Ellie AI vs InReply: Overnight Drafts or Customer Email Answered?

TL;DR: the honest verdict up front

One overlap worth naming immediately: drafts for review are not unique to Ellie. InReply's Ghost Mode, included on every plan, saves each reply as a Gmail or Outlook draft for a human to approve. The fork is what happens after trust is earned: Ellie always stops at the draft, while InReply's Autopilot can go on to send, playbook by playbook.

Full disclosure: this comparison is written by InReply. Every Ellie claim on this page comes from tryellie.com's own pages, quoted so you can check it. All Ellie facts on this page were verified from tryellie.com on 22 July 2026. Where something could not be verified (notably exact prices), we say so instead of guessing.

What Ellie does well

Let's be fair to Ellie first, because it is a thoughtfully built product. As of 22 July 2026, tryellie.com describes an AI assistant that connects to your Gmail, Google Workspace, Outlook or Microsoft 365 mailbox and auto-drafts replies into your Drafts folder in the background, learning your voice, tone and sign-off patterns from your sent mail. Its headline promise is "Perfect email replies in 100x less time", and its tagline, "Your inbox, on autopilot", describes the drafting, not the sending: the site is explicit that nothing goes out until you approve it.

The Microsoft story is a genuine differentiator in this category. Ellie ships a native Outlook desktop add-in, supports Outlook.com, Microsoft 365 and Exchange Online, and is listed on Microsoft AppSource, so a Microsoft shop can buy it as a subscription billed alongside its other Microsoft services and an IT admin can deploy the add-in tenant-wide. There is also a browser extension for triggering a reply on demand in Gmail, Outlook on the web and Fastmail.

Ellie has knowledge features too, and we won't pretend otherwise. Its Business and Professional plans include what it calls Advanced Knowledge Base Training: upload PDFs and documents or point it at a website URL to scrape, and use Roles to set up personas (for example a "Customer Support Specialist" that draws on your help documentation) each with its own knowledge and tone. Ellie is powered by OpenAI models and states it never trains general models on your email. Two products, Ellie Desk and Ellie Docs, are in early access.

What InReply does

InReply is an AI email agent for small businesses. It works inside the Gmail or Outlook inbox you already have, connecting via OAuth: no new email client, no browser extension, and replies go out from the same address your customers already write to.

Replies are grounded in your workspace's own knowledge base, and the safety rule is the point: when InReply does not know the answer, it leaves the email for a human instead of inventing one. Behaviour is controlled through playbooks, which set tone, behaviour and routing per scenario, so a refund request and a pre-sales question are handled differently by design.

There are two modes. Ghost Mode, available on every plan, saves each reply as a Gmail or Outlook draft for review, which is functionally where Ellie stops. Autopilot sends automatically, and you switch it on per playbook, so the scenarios you trust run themselves while the rest stay in drafts. Emails that need a person, whether because the knowledge base has no answer or because something needs doing, surface in an Actions list with urgent flagging, and team members can be given per-inbox access so several people work the same inbox without sharing a login.

Ellie vs InReply at a glance (verified July 2026)

Ellie details verified from tryellie.com on 22 July 2026. Where a capability isn't visible on its public pages, we leave it out rather than guessing.

Ellie pricing in 2026: what we could and couldn't verify

Here is where honesty beats a tidy table. Ellie's pricing page renders its price table client-side, so on 22 July 2026 we could not read exact plan prices from the page itself, and we won't print numbers we couldn't verify. Third-party directories still circulate $19, $39 and $79 per month for Ellie's tiers, but those figures date from older sweeps and may be stale, so treat them as historical and check tryellie.com/pricing directly.

What the page does state in plain text, and we can verify:

• Three tiers: Casual, Business and Professional, each with a daily reply allowance ("how many emails Ellie can write for you per day").
• Casual is manual mode only: on-demand replies via the browser extension, with basic knowledge base training and no auto-drafts.
• Auto-draft and auto-categorise arrive on Business, which includes advanced knowledge base training and 1 connected account per user; Professional raises that to 3 connected accounts per user.
• Additional team members are "priced starting at $5 per user", and a limited 25% first-year discount was being promoted at our retrieval.
• A 7-day free trial, no credit card required.

InReply pricing

InReply is a flat monthly workspace price, not per seat: adding a teammate doesn't change the bill.

