Sortd App Review: My Hands-On Experience

What Is Sortd?

The Sortd app is a productivity tool that transforms your inbox into a visual task management system with a Kanban-style board interface. It does this by essentially overlaying a drag-and-drop workspace on top of Gmail so that you can organize emails as actionable tasks.

When you enable Sortd, you'll see customizable boards where you can drag emails into different columns based on their status or priority. You can add due dates, create follow-up reminders, attach notes to emails, and even share boards with your team members. It's particularly useful for sales teams, customer support departments, or anyone who treats emails as action items rather than just messages.

However, I should warn you right away that these and other Sortd capabilities work exclusively with Gmail and Google Workspace accounts, so a significant portion of email users who rely on other mail services are out of luck.

Those who are looking for a Sortd alternative for Outlook or any other email provider should turn their attