Email is a big part of our work day. We send and read lots of emails. Sometimes we get frustrated by them. New tools often say they'll cut down our emails, but they usually don't help much.
We probably won't stop using email completely. But we can make dealing with email easier. That's what email management software does.
These tools help teams sort and answer emails faster. They can change a messy inbox into a neat system for handling customer messages and team talks.
What is email management software?
Email management software is a tool that helps you manage, sort, organize, and send email. Generally speaking, email management tools tends to focus on a few different areas:
Received email — Tools in this category are mainly focused on managing incoming emails from your audience, be they customers, clients, students, patients, sales leads, or employees from other departments. These tools are mostly focused on one-to-one interactions.
Bulk email — Tools in this category are mainly focused on sending emails. These tools are used for one-to-many communication. You also have expanded capabilities to see things like open rates, click-through rates, and other metrics that a tool focused on received email wouldn’t include.
Personal email — Tools in this category are mainly focused on managing a personal email inbox. They generally help automate sorting and sending and can even unsubscribe you from certain emails to make managing your own inbox less of a hassle.
Rarely, if ever, do tools cover multiple use cases. They’re too disparate and generally lack any amount of crossover. However, they may be used in conjunction with one another.
The 14 best email management software
Since email management software covers a few different use cases, we’ve put together a diverse list of tools that cover each of them.
Help Scout
SaneBox
Gmail
Brevo
Front
Klaviyo
Microsoft Outlook
Missive
Hiver
Moosend
Emailigistics
Zendesk
Spark
Omnisend
1. Help Scout
Best email management software for small and mid-sized organizations.
Help Scout is email management software built specifically to help teams expertly manage their email communication. With Help Scout, you get access to powerful collaboration tools like private notes to help keep everyone informed and collision detection to eliminate duplicate work.
Productivity tools like workflows let you automatically assign conversations to specific employees or custom folders based on criteria you set. AI features like AI assist and AI summarize help your team get caught up on cases and respond to them faster. And saved replies make responding to routine requests a breeze.
Finally, access to customer profiles helps you stay in the loop. You’re able to see past conversations and other basic information to help interactions go smoothly and limit hassle for both the sender and your team alike.
Best of all, email management software is just one of the entire suite of tools you get access to when signing up for Help Scout. A couple other notable tools are Docs, which allows you to build out a knowledge base, and Beacon, which lets you provide live chat and in-app messaging.
Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $22/user per month.
2. SaneBox
Best personal email management software.
Though lots of email management software focuses on business needs, there are also tools to help manage personal inboxes. One of the best we’ve found is SaneBox. Their powerful AI learns your different email habits and then automatically sorts emails right when they hit your inbox.
High-priority messages are shown in your main inbox, while lower priority ones are moved to a separate folder.
They also offer features like SaneNoReplies, which shows any message you’ve sent that’s yet to get a response, and Do Not Disturb, which stops any new incoming emails from showing to help keep your focus on the task at hand.
Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $7 per month.
3. Gmail
Best email management software for those who prefer the Google ecosystem.
Gmail is arguably the most popular email client on the market, and that’s for a good reason. It has a customizable interface, an easy to use editor for composing emails, labels that can help you organize and filter your messages, and a powerful search feature that makes locating rogue emails a snap.
Those features, however, are just the beginning. Gmail lets you schedule messages to be sent in the future, snooze messages you’re not ready to handle, and create templates for frequently sent emails. You can even send something in confidential mode to add an extra layer of security for sensitive messages. Those who subscribe to Google Workspace — Google’s business offering — can create beautiful emails through the use of pre-made templates and use multi-send mode to personalize outgoing communications.
Another big plus for Gmail is that it’s part of the Google ecosystem. This means that when you sign up for Gmail, you also have access to Docs, Sheets, Slides, Calendar, Drive, and the rest of Google’s suite of productivity software. This makes it easy to share documents and collaborate with other people.
While good for individual email, Gmail does fall short when it comes to team email. Though there are ways to set up a shared email solution in Gmail, other options on this list do a better job.
Price: Free for individual use. Google Workspace plans start at $6/user per month; free trial available.
4. Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)
Best email management software for one-to-many communication.
Sometimes you need to communicate with a lot of people at once. Maybe you’re announcing a new service or you have a company or product update. Since you can only Bcc so many people from your Gmail account — around 500 if you were wondering — you’ll need a specialized tool.
