Apple Mail vs. Outlook—which email client should you choose?

Apple Mail and Outlook are among the most popular email clients, widely used by businesses and individuals. Mac users often face the dilemma of choosing between these two clients, but it all comes down to reviewing the options in detail and finding the perfect fit for your workflow, organization setup, and productivity needs.

In this article, we will make the Outlook vs. Apple Mail comparison to help you choose the best email client for yourself. Once we present the pros and cons of these two options, we’ll also introduce Notion’s modern, AI-first email solution that can transform the way you prioritize and manage your personal and business communications.

The best way to determine which of the two famous email clients meets your requirements is to compare them across the following five categories:

1. User interface

2. Cross-platform compatibility

3. Pricing

4. Security and privacy

5. Customization and productivity

An intuitive interface increases efficiency and eliminates frustration, which is especially important for new users navigating the platform for the first time. Both email clients have a fairly straightforward interface but lack the advanced customization options of some other email service providers.

Apple Mail’s interface is simple and easy to use. You can sort your emails, flag them, and delete them in seconds. Still, compared to other email clients, Apple Mail lacks interface customization, which may be disappointing for users who enjoy personalizing their views.

Apple has a “unified inbox,” letting users with multiple accounts see them in one place. That said, the linear structure of a unified inbox can quickly become overwhelming if you have to maintain multiple communication chains.

On the other hand, the app has no limit regarding the number of inboxes you can register, making it convenient for businesses and people with more than ten email addresses.

Additionally, the syncing issues can be a deal-breaker for users who want regular updates because, with Apple Mail, you usually need to refresh to see new emails.

Outlook, similar to competitors like Gmail, prioritizes function over form, so its user interface is fairly basic. The platform allows users to customize the theme with different colors and fonts, which is important for those who like a more visually appealing view. Users can set up unlimited inboxes in Outlook, which are displayed in a list on the left-hand side, and are allowed to customize the order in which their inboxes are shown.

While sufficiently straightforward, Outlook’s interface may also appear cluttered. The panels display numerous buttons and icons, and the lack of compartmentalization can make it difficult to navigate the platform.

Cross-platform compatibility allows the email client to run on different operating systems and devices. Outlook shows greater versatility in this regard, while Apple Mail comes as a default email application by Apple and is compatible only with Mac OS.

Unlike Outlook and most other email competitors, Apple Mail is only available on Apple hardware devices, such as Mac computers, iPhones, and iPads. Apple Mail provides users with their own email service called iCloud Mail, but you’re not required to use it. You can add email addresses from other providers like Outlook or Gmail to your unified inbox and conveniently manage emails from a single location.

Outlook can be downloaded and used across different devices and operating systems. Unlike Apple Mail, Outlook has a web application you can access through any web browser. It has its own email service, Outlook.com, but users with different email addresses (Gmail, Apple Mail) can also use Outlook as their email client. You can add an unlimited number of different email addresses to Outlook and manage all accounts effortlessly from one platform.

Apple Mail has a free plan only, including all the features and security protocols that come with the email client. Outlook has a free Outlook.com version for web-based email users and multiple paid plans for advanced users, businesses, and enterprises that need extra storage, elaborate features, or superior security protocols.

Apple Mail is a built-in email client available on all Apple’s macOS and iOS operating systems free of charge. It doesn’t have a paid version, nor is it sold separately for non-Apple users.

Outlook is included in the Microsoft Office Suite of productivity tools and has no separate pricing plan. The free web-based email service, Outlook.com, can be accessed via the web and includes up to 15 GB of free storage.

Users can also sign up for one of the three paid plans*:

1. Home

   1. Microsoft Personal: $99.99 per year

   2. Microsoft Family: $129.99 per year

2. Business 

   1. Basic: $6/user per month

   2. Standard: $12.50/user per month

   3. Premium: $22/user per month

   4. Microsoft 365 Apps: $8.25/user per month

3. Enterprise

   1. Microsoft 365 F3: $8/user per month

   2. Microsoft 365 E3: $33.75/user per month

   3. Microsoft 365 E5: $54.75/user per month

*All prices reflect annual subscription values.

The Outlook.com free plan includes basic email features, such as email organization, email filtering, and calendar management, which are solid for an average user’s needs.

Within home paid plans, users get up to 1 TB of storage per user and custom domains, among other features.

Security and privacy are among the key factors you want to consider when choosing an email provider. Most email clients offer the standard built-in protections to safeguard your inbox from unauthorized third-party access, malware, etc. Both Outlook and Apple Mail implement the expected safety protocols to keep emails protected, though they use different approaches.

By default, Outlook provides a Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol that protects emails while in transit (traveling across the network to reach the recipient), which is a standard email security practice.

Outlook also offers advanced security protocols to business and enterprise users, mainly end-to-end encryption. The encryption scrambles data on the device level and only the authorized recipient with a decryption key can read the messages, but the setup requires additional configuration that’s often challenging for regular users.

As far as privacy is concerned, Outlook has strong filters driven by Microsoft 365 AI Copilot for detecting phishing, malware, and other harmful content. The only issue is that the filters can get too aggressive at times—you’ll have to keep adjusting your settings to ensure visibility for important emails.