Every plan starts with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required, and every plan includes Ghost Mode. The structural contrast with Ellie matters more than any sticker: Ellie prices per user because each seat is a personal drafting assistant; InReply prices per workspace because the product's job is handling the mail itself. Full details on the pricing page.

The core difference: a draft still needs you

Ellie's model is drafts-first by principle. Its pricing FAQ says it outright: "Ellie never sends an email without you first checking it", and the workflow is built around waking up to a Drafts folder full of overnight replies. For your own inbox, that is a lovely morning. Every draft is a head start on an email you were going to send anyway.

For a customer inbox the arithmetic changes. A draft still costs one human review-and-send per message, so if 60 customer emails arrive today, someone still performs 60 approvals, and the customer's waiting time runs until that click happens. On evenings, weekends and busy days, drafts accumulate and customers wait exactly as long as they did before. Overnight drafting arguably sharpens the point: the reply was ready at 3am, but nobody sent it until 9.

InReply removes that bottleneck where you choose to remove it. Autopilot sends automatically, and because it is controlled per playbook you can put the routine scenarios (opening hours, booking questions, policy queries) on full automation while everything else stays in Ghost Mode drafts. Anything the knowledge base can't answer is left for a human and surfaced in the Actions list, so the risky emails were never going to send themselves. That is how a small business gets the effect of an email answering service without leaving its own inbox.

Knowledge: both have it, but the job differs

This is the comparison's most interesting overlap. Ellie is not a voice-mimic only: its Business and Professional plans let you upload documents or scrape a website, and Roles attach different knowledge and tone to different kinds of email. That is genuinely more than most drafting assistants offer, and if you are evaluating Ellie for that reason, you are already thinking in the right direction.

The difference is what the knowledge is for. In Ellie, knowledge improves a draft that a human will vet, so the failure mode of a wrong guess is your edit before sending. In InReply, knowledge is load-bearing: the reply may go out with nobody watching, so the system is built around a harder rule. It answers from the workspace knowledge base, and when it does not know, it leaves the email for a human rather than producing a plausible paragraph. Playbooks then control tone, behaviour and routing per scenario, which is what makes switching on Autopilot for one scenario at a time a sane rollout path rather than a leap of faith.

Where Ellie wins

• Voice matching for your personal email. Learning your tone and sign-off patterns from sent mail is its core mechanic, and drafts land in your folder overnight without you doing anything.
• On-demand drafting surfaces. A browser extension for Gmail, Outlook on the web and Fastmail, plus a native Outlook desktop add-in: more places to summon a draft than InReply offers.
• Microsoft procurement. AppSource listing and tenant-wide add-in deployment make it easy for Microsoft 365 organisations to buy and roll out.
• Low per-seat entry for extra teammates, from $5/user by its own pricing FAQ.

Verdict sentence: if the email that hurts is the email only you can send, Ellie is a strong pick, and InReply would be the wrong tool.

Where InReply wins

• Replies that actually go out. Autopilot sends automatically, per playbook, which no drafts-only assistant does; Ghost Mode covers you until you trust it.
• A grounded no. When the knowledge base doesn't contain the answer, the email is left for a human, not improvised.
• Built for a shared customer inbox. Actions list with urgent flagging for emails needing a person, and team members with per-inbox access instead of shared logins.
• Flat workspace pricing with published prices, from £39/mo, rather than per-user maths and a client-rendered price table.

Verdict sentence: if the email that hurts is customers waiting on answers, InReply is built for exactly that job.

Which one should you pick?

• Solo professional drowning in personal email → Ellie. Overnight drafts in your voice are precisely its job.
• Small business with a support@ or hello@ inbox → InReply. Answers from your knowledge base, sent when confident, escalated when not.
• Microsoft 365 shop wanting personal drafting → Ellie, whose Outlook add-in and AppSource listing are the smoothest path in this pairing.
• Mixed needs → they don't conflict. Ellie on a founder's personal inbox and InReply on the customer inbox is a coherent setup, not a compromise.

Weighing other tools in the category? See InReply vs Fyxer and InReply vs Jace for the adjacent head-to-heads, or the Jace alternatives roundup for the wider field. And once more for clarity: every Ellie fact on this page was verified from tryellie.com on 22 July 2026, and where prices couldn't be verified we said so.

Not ready for automatic sending? Start in Ghost Mode: every reply saved as a draft in your own Gmail or Outlook until you approve it, which is exactly the working style Ellie users already know, with Autopilot waiting per playbook whenever trust is earned.