One of the best is Brevo. Their marketing tool lets you build beautiful emails using their easy-to-use editor and also includes top-notch automation to make sure messages are sent right when you want. You’re also able to do A/B tests and track metrics like open rate, click-through rate, and even see a heat map for your emails.
Brevo can also help you use SMS, WhatsApp messaging, Facebook ads, and push notifications to reach your customers using their preferred communication channels. Separate from the marketing platform, Brevo also has live chat, CRM, and transactional email products. All of the company’s offerings include a free plan, allowing your team to give them a try before making a monetary commitment.
Price: Free plan available. Paid marketing platform plans start at $25 per month.
5. Front
Best email management software for managing team and personal emails together.
Email management software is often used to manage a group email address (e.g., support@companyname.com). However, if your team wants to use both personal and shared email addresses to interact with your audience, Front could be a great option.
Front offers some collaborative features like internal comments, shared drafts, and message templates, and they also have more advanced features like analytics and automation on their higher-cost plans. You can even use the software’s personal rules feature to automate actions in your personal inbox.
While Front is most often thought of as a shared email platform, it is also capable of managing additional channels from its shared workspace. The service offers native live chat as well as integrations with other tools to allow you to handle Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, voice, and SMS messaging.
Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $19/seat per month (two seat minimum).
6. Microsoft Outlook
Best email management software for those who prefer the Microsoft ecosystem.
Outlook is Microsoft’s email offering, and its functionality is almost identical to Gmail’s. It has a customizable workspace, clean user interface for easy message composition, the ability to snooze messages and schedule replies, categories and rules to keep you organized, and decent search functionality.Â
Also similar to Gmail, Outlook users have access to its parent company’s suite of productivity applications — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive, OneNote, Teams, Skype, and calendar and to-do list tools. Both platforms have free individual plans and paid business plans, though Microsoft also has paid individual tiers. For $1.99 per month, Outlook users can remove ads from their inbox and get extra OneDrive storage; for $6.99 per month, users get premium features for the rest of the Microsoft 365 suite.
Price: Free plan available for individual use. Paid individual plans start at $1.99 per month. Business plans start at $6/user per month; free trial available.
7. Klaviyo
Best email management tool for marketing teams requiring advanced segmentation.
Klaviyo is a marketing platform with a focus on automation. It can help you create campaigns using channels like SMS, push notifications, and email. In addition to these features, the company also offers customer data platform (CDP) and review management plans.
When it comes to email, Klaviyo customers can create professional emails that convert using a library of templates. Customize one of these templates or use HTML/CSS to create your own. Klaviyo offers A/B testing and reporting features so that you can try out different elements and closely monitor performance.
The platform also has powerful segmentation, automation, and AI functionality, helping ensure that you’re contacting the right people at the right time with the right content.
Part of what makes Klaviyo’s segmentation so powerful is its ability to integrate with applications across your tech stack. For instance, Help Scout customers can connect their account to Klaviyo and use Help Scout data to help with targeted messaging.
Price: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $45 per month.
8. Missive
Best free email management software for team collaboration.
Missive is a shared inbox tool that can be a great choice for companies that want to manage email collaboratively. Assign conversations to specific employees or teams, label emails for better organization, and create rules to automate tasks and improve your workflow.
The platform has a lot of tools that can help foster collaboration, such as canned replies, collaborative drafts, internal comments, and workload balancing to ensure that work is being distributed equally across your team. Missive also offers internal chat rooms where your team can discuss ideas as a team or even one-on-one.
For those who need to manage additional channels beyond email, Missive offers integrations with Facebook Messenger and Instagram. You can also handle live chat, SMS, and WhatsApp messaging through your Missive workspace, though some channels may require the use of a third-party application.
Price: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $14/user per month.
9. Hiver
Best team email management software for Gmail users.
Many of the tools on this list are standalone offerings, but Hiver is a little different. Basically, it acts as an extension to your existing Gmail account. You’re able to assign emails to specific people, store shared email templates, add internal notes, set email statuses, and receive collision alerts — all things you can’t do from a standard Gmail account.
You also can’t manage additional channels using traditional Gmail, but Hiver can handle live chat, WhatsApp messaging, and even voice for those with an Aircall subscription. For teams interested in self-service support, Hiver offers a knowledge base builder, which can help reduce the burden on your support team and improve your customer experience.
