BoxBee vs Shortwave, which AI email client should you pick?

Short answer

BoxBee wins if the question is where your mail is processed and what it costs, Shortwave wins if the question is how good the AI is. BoxBee keeps subject, body and attachments on the device and names one AI sub-processor, Mistral AI in the EU region, for 8.99 EUR per user and month. Shortwave indexes your whole Gmail archive and answers questions about it better than anything else on the market, for 30 USD per seat and month, in US data centres, with no published data processing agreement. These are not two versions of the same product.

Disclosure: BoxBee is built by TTA Technologies, which also publishes thinking.lu. The scoring criteria below were fixed before either product was assessed, and Shortwave scores higher than BoxBee in our software profiles, 8.5 against 8.2.

Price and packaging

Converted at 1 USD = 0.92 EUR. BoxBee is roughly a third of Shortwave's price at the entry tier, and the BYOK plan at 4.99 EUR is the cheapest route to AI mail we have found anywhere, though you then pay your model provider directly. Note the iOS gap: buying Solo inside the App Store costs 15.99 EUR against 8.99 EUR bought directly, so buy on the web.

Where does the mail body go?

This is the real difference between these two products and it is worth being precise.

BoxBee's published privacy policy is explicit: mail content, meaning subject, body and attachments, stays on the device, and the server side holds account and sync metadata on Hetzner infrastructure in Luxembourg and Germany. The AI request goes to Mistral AI in Paris, in the EU region, processed in real time and, per the stated contract, neither retained nor used for training. For an operator who has to answer a works council or a data protection officer, that is a chain with one named processor inside the EU.

Shortwave's chain is longer and American. Data is stored in Google Cloud, the privacy policy says personal data is transferred to facilities and servers in the United States, and the named outside AI services are OpenAI, Anthropic and Pinecone. Shortwave does claim that the vast majority of its AI workloads run on open source models on hardware it controls, which is a stronger statement than most competitors make, and it commits that your mail never trains third-party models.

Neither vendor publishes a customer-facing data processing agreement, and both should. Shortwave's security page tells GDPR customers to contact the team. BoxBee publishes its own contract terms with Mistral but no agreement you can sign. Ask for one in writing before you deploy either across a company, and use our GDPR checklist for AI email as the question list.

Which has the better AI?

Shortwave, and not by a small margin. Its search understands questions, it reaches back through your whole Gmail history, and AI threads let you interrogate a conversation without leaving it. If you have five years of mail and the recurring frustration is that the answer is in there somewhere, Shortwave is the product that fixes it. BoxBee's search is meaning-based with filters, which is good, but it is a search box and not an analyst.

BoxBee's AI is aimed at a different job: triage and output. Smart inbox categorisation, reply drafts in the right language and tone, a daily brief, extraction of appointment proposals from mail, dossiers that bundle messages with attachments, and on the Pro tier an autonomous agent with skills plus automatic categorisation and spam quarantine. It also does something Shortwave does not, end-to-end encrypted direct messages between BoxBee users. Multilingual handling in German, English and French matters more in Luxembourg or Belgium than most vendors understand.

So the honest split is this. Shortwave is better at understanding mail you already have. BoxBee is better at stopping mail from reaching you in the first place, and it does it without sending the text to a US cloud.

Mailbox support and migration

BoxBee is a client, not a provider: it connects over IMAP and SMTP, so Gmail, Microsoft 365, Infomaniak, Mailbox.org or your own server all work, and nothing moves. Shortwave requires Gmail or Google Workspace. Microsoft 365 and Exchange are explicitly unsupported, and other providers only work by routing through a Gmail account with an app password.

If your mail is not in Google Workspace, this comparison is over before the AI matters. If it is, both are live options.

Platforms and maturity

Shortwave has the longer track record and the more polished product, with a mature web and mobile experience over a single provider. BoxBee ships native desktop apps for Mac on Apple Silicon and Intel and for Windows as installer or portable build, plus iOS and iPadOS. Desktop plus IMAP is a real advantage for anyone who wants mail that works offline and across accounts. Against that, BoxBee is young, the Team tier is shared administration rather than a shared inbox, and there is less third-party knowledge to lean on when something breaks.

Which should you choose?

Choose BoxBee if the processing location is a constraint you cannot negotiate, if your mailbox is anywhere other than Google Workspace, or if 8.99 EUR against 27.60 EUR decides it. Choose Shortwave if your mail is in Google Workspace, your archive is deep, and the AI quality is what you are actually buying. If you need a shared inbox with assignment and collision handling, neither is the answer and you should read our list of AI inbox tools for small teams.

Both are also worth comparing against the rest of the field in our ranking of AI email clients, where Shortwave places second and BoxBee first on criteria that weight jurisdiction and price.