Shortwave vs Usenti: Which AI Email Assistant Should You Use?

Key facts

Shortwave

An AI-native email client built on top of Gmail. Known for natural-language search, AI-powered filters, and tone-matched drafting inside a fast, keyboard-driven inbox.

Usenti

An AI assistant for work email, meetings, calendars and to-dos, led by an assistant called Donna. Connects Gmail, Outlook, Zoho Mail, AWS WorkMail and any IMAP inbox.

Pricing

Shortwave: Business $30, Premier $45, Max $120 per seat/month, no Free tier listed (as of November 2026). Usenti: 14-day trial for a one-time $1, then $45 per user/month.

Outlook / Microsoft 365

Shortwave: not supported, Gmail only. Usenti: supported natively, alongside Zoho Mail, AWS WorkMail and any IMAP inbox.

What Shortwave is, and what it does well

Shortwave is an email client built from scratch on top of Gmail, from a team with roots in Inbox by Gmail, Google's own experimental email project. Rather than bolting AI onto a normal inbox, Shortwave rebuilt the inbox itself around search and conversation: you can ask it to find "invoices from last quarter I haven't paid" or "anything from Sarah about the contract" in plain English, and it searches across your entire mail history, not just subject lines.

That foundation earns Shortwave real credit:

• Natural-language search. Plain-English queries across your whole Gmail history, not keyword matching.
• AI-powered filters. Automatic bundles that group similar mail (receipts, newsletters, calendar invites) so your main view stays short.
• Fast, keyboard-driven UI. Shortwave is built for speed, in the tradition of the original Inbox by Gmail interface.
• AI drafting and summaries. Thread summaries and draft replies that work directly against your real Gmail data, with a usable Free-trial-to-paid path.

For a Gmail-only household or a small, all-Gmail team that wants the fastest, smartest Gmail client available, that is a genuinely strong package. The gaps show up once your team isn't all on Gmail, or once email is only part of what you need an assistant to do.

Where Shortwave is limited

Three limits matter most if you are comparing Shortwave against a broader assistant like Usenti:

• Gmail only. Shortwave does not support Microsoft 365, Exchange, or generic IMAP accounts. A team split between Gmail and Outlook cannot standardize on it; everyone has to be on Gmail or Google Workspace.
• No Free tier, as of November 2026. Shortwave's own pricing page now lists three paid, per-seat plans, Business at $30, Premier at $45, and Max at $120 a month, each gated behind a 14-day trial. That's a step up from the Free and $18 Pro tiers it advertised earlier in 2026, before a June 30 price change moved it to monthly-only billing.
• No meeting notetaker, no unified calendar, no daily planner. Shortwave is an email client. It does not join or summarize Google Meet, Zoom or Teams calls, and it has nothing that unifies your calendar across providers or turns your inbox and schedule into a daily plan.

Privacy is also a thinner story than on Usenti's side. Shortwave's privacy policy does not state whether your email content is used to train AI models, in either direction, and it specifies that data is transferred to and stored on servers in the United States, with no GDPR section. Its paid plans do list "CASA Tier 2 compliance," and Shortwave says its systems have been assessed by a Google-designated third-party security auditor, but neither a SOC 2 nor an ISO 27001 certification is mentioned.

Where Usenti differs

Usenti doesn't try to be the fastest way to search one Gmail account; it tries to be the assistant for the whole working day: the inbox, the meetings, the calendar and the to-dos, across whichever providers your team actually uses.

1. Works with the inbox you already have

Connect Gmail, Outlook / Microsoft 365, Zoho Mail, AWS WorkMail, or any IMAP / SMTP inbox, plus Slack, as many accounts as you need. That solves the exact gap Shortwave leaves open: a team doesn't have to be entirely on Gmail to share one AI assistant.

2. Meetings, calendar and a daily brief, not just email

An AI notetaker joins Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and Zoom calls and returns a summary with decisions and action items. A unified calendar brings Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar, Apple/CalDAV and iCal subscriptions into one view, with scheduling and video-call links built in. Each morning, Donna, Usenti's AI assistant, turns the sorted inbox, the day's meetings and the calendar into a plan: what needs a reply, what to prep for, and what to prioritize.

3. Tone that adapts to the person you're writing to

Usenti drafts replies in your voice and adapts the tone to the relationship, so a note to a long-time client and a note to a cold prospect don't come out sounding identical, and drafts in the same language the original email arrived in.

4. Built for a team, not one Gmail seat

Usenti bills per user at a flat $45/month after a $1, 14-day trial, with shared boards and email outreach campaigns for teams that work together, not just one inbox at a time.

5. What Usenti doesn't claim

To be equally plain in the other direction: Usenti does not yet offer Shortwave's kind of natural-language search across years of mail history, and it does not hold a SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification yet, only AES-256 encryption, row-level data isolation, and controls aligned to those standards. It never uses customer content to train, tune or evaluate AI models, and its database sits in the EU region under Danish jurisdiction.

Shortwave vs Usenti, at a glance

Rows reflect each company's own published pages as of November 2026. A dash means "not offered or not documented," not necessarily "impossible."

✓ = confirmed / built in  ·  ~ = partial  ·  – = not offered or not publicly documented. Shortwave rows reflect its own pricing page and privacy policy as fetched in November 2026; Usenti rows reflect Usenti's published policies and live product.

Who should choose which

Choose Shortwave if you and your team live entirely in Gmail or Google Workspace, you want the fastest possible natural-language search across your mail history, and email itself (not meetings or a cross-provider calendar) is the whole job.

Choose Usenti if your team isn't entirely on Gmail, if you want one assistant that also takes your meeting notes and keeps every calendar in sync, or if you want a daily plan rather than just a faster inbox. It also fits a company that needs an EU-hosted provider and a promise that mail never trains a model.

Some people use both: Shortwave for a Gmail-only side project, Usenti for the team inbox that spans providers.

Comparing a different Gmail-first competitor? See our Fyxer vs Shortwave comparison. Want the wider field? See the best AI email assistants in 2026, ranked, where Shortwave, Superhuman and Fyxer are compared side by side. Curious how the tone-matched drafting mentioned above actually works? See how AI drafts and replies to your emails.

Frequently asked questions