The software also offers task automation, an AI bot, analytics, and customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey features, but they are only offered on higher-cost plans.
Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $15/user per month.
10. Moosend
Best email management software for email marketing.
Moosend is another tool meant for one-to-many communication. They offer features like a no-code editor to easily create beautiful emails and newsletters. You’re also able to segment audiences, A/B test, and track metrics like opens, clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes.
Best of all, you’re able to try all of their features out for 30 days, no strings attached. While free trials are common with SaaS software platforms, most only offer a week or two. Having a full month to evaluate a service can be really helpful when trying to figure out if a tool is going to meet your needs.
Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $9 per month.
11. Emailigistics
Best team email management software for Outlook users.
Emailigistics is similar to Hiver, but instead of working with Gmail, it’s an overlay for Outlook. It provides similar functionality and light collaboration features such as internal notes and assigning capabilities
You’re also able to do some automations like routing emails to specific people based on certain conditions to improve productivity and response times. You can turn off agent availability to prevent messages from going unanswered when agents are away with the user schedules feature, and you can even set up recurring schedules to set availability automatically.Â
Rounding things out, they offer access to message templates, analytics to see how your team is performing, conversation histories to better understand a sender’s previous contacts, and the ability to categorize emails for better organization.Â
For teams that are fond of the Microsoft platform but need more functionality than Outlook can provide, Emailigistics can be a good solution. However, prospective customers should be aware that some features are only available as part of the software’s higher-cost plan.
Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $9/user per month.
12. Zendesk
Best email management software for enterprise customer service teams.
If you’re looking to manage customer-facing email for an enterprise organization, you should check out Zendesk. It’s an omnichannel option, so in addition to email, Zendesk can help you manage other channels like live chat, voice, social, and messaging from a single platform. With Zendesk you can also create a help center or community forums to promote self-service support.
Email-wise, Zendesk is great for collaborative email management. There are tags, custom fields, and custom views to help with ticket organization and macros to speed up your response time to frequently asked questions. The software has collision detection so you can see if someone else is viewing a ticket, and you have the ability to assign individual tickets to specific agents. There are also a lot of ways to automate repetitive work through triggers, automations, and AI features.
Due to its seemingly endless amount of features, Zendesk could be a great choice for a larger team. However, if you’re just starting out, you should remember that sometimes less is more. It’s great to have a lot of features, but if you don’t use them, they’re too complicated to set up, or you don’t have the resources to implement the software to meet your needs, then it might be better to take a look at one of the other options on the list.Â
Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $19/agent per month.
13. Spark
Best personal email management software with AI functionality.
Spark is an email management platform that aims to make your inbox less noisy and more organized. It can do the same things a normal email client can do, like sync your inbox across devices, let you snooze an incoming message, or schedule an email to send at a later time. But it also has more advanced features like AI for proofreading and rephrasing your replies. The AI can even draft an outgoing email or reply, helping you reduce the amount of time spent writing messages.
The platform’s main selling point is its emphasis on prioritization. The home screen provides a focused view of the emails that you’ve received while you were away and displays only the most important messages on the screen. Within the inbox, the platform has features for grouping messages by sender and automatically filtering notifications and newsletters.
Beyond individual email, Spark also has a plan for teams. These plans allow you to have shared inboxes, share messages with other collaborators, comment on emails to provide context, work on drafts with other colleagues, and create shared templates to help keep messaging consistent. With team plans offering more functionality than Gmail but at a comparable cost, it could be a good option.Â
Price: Free trial and plan available. Paid plans start at $4.99 per month.
14. Omnisend
Best email management software for ecommerce marketing campaigns.
Omnisend is an email marketing, SMS, and marketing automation platform designed for ecommerce companies. It boasts a drag and drop email builder that comes preloaded with tons of ready-made templates. Once you upload your brand assets, the system remembers them, automatically customizing each email you create.
For those interested in incorporating SMS into their strategy, Omnisend makes it easy to create and launch one-off text campaigns or to incorporate SMS messages into automatic workflows for things like abandoned carts and shipping notifications. In addition to SMS messaging, you can also integrate landing pages as well as targeted push notifications, pop-ups, and teasers into your strategy.
Enjoy pre-built automation flows for things like welcome campaigns and order confirmations, and for those who prefer to create their own automations, the platform offers an easy to use automation editor. Lastly, Omnisend comes with the reporting, segmenting, and A/B testing tools necessary to measure results and make more informed decisions.
