Try the cheap one first.
Free with one account, no card. $9.99 once for the rest, and a refund if it's not for you.
↓ Download for macOSSix apps that put more than one Gmail or Outlook account in a single desktop window. They split into three camps: native shells around the real web app, Electron shells around the real web app, and rebuilt clients. Here's how they differ, including where Smails loses.
Pricing is the model, not the number, because the numbers change. Where an app has both a free tier and a paid one, "Subscription" means the useful version is paid monthly or yearly. Checked against each vendor's site in September 2026.
| Smails | Orbit | Shift | Wavebox | Kiwi for Gmail | Mimestream | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shows the real Gmail / Outlook web interface | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Native shell (no Electron or bundled Chromium) | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Gmail and Google Workspace | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Outlook.com and Microsoft 365 | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Google Calendar in the sidebar | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Each account in its own isolated session | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | n/a (own client) |
| Unified inbox across accounts | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Mail goes straight to the provider, no vendor server in between | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| macOS | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Windows | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Pricing model | $9.99 once | $89 once | Subscription | Subscription | Subscription | Subscription |
| Free tier | ✓ 1 account | Trial | ✓ limited | Trial | Trial | Trial |
You want the real Gmail and Outlook, side by side, in a small native app, and you'd rather pay $9.99 once than anything a year. You don't need a merged inbox. You're on Mac or Windows.
You're all-Google, Mac only, and want the same native-shell idea with a longer track record behind it. Same architecture as Smails, roughly nine times the price.
Email is only part of it and you want Slack, Notion, WhatsApp and forty other web apps in the same window too. You accept a Chromium-sized memory footprint and a subscription for that breadth.
You want Google Workspace apps (Docs, Sheets, Drive) as windows alongside Gmail, and the subscription doesn't bother you.
You want a real Mac-native client, not the Gmail web UI: a unified inbox, Mail.app-style keyboard feel, offline reading. Gmail only, subscription, and a different philosophy from everything else here.
It was discontinued in 2021. Smails and Orbit are the two apps built on the same idea. More on that here.
Straight answers
Yes, and that's the point. The Gmail you see is the real one, so labels, filters, keyboard shortcuts and search operators all work, and nothing breaks when Google changes things. The native part is everything around it: isolated sessions so accounts don't sign each other out, one unread badge, notifications, links opening in your real browser, and a 4 MB download instead of a bundled browser.
There's no private API to switch off. Smails loads Gmail in the WebKit that ships with macOS (WebView2 on Windows), signed in on Google's own login page, so to Google it looks like a browser. The one known exception is Workspace accounts whose admin enforces passkey-only sign-in, which no embedded app can use.
Because the heavy lifting is Gmail's own web app, and the shell around it is small. We'd rather have many people pay a coffee once than a few pay $89.
None of the six do. All of them talk directly to Google or Microsoft from your machine. Apps like Spark or Shortwave, which do proxy mail, aren't in this table for that reason.
Free with one account, no card. $9.99 once for the rest, and a refund if it's not for you.
↓ Download for macOS