When comparing Airmail vs Missive, the Slant community recommends Airmail for most people. In the question“What are the best Gmail clients for iOS?” Airmail is ranked 8th while Missive is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose Airmail is:
Airmail has a very clean and modern interface. On the left side of the screen are the folders (inbox, starred, draft, sent, snooze, trash) and on the right side the email threads for the folder currently being viewed.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Clean interface
Airmail has a very clean and modern interface. On the left side of the screen are the folders (inbox, starred, draft, sent, snooze, trash) and on the right side the email threads for the folder currently being viewed.
Pro Automatically syncs settings between devices
If you are using Airmail in different devices (either MacOS or iOS), you can automatically sync settings through iCloud.
Pro Fast and easy setup process
Even though there's a huge amount of settings available, it's quite easy to get used to each of them and the setup process is very fast and easy.
Pro Consistent interface between devices
Airmail is available for both iOS and Mac, for people who use Apple's mobile devices. And the interface between both platforms is quite consistent, making it easy to seamlessly jump between one and another.
Pro Integrates with multiple third-party services
Airmail can integrate with multiple Cloud services for syncing, creating backups, adding tasks and more. Some of these services include Dropbox, Box, Fantastical, 2DO, Todoist, Wunderlist etc.
Pro Support for VIP folders
VIP folders are for particular senders which you always want to read even when you are ignoring email. The way it works is that you add different senders as VIPs and emails from those senders will always be surfaced on top of everything else.
Pro Extremely customizable
Instead of forcing the user to work with their email the way Airmail developers would want, it allows the user to customize and make the email client work the way they want because of the sheer flexibility of the application.
There's a lot of settings available in Airmail with which you can customize almost every aspect and functionality of the app. In fact, it's very easy to get lost in them and spend a lot of time tweaking and customizing everything to your liking.
Pro Supports Gmail shortcuts
Pro Multiple ways of sorting emails
There are multiple ways to sort emails with Airmail. You can sort by unread, starred, attachments, conversations, dates, and many more criteria. You can even combine different criteria together.
Using these filters makes it extremely easy to quickly find any email you are looking for.
Pro Always keep the inbox clean
Airmail allows users to snooze an email until a defined moment (a few hours later, tomorrow, next weekend, next week, etc.), allowing you to process every email immediately and to always keep the inbox clean.
Pro Supports trackpad gestures
Airmail is able to use trackpad gestures for achieving and deleting mail items.
Pro Live collaborative draft editor
In Missive you can live edit an email draft with your teammates, the draft composer acts exactly like a Google doc. Each team member has a different color cursor.
Pro Is a fully functional email client
The email section allows for consuming all of your email accounts in it, utilizing shared addresses (help@acme.com), personal work inbox (philippe@acme.com) and personal inbox (phil@gmail.com).
It’s important because the collaborative part of Missive becomes useful when users consume all of their emails within the app. You not only want to collaborate around emails sent to your company help@address, but also around the really important emails you most likely receive at your personal company address, like that really important email you received from a potential high profile partner.
Pro Team chat
Missive is also a team chat app. When using Missive you can ditch your email client, chat app and help desk.
Pro Unified inbox
Merge all email accounts in one unified inbox.
Pro Tasks
You can create multiple tasks per conversation all assignable to a single or a group of persons.
Pro It works
Nicely written software. Always works as you'd expect, beautifully designed, a classy piece of software.
Pro Multi-organizations
Supports multiple organizations with one user login.
Pro Offers read receipt
Know exactly if and when the recipients read your important email.
Pro Has emojis
Pro Gmail shortcuts
Supports Gmail shortcuts.
Cons
Con Unreliable
There are many issues/bugs with different accounts, including Gmail and iCloud.
Con Serious sync problems
On some IMAP accounts, there are a number of serious sync problems, which otherwise work fine with Apple Mail.
Con Search is buggy and not very powerful
Con Not free
Paid version only.
Con iOS app requires a subscription to enable incoming mail notifications
The iOS app now requires a subscription to enable incoming mail notifications. This makes the iOS app very unattractive and there's little point installing the Mac desktop client for users who want to sync accounts between devices.
Con Copying/moving mails unreliable
Doesn't work most of the time even though the operation is reported as successful. Even has lost emails when moving. Support was not too much use either.
Con Rather expensive
Con Inability to turn off auto-creation of labels
Version 3 does not allow it while version 2 did.
Con UI is a little busy
Con Has the "slow typing" bug
When composing an email, Airmail can respond very slowly to keystrokes. Customer service refuses to acknowledge this problem, responding that it's "not real" - which is a very odd response, to simply refuse to acknowledge the customer's experience.
Con No option to add words to spellcheck dictionary on Windows
Incredibly frustrating to see the name of your company constantly underlined in red, with no way to fix it.