Pricing is based on volume, but if Omnisend sounds like what you’re looking for, there is a free plan to get you started.
Price: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $16 per month.
The benefits of using an email management solution
As you can probably tell from reading through the features included in the software from our list, email management software has a lot of advantages over traditional email services.Â
Making the switch to a more robust solution can lead to:
Better organization. Tags, filters, folders, and conversation assignments keep customer communications accessible, and using a dedicated tool for email marketing keeps all of your email campaigns in one place.
Improved productivity. Collaborative tools help your team work together, avoiding work duplication or miscommunications. Automations and AI-powered features also reduce the amount of time and effort it takes to engage with your customers and clients.
Increased visibility. Standard email software creates bottlenecks due to email being restricted to an individual team member’s inbox. Email management tools ensure that everyone within your team or organization can see the status of tasks and customer communications anywhere, anytime.
Secure communication. Most email clients don’t offer the option to share access to an email account, or if they do support the functionality, it’s a clunky user interface. This leads to a huge safety risk: password sharing. Email management platforms provide each user with their own login credentials, keeping both your customer and company data secure from bad actors.
An elevated user experience (UX). There is nothing worse for a customer than receiving conflicting messages from a company and there is nothing worse for a company than flubbing a marketing announcement or an email response to a support request due to a siloed workflow. Email management software’s features provide a better experience for both customers and employees.
Quantified efforts. While there are many settings where a gut feeling is enough, business isn’t one of them. Decisions are built on data, and email clients don’t come with reporting dashboards. Email management solutions do, making it easy to show your work.
Must-have features to look for in email management software
While the types of features you need will vary depending on your specific use case, the following features are good ones to look for, especially for those subscribing to an email management system for team use.
Customization options
Whether you’re sending out an abandoned cart email or a message to let a customer know that a software bug has been resolved, you want customers and clients to open an email and immediately recognize it as a message from your brand. Look for a solution that provides the ability to customize your email messages.
For some use cases, this may be as simple as making sure that the software you choose has options for standardizing signature lines. For more complex scenarios, you may be looking for the ability to create email templates that are in line with your brand guidelines.
Collaboration tools
While this may not be important if you’re only looking for a personal email solution, for teams, collaboration tools are one of the most important features included in email management software. For use cases like customer support, you’ll want collision detection to ensure that your team can always see who is working on a conversation. Saved replies are also a great tool to have in support as they let you send out a pre-written response in just a couple of clicks, saving time and keeping the team on the same page.
For email marketing tools, you may want to look for software that has the ability to assign tasks to teammates to keep them from falling through the cracks or platforms that allow users to work together on emails in real time.
Customer profiles
For businesses, email management software empowers team members with data that paints a vivid picture of the person who is sending or receiving an email and their unique relationship with your business.Â
With this important information, your support team can help people more effectively and efficiently without requiring much effort on the part of the sender. Your sales team also has a better shot at closing deals, and your marketing team will be able to target their messaging to prospective buyers with greater precision.
Spam protection
While everyone may be familiar with annoying spam messages, spam can be more than annoying; spam can be dangerous. Look for email management software that provides filters and tools that are capable of spotting malicious emails and keeping them out of your inbox.
For email marketing tools, you may also want to look into deliverability tools that help prevent your messages from winding up in the dreaded spam folder.
Integrations
When your email management software can integrate with the apps your team and organization use, it can break down silos and facilitate collaboration. Just as people need to talk to each other for a company to work, these different tools need to connect for a seamless workflow.
Automated workflows
Workflows are a form of supercharged filters or rules that automate processes to organize tasks and bring efficiency to your inbox. Instead of manually tagging emails or assigning conversations to different people on your team, you can automate those actions based on specific conditions.
Artificial intelligence (AI) tools
Many email management platforms are starting to integrate AI features into their products. While the technology isn't quite ready to handle all of your correspondence unattended, it can help with things like spelling and grammar, translating messages, or even drafting a preliminary response.
Reporting
Trying to complete any analysis within a shared Gmail or Outlook mailbox takes more time than it’s worth. The right email management software can do the work for you, giving you data that adds up to powerful business insights relevant to every aspect of your company.
Finding the right email management tool for you
For most of us, email is inevitable, but it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Whether you’re responding to customer emails, sending out a mass message about a new feature, or just cleaning up your own inbox, email management software can help make your life easier and your communication more successful.