HEY vs Superhuman: Email Philosophy vs Speed (2026)
· Alexandre Sauvageau
HEY vs Superhuman compared: opinionated email redesign vs keyboard-driven speed, with the corrected May 2026 prices. Plus why Agentys — which drafts replies in your voice automatically — is the AI-first third option.
HEY (37signals) rebuilds email around a Screener, an Imbox, and calm-by-design defaults. Superhuman keeps email exactly as it is and makes you fly through it on the keyboard. They disagree on what is actually broken. This is a head-to-head on philosophy, speed, AI, and the May 2026 prices — with one honest note about where each one stops.
They Disagree About What Is Actually Broken
Most email comparisons line up two products that do nearly the same thing and argue about which does it 4% better. This is not that. HEY and Superhuman disagree on what is actually wrong with email in the first place, and almost everything else — the interface, the defaults, the price, the kind of person who loves it — follows from that one disagreement.
Ask HEY's makers what is wrong with email and they will point at the inbox itself. A single undifferentiated stream, newest on top, treating a signed contract and a 30%-off coupon as equal citizens. Their fix is architectural: screen every new sender at the door, give each class of mail its own room, and strip out the features (open tracking, read receipts) they believe poisoned email in the first place. Ask Superhuman's makers the same question and they shrug at the architecture. Email is fine, they say; you are just slow at it. Their fix is mechanical: remove every millisecond of friction, bind every action to a key, and let a practiced user clear a hundred messages before a normal person finishes their coffee.
That gap matters because it predicts who should buy which. If your inbox feels like a hostile place that needs new rules, HEY's redesign will feel like relief. If your inbox is fine but you are drowning in the sheer mechanics of triage, Superhuman's speed will feel like a superpower. Email already swallows close to a third of the average knowledge worker's week, and every interruption to deal with a message costs more time than the message itself. HEY attacks the interruptions; Superhuman attacks the minutes. Neither is wrong — they are aiming at different halves of the same problem.
HEY: The Screener, the Imbox, and Calm by Design
HEY's signature feature is the Screener, and it is the one thing no other product on this page replicates. The first time anyone emails your @hey.com address, their message does not reach you — it waits in the Screener with a single question: do you want to hear from this person, ever? Say no and you never see them again; nothing bounces, they simply vanish into a void with no notification. Say yes and they earn a permanent spot in your Imbox. It is an allow-list applied to your entire email life, and after a week or two the effect is striking: the cold pitches, the scraped-list newsletters, the one-off vendors all get filtered at the door instead of in your head.
Past the Screener, HEY splits approved mail into rooms. The Imbox ("important" + inbox) holds the people and threads that matter. The Feed is a scrollable river for newsletters you actually want — you read them like a timeline, not as 40 unread badges nagging you. The Paper Trail collects receipts, confirmations, and statements so they never clog the conversations that need a human reply. On top of that sit the workflow tools: Reply Later gathers everything needing a response into one focused queue, Set Aside is a private shelf for threads you are tracking, and "Focus & Reply" walks you through your Reply Later stack one message at a time with nothing else on screen.
The deeper point is what HEY refuses to build. There is no open tracking and no read receipts — 37signals considers surveillance pixels a betrayal of the person on the other end, and HEY actively strips tracking pixels out of mail you receive. The defaults are calm on purpose: no aggressive unread counts screaming for attention, no urgency theater. That stance is a feature for some and a dealbreaker for others. A salesperson who lives by knowing whether a prospect opened the proposal will find HEY actively hostile to the way they work. Someone who wants their inbox to stop feeling like a slot machine will find it a genuine relief.
Pricing is refreshingly flat. HEY for You is $99/year for an individual, which works out to about $8.25/month and includes your own @hey.com address. HEY for Families is $179/year for up to five people, and HEY for Work (their business tier, on your own domain) runs about $12/user/month. There is a 30-day free trial, no credit card required. One real limitation to weigh before you commit: HEY is its own walled email service. Adopting it means a new address and migrating contacts to it, and while you can forward an existing address in, you are buying into 37signals' ecosystem and its opinions wholesale. If those opinions match yours, the lock-in feels like alignment. If they do not, it feels like a cage.
