Gmelius vs InReply: Coordinate the Email or Answer It?

TL;DR: the honest verdict up front

Full disclosure: this page is written by InReply. Every Gmelius claim on it comes from gmelius.com's own public pages, retrieved on 23 July 2026, so you can check each one. Where a Gmelius detail is not visible on its public pages, we say so rather than guessing. All Gmelius facts and prices here were verified from gmelius.com on 23 July 2026.

What Gmelius does well

Credit first, because Gmelius has earned it. As of 23 July 2026, gmelius.com pitches an "AI-Powered Inbox for Gmail" under the tagline "Less Email. More Life.", and says it is trusted by 10,000+ teams inside Gmail. The core idea has been consistent for years: instead of moving your team to a separate helpdesk, Gmelius layers teamwork into Gmail itself. Group addresses like support@ or billing@ become shared inboxes your whole team can work from, conversations can be assigned in one click, labels sync across the team in real time, and colleagues collaborate on drafts with comments and @mentions before anything goes out.

Around that core sits real workflow machinery: kanban boards for managing email as a pipeline, automation rules for routing, round-robin assignment, SLAs and auto-responses, and email analytics covering response times, volume and workload. Gmelius also reaches into outbound with sequences: multi-stage drip campaigns sent from Gmail, with conditional follow-ups based on whether a lead opened or replied. Its AI assistant, Meli, drafts replies, sorts email, schedules meetings, dispatches messages to teammates and manages follow-ups, and the pricing page lists a growing family of assistants (AI Draft, AI Sorting, AI Meeting, AI Automation Architect, AI Sentiment Analysis, AI Dispatching) spread across tiers. Integrations include Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, Trello, Zapier and Make.

In short: if the job is coordinating a team around Gmail without adopting a helpdesk, Gmelius is a mature, credible way to do it. InReply does not compete with most of that list, and this page will not pretend otherwise.

What InReply does

InReply is an AI email agent for small businesses, and it starts from the opposite question. Shared inboxes, boards and assignment are all machinery for humans answering email. InReply exists to shrink the pile that needs a human at all: it reads incoming customer email in your existing Gmail, Google Workspace, Outlook or Microsoft 365 inbox (connected via OAuth, with nothing to install, no new client and no extension) and answers it from your workspace's own knowledge base.

The grounding is the point. When InReply does not know the answer, it does not improvise; it leaves the email for a human, and those emails surface in an Actions list with urgent flagging so nothing sits unnoticed. Behaviour is organised into playbooks that control tone, behaviour and routing per scenario, so a booking enquiry and a complaint are handled differently. Sending is graduated: Ghost Mode, included on every plan, saves each reply as a Gmail or Outlook draft for human review, while Autopilot sends automatically and is switched on per playbook, so you choose exactly which scenarios run without review. Team members can be given per-inbox access, and plans include 1, 3, 5 or unlimited connected inboxes.

What InReply deliberately does not have: assignment workflows, kanban boards, internal notes, shared drafts or outreach sequences. If those are what you are shopping for, Gmelius is the better fit, and our shared inbox software guide maps that whole category.

Gmelius vs InReply at a glance (verified July 2026)

Gmelius details verified from gmelius.com, its pricing page and its feature pages, 23 July 2026.

Gmelius pricing in 2026 (verified)

All figures below are from gmelius.com/pricing, retrieved 23 July 2026. Check the live page before you buy; third-party review sites still circulate older Gmelius tier structures, and the current line-up is named differently.

Last verified 23 July 2026. The free trial runs 7 days with access to the Growth tier.

The structure is per seat, which is worth reading honestly in both directions. For a solo founder, Gmelius is cheap: $19 a month on annual billing is less than any InReply plan. The maths shifts as the team grows. Four people on Growth cost $100/month billed annually, or $132/month billed monthly; the same four on Pro cost $160/month annually. And the per-seat model has a built-in logic: Gmelius is software for the humans doing the answering, so every extra answerer is an extra licence.

InReply pricing

InReply charges a flat monthly price per workspace, scaled by email volume (credits) rather than headcount, so adding a teammate never raises the bill.

Every plan starts with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required. The comparison worth doing in your head is not price-per-price but job-per-price: a four-person team on Gmelius Growth pays $100/month (annual) for better machinery around humans answering everything; the same team on InReply's £79 Growth plan gets 2,000 credits and three inboxes of email answered by the AI, with humans handling only what it cannot. One bill scales with headcount, the other with volume. Full details on the pricing page.