On the plus side, Outlook enables multi-factor-authentication (MFA) to have an additional layer of safety from intruders.

Like Outlook, Apple Mail provides the TLS protocol for all users by default. Those interested in advanced encryption can install the S/MIME certificate on their own, although the process can seem easier if both the sender and recipient are within the Apple ecosystem.

Apple Mail offers another useful security feature, Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), which users can activate under Settings > Mail > Privacy Protection. MPP helps prevent third parties from tracking users by hiding their IP addresses. Outlook can prevent third-party tracking to an extent, but not as comprehensively as Apple Mail.

That said, while the MPP feature protects you from spam and phishing emails, it doesn’t protect the data and files users send via mail. Apple Mail’s built-in spam filters also require additional training for better performance.

While Apple Mail’s basic customization features will likely meet an average user’s needs, you’ll be left wanting more if you are a medium to advanced user or have expanding business needs. Outlook offers relatively more customization options, useful for organizing your inbox and collaborating with a team, but many of these can be hidden behind complex commands and settings.

Outlook is part of Microsoft Office, which means seamless integration with all other collaboration-friendly tools in the Suite, such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

The inbox has useful navigation features like email search and a focused inbox. They allow you to automatically sort and categorize emails based on various criteria, as well as find specific emails or attachments easily.

If you’re keen on making your email workflows efficient and personalized, you can use the Create Rule feature to flag, move, or respond to emails automatically. However, creating these rules can be complicated and time-consuming as you need to manually configure conditions and actions for the rules to work.

Other notable features for productivity include:

• Mention: If you type @ and a user’s name, they will immediately get added to the emailing list and notified.

• Email scheduling: You can create emails in advance and choose the time they are to be sent.

• Quick Parts: If you often send emails with similar bodies, you will benefit from this feature as it allows you to insert frequently used phrases and blocks of text into future messages.

That said, many experienced users have encountered sluggish Outlook inboxes, especially as they grow in size, which impacts productivity to an extent.

Apple Mail is part of the Apple ecosystem, so the email is integrated with other apps, such as Notes, Calendar, Contacts, and Siri—which ensures an optimal collaborative environment within the Apple ecosystem. Users with Apple hardware can create notes or schedule events from emails directly, streamlining their communication.

While it provides basic features like quick search, spam filters, and email scheduling, Apple Mail’s productivity features are limited. Among the notable options is Apple Intelligence—if you’ve enabled it on your smartphone, you’ll be able to assess priority messages, such as same-day meeting invites or tickets, faster.

Apple Mail also offers rules to personalize how you automate certain email responses and admin tasks, although the process can be a little more complicated than what we see for Outlook.

Both Apple Mail and Outlook offer a decent service in their own right but can feel limited when it comes to features related to ease of use and productivity.

Apple Mail, for instance, works great as a minimalistic and privacy-focused email service within the Apple ecosystem, but the lack of well-etched-out customization features can make email management challenging. Outlook, on the other side, can come off as bloated and clunky at times, despite offering some good efficiency features.

If you’re looking for something more robust than your average email service but without the added complexity—you might want to explore Notion Mail.

Notion Mail is an AI-native, secure, productivity-focused email client that packs several innovative functionalities to help you organize and personalize your inbox according to your workflow. The platform allows you to leverage simple AI prompts to create Views—they are custom layouts that streamline all your communication for a specific workflow, say, your sales communications or social media campaigns. You can find all contextual emails in the view you create and also sort them according to priority.

Notion Mail brings you a free-to-use Inbox that essentially manages itself. With an AI-assisted, minimalistic interface, you get an experience focused on speed, ease of use, and visibility with simple configurations. Here are some of the interesting features to look forward to:

Besides customizing workflow-specific views, you can use AI to simplify multiple aspects of your workspace and have more control over what you can access. For instance, you can create a straightforward prompt to search for emails with a deadline mentioned. You can also adjust a specific view to reduce or increase the number of data fields, depending on the information density you need.

Notion Mail can help you schedule your meetings without conflicts via intelligent scheduling, ensuring there are minimal follow-ups with your team. You can even use short commands, like /schedule, to schedule meetings with Notion Calendar or insert a scheduling button (e.g., Calendly) in your message using Notion Calendar booking links.

Notion Mail has built-in quick replies that adapt to your or your organization’s needs. We also love the platform’s reusable email snippets—they’re technically AI-supported templates that help you create personalized emails for each context in a few clicks.

You can use simple keyboard shortcuts to complete tedious actions like marking an email as read, replying to or forwarding an email, etc.

Notion Mail is designed to integrate seamlessly with Notion’s existing productivity suite. You can not only manage your emails but also handle your notes, tasks, and calendars from a single account. The platform also integrates with dozens of other work and productivity apps to ensure you have a streamlined experience navigating a busy workspace.

To start using Notion Mail, you need to sign up with your Google or Gmail account—and that’s it. The email suite comes with many integrated AI features for free, but you can also get the Notion AI add-on to access advanced productivity features.