Shortwave and Nolario are both AI-first inboxes, and they disagree about what the AI should be for. Shortwave points it at understanding: summarize this thread, search my mail like a conversation, draft a reply. Nolario points it at deciding: of everything that arrived across every channel today, what needs you, in what order. Here is an honest comparison of where each one earns its money.
At a glance
| Nolario | Shortwave | |
|---|---|---|
| Gmail | ||
| Outlook | ||
| Slack and Teams in the same feed | ||
| AI importance scoring per message | Bundles | |
| Conversational search over your mail | ||
| AI drafts in your voice | ||
| Price | €29/mo (waitlist) | ~$30/user/mo |
Where Shortwave wins
Ask Shortwave what a customer said about pricing in March and it answers, from your own mail, in a sentence. That conversational search is the best implementation of the idea in any email product, and thread summaries make a forty-message escalation readable in ten seconds. Bundling groups similar mail so you clear a whole category at once. If your professional life genuinely lives in one Gmail account, this is an excellent place to spend $30 a month.
Pros
- Conversational AI search over your entire mail history
- Excellent thread summaries and bundling
- Fast, modern client with strong keyboard support
Cons
- Gmail-only, which no roadmap item is going to change soon
- Nothing outside email: Slack and Teams are invisible to it
- AI is metered in daily requests on the lower tiers
Where Nolario wins
Nolario starts from the fact that the message that decides your week is as likely to be a Slack mention as an email. It scores every item from Gmail, Outlook, Slack, Teams and calendar on one importance scale, using behavioural signals rather than keywords: who addressed you directly, who you actually reply to, what you flagged, whether the sender marked it urgent and whether that has ever meant anything. Then it drafts the reply in your voice, on whichever channel it arrived.
Pros
- One ranked feed across email, chat and calendar
- Works with Outlook as well as Gmail
- Drafts in a voice learned from what you have actually sent
- Starts at €29/mo
Cons
- No conversational search over your mail history
- Its own workspace, so you are changing where you read
- Access is by waitlist today
How to choose in one question
Think about the last three things that genuinely needed you urgently. If all three arrived in Gmail, buy Shortwave and enjoy it. If one of them was a Slack message you saw two hours late, no amount of AI inside a mailbox will help, because the problem was never in the mailbox.
The bottom line
Shortwave is the better product if your world is one Gmail account and you want AI that understands it. Nolario is the better fit if your world is four channels and you want AI that tells you which of them needs you right now.