The real difference: coordination vs composition

1. What problem each one attacks

Gmelius attacks coordination. Its features assume the replies will be written by people, and make that faster and safer: assignment stops two people answering the same thread, boards show where everything stands, analytics show who is carrying the load, automation moves email to the right person. If your inbox pain is collisions, dropped threads and no visibility, that is exactly the medicine.

InReply attacks composition. Its premise is that in a typical small-business inbox, a large share of email is repeatable questions your documents already answer: hours, prices, policies, availability. Software that routes those questions to a human faster still costs a human. InReply answers them from the knowledge base and only escalates what genuinely needs judgement. Less queue, rather than better queue management.

2. What the AI is grounded in

Both products now say "AI" on the tin, so the grounding question matters. Gmelius's Meli drafts replies, sorts, schedules and dispatches; gmelius.com's public pages (retrieved 23 July 2026) describe it learning to save you time across the inbox, but do not describe grounding replies in a curated company knowledge base, or a defined behaviour for when the answer is unknown. InReply's replies are grounded only in your workspace's knowledge base, and its defined behaviour for unknowns is to abstain: the email goes to the Actions list for a human instead of getting a confident guess. For customer-facing email, that abstention is the property most small businesses actually want.

3. Platform reach

Gmelius is Gmail and Google Workspace only, with an Outlook integration on a public waitlist as of 23 July 2026 ("Less Email for Outlook is coming", in its own words). If your business runs on Microsoft 365, Gmelius is not an option today. InReply connects to Gmail and Outlook now, both via OAuth on the inbox you already have.

Where Gmelius wins

• Team collaboration in Gmail. Shared inboxes, one-click assignment, synced labels, shared drafts with comments and @mentions. InReply has none of this beyond per-inbox team access.
• Workflow machinery. Kanban boards, automation rules, round-robin routing, SLAs and email analytics for managing a queue of human work.
• Outbound sequences. Multi-stage drip campaigns from Gmail with conditional follow-ups. InReply does no outreach at all.
• Cheapest solo entry. $19/user/month on annual billing undercuts InReply's £39 Starter for a single user.
• Breadth of integrations. Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, Trello, Zapier and Make are all listed on gmelius.com.

Verdict sentence: if you are a Google-only team whose problem is coordinating people around shared email, Gmelius is a strong, proven choice, and this page should not talk you out of it.

Where InReply wins

• It answers the email. The AI composes and (where you allow it) sends the reply, grounded in your own knowledge base, rather than helping humans divide the work.
• A defined behaviour for unknowns. No answer in the knowledge base means no reply is invented; the email goes to a human via the Actions list, with urgent flagging.
• Gmail and Outlook today. No waitlist; both providers connect via OAuth to the inbox you already have.
• Flat workspace pricing. £39 / £79 / £149 with published credit numbers and 1 / 3 / 5 / unlimited inboxes per plan. Headcount never changes the bill.
• Control that fits customer email. Ghost Mode drafts on every plan, Autopilot per playbook, tone and routing set per scenario.
• Longer, card-free trial. 14 days with no credit card, versus Gmelius's 7.

Verdict sentence: if the job is getting customer email answered well without hiring for it, InReply is built for exactly that job, and Gmelius does not attempt it.

Which one should you pick?

• Team colliding on shared Gmail inboxes, humans happy to write replies → Gmelius. Assignment, boards and analytics are its home turf.
• Small business drowning in repeatable customer questions → InReply. Ground it in your knowledge, review in Ghost Mode, promote trusted scenarios to Autopilot.
• Outlook or Microsoft 365 shop → InReply, by default: Gmelius's Outlook support is a waitlist as of 23 July 2026.
• Sales team that needs sequences and CRM sync → Gmelius, or a dedicated outreach tool. InReply does not do outbound.
• Growing team watching the per-seat line → do the maths above. Per-user pricing compounds with hiring; flat workspace pricing compounds only with email volume.

If you are weighing the wider category, our InReply vs Hiver comparison covers the other big Gmail-collaboration player, and the Hiver alternatives roundup puts Gmelius, Missive, Front and Help Scout side by side. Once more for clarity: every Gmelius fact and price on this page was verified from gmelius.com on 23 July 2026.