HEY vs Agentys (2026)
· Alexandre Sauvageau
HEY vs Agentys compared in depth: inbox redesign + @hey.com migration vs AI drafting on your existing Gmail/Outlook. Honest 2026 breakdown of two philosophies for fixing email.
HEY by 37signals rebuilds the inbox from scratch — Screener, Imbox, Feed, Paper Trail, and a mandatory @hey.com address you must migrate to. Agentys layers automatic AI drafting onto your existing Gmail or Outlook without touching the container. HEY reorganizes the inbox; Agentys writes the replies.
HEY: What the Inbox Redesign Actually Gives You
The Screener is HEY's most original feature. Every first-time sender lands in a holding area — not your inbox — until you explicitly say yes or no. Yes, they reach your Imbox going forward. No, their emails disappear permanently without any acknowledgment. This is a categorical departure from how every other email client works: in Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail, any sender who knows your address can push a message directly into your attention. HEY breaks that assumption. For professionals who attract cold outreach — founders, executives, public-facing consultants — the Screener alone can remove 30–50% of inbox load without a single rule or filter.
The three-bucket structure that follows is equally deliberate. The Imbox (intentional inbox) holds correspondence you opted into. The Feed is a chronological stream for newsletters and digests — passive reading, no urgency implied. The Paper Trail collects receipts, confirmations, and shipping notices, things you might need to find but never need to act on. Together, these three areas keep different kinds of mail apart — the separation most inbox tools only approximate with labels, tabs, or folders. HEY builds it into the product, so the software keeps the boundaries for you instead of leaning on your daily willpower.
Privacy is a genuine differentiator. HEY blocks tracking pixels by default — the invisible 1x1 images that marketing tools embed in emails to record when, where, and on what device you opened a message. HEY identifies the sender's tracking service and shows you the blocked pixel; Gmail silently loads it. For professionals who receive a high volume of vendor and agency emails, this is not a trivial concern. Your reading behavior is commercially valuable data, and HEY is one of the few clients that refuses to transmit it.
The honest limitation of all this: HEY requires a full commitment. To use HEY for You ($99/year, confirmed on hey.com/pricing), you get a @hey.com address. That address is what your contacts see. If your professional identity is tied to a custom domain — firstname@yourcompany.com — you have two options: use HEY for Domains ($12/user/month), which supports custom domains but adds per-seat recurring cost, or set up email forwarding from your existing address, which introduces its own complications around replies and deliverability. There is no frictionless HEY experience that preserves your existing address and workflow. The migration is real, and it touches every contact who has your current address saved.
Agentys: No New Address, No Migration — Just Less Work
Agentys connects to your existing Gmail or Outlook account via OAuth. No new email address. No contacts to notify. No change to how people reach you. The product does one thing at scale: automatically, it reads your new messages, classifies them by urgency and topic, and produces a ready-to-send draft reply for each one — written in your voice, using the patterns it has learned from your sent history (it calibrates after roughly 30 sent emails). Your greetings, your level of formality per contact, your typical sign-off. What would have been 45 minutes of composition work is compressed into a 10-minute approval pass.
The volume question matters here. A HEY Imbox might contain 20–30 messages after the Screener does its work — which still requires 30–45 minutes of reading and writing. Agentys processes all of those plus the ones in your inbox that HEY would have categorized into Feed and Paper Trail. The platform is not competing on how it structures messages; it is competing on who does the labor of responding. For professionals whose bottleneck is not inbox noise but reply time — researchers, consultants, lawyers, account managers — the distinction matters considerably.
Two things worth setting expectations on, plainly. Agentys drafts in the background and leaves the send to you, so you stay in full control of timing — you approve each reply when you are ready, and urgent threads are still yours to act on the moment they land. And the voice model sharpens over the first week as it learns your patterns; drafts are useful from day one and get more precisely you the longer it runs. Both are simply how a review-and-approve drafting layer works — and either way, that is a reply written for you, which is something HEY never does, because HEY does not draft at all.
Pricing and the Real Cost of Migration
On list price, HEY for You at $99/year looks cheaper than Agentys at $16.99/month ($203.88/year). That comparison holds only if you are an individual willing to take a @hey.com address. For any professional with a custom domain — which describes most business users — HEY for Domains runs $12/user/month, or $144/year per seat. Agentys at $16.99/month Starter is $203.88/year; the Professional plan at $29.99/month ($24.99/month billed annually) is $359.88/year or $299.88/year. The plans are in the same neighborhood once custom domain support is included.
More important than the number is what each price buys. HEY's $99 purchases inbox organization, the Screener, the Feed/Paper Trail structure, HEY Calendar, spy-pixel blocking, 100GB storage, and HEY World (a personal publishing tool). It does not purchase any reduction in the time you spend composing replies — that work remains entirely yours. Agentys' $16.99/month purchases AI classification, automatic draft generation, and voice-learning. It does not purchase inbox structural redesign, tracking pixel blocking, or a calendar. The two tools are not interchangeable; they solve adjacent but distinct problems.
The migration cost for HEY should be factored in honestly. Switching your primary email address is not a one-afternoon project if you have years of professional contacts who know your current address. You will need to update contacts in your CRM, notify clients and vendors, and maintain dual-address management for months while the transition happens. Some organizations' IT policies restrict the use of external email addresses entirely, which makes HEY for You non-starter in enterprise contexts. Agentys requires zero migration — the setup is OAuth authorization and a first-run analysis of your sent history, roughly 15 minutes of one-time work.