud-based email client has relatively basic email functionality, but the smooth integration with the rest of Apple’s productivity apps can make it a good option if you use a lot of other Apple apps for getting work done.
For example, if all your important files are already stored in iCloud, it’s even easier to add them to emails when you use iCloud Mail.
If you already have an Apple ID, that’s all you need to get a free iCloud Mail account with 5GB of storage. Plus, if you use Gmail, you can set up email forwarding, so you get all your emails to iCloud Mail.
5. Edison Mail
Edison Mail is an email app for Android and iOS designed specifically to provide an extremely smooth mobile experience.
The Edison Mail app lets you link other email accounts, such as Gmail and Outlook email addresses, so you can manage all your existing personal and professional email accounts in one central place.
A notable extra feature of Edison Mail is the built-in virtual assistant. This handy tool can notify you about important events as they occur, especially in terms of travel plan changes. For example, it can tell you when flights change or what your destination’s weather is. The assistant can even ping you when you get packages delivered.
Note that Edison Mail does aggregate ecommerce information from your inbox to sell as consumer reports (which is how they keep the app free). So, if privacy is a main concern of yours, Edison Mail might not be the Gmail app alternative for you.