Superhuman: Raw Speed, Polish, and (Now) AI Drafting
Superhuman keeps your real inbox — it sits on top of Gmail or Outlook — and rebuilds the experience of using it for speed. Every action has a keystroke. Archive, reply, snooze, jump to a label, summon any command: your hands never leave the keyboard, and the interface is engineered to respond in well under 100 milliseconds so it never feels like it is waiting on you. Split Inbox carves your mail into lanes (VIP, team, calendar, news) so you triage in batches instead of one undifferentiated pile. Snippets fire entire paragraphs from a few keystrokes. There is a genuine onboarding ritual — Superhuman trains you to use it — and once the shortcuts are in your fingers, clearing a backlog feels less like work and more like a rhythm game you are winning.
Where HEY removes tracking on principle, Superhuman leans into it. You can see when a recipient opened your message, on what device, and how many times — and follow-up reminders nudge you when a thread goes quiet. That visibility is exactly why Superhuman is beloved by executives, founders, and salespeople running high-stakes threads, and exactly why a privacy-minded HEY convert would never touch it. Same feature, opposite verdict, depending on which philosophy you signed up for.
The AI story changed in 2025. Superhuman was acquired by Grammarly — announced in July 2025 and closed that October, with founder Rahul Vohra staying on to lead the product (Wikipedia, *Superhuman (email client)*) — and the AI feature set deepened in the bundle that followed. Superhuman now offers Ask AI (query your inbox in plain language: "what did legal say about the MSA?") and, more importantly, Auto Drafts, which pre-writes replies in your tone so a response is waiting when you open a thread. This is the closest thing on this page to what an AI assistant actually does. The catch is which tier it lives in, and that brings us to price.
Read the plans carefully, because the marketing blurs it. Superhuman has no free tier for the email client. The Pro plan is $30/month, or $12/month billed annually — and Pro does not include the inbox AI most people are buying Superhuman for. Auto Drafts, Auto Archive, Auto Labels, and the rest of the automation live on the Business plan at $40/month, or $33/month billed annually. So the honest comparison is not "Superhuman costs $30"; it is "the Superhuman people actually want — the one that drafts for you — costs $40/month, or $33 annually." That is roughly four to five times HEY's effective monthly price, for a fundamentally different promise.
Agentys: Handles Email For You — No New Client Required
Disclosure: Agentys publishes this blog, so treat the next two paragraphs as the vendor's pitch and weigh them accordingly. HEY and Superhuman both still assume you are the one writing the replies — HEY just sorts who gets to reach you, and Superhuman just makes your typing faster. Agentys is built on a different bet: that the slowest part of email is not navigation or screening, it is composing the answer. So it does not replace your client. It connects to the Gmail or Outlook inbox you already have, reads the incoming pile automatically, ranks it by what needs you, and writes a complete first-draft reply for each message in your own voice. You open a stack of drafts to approve, edit, or send — not a stack of blank compose windows.
That model has obvious limits, and it is fair to name them next to HEY's and Superhuman's. Agentys is an automatic batch worker, not a real-time client — it will not give you Superhuman's sub-100ms keyboard flow, and there is nothing to navigate faster because there is no new interface at all. It does not screen senders the way HEY's Screener does, and it does not block tracking pixels. It runs on standard providers (Gmail, Outlook, Microsoft 365); because HEY is a closed system, pairing the two depends on forwarding rather than a native hook. What Agentys does instead is erase the writing step, at $16.99/month — below HEY's effective rate and well under the $40/month Superhuman tier that actually drafts. If your bottleneck is volume rather than speed or noise, that is the lever worth pulling; HEY and Superhuman are built for a different job — sender screening and raw keyboard speed — and many people run Agentys alongside one of them.
Do not pick between HEY and Superhuman on a feature checklist; pick on which sentence describes your inbox. If the words are "this place is chaos and I want it to feel calm and protected," HEY's Screener and Imbox are a coherent answer to exactly that, and $99/year is a fair price for that peace. If the words are "I know what to do, I just need to do it faster," Superhuman's keyboard flow is built for exactly that — just budget for the $40/month (or $33 annual) Business tier if you want the Auto Drafts AI, because the $30 Pro plan does not include it. The honest twist is that both still hand you the work of writing every reply. The only category here that removes that work outright is the AI-drafting model — Superhuman's Auto Drafts inside its premium client, or Agentys layered on the inbox you already use. Decide whether your real enemy is noise, speed, or the blank reply box, and the choice makes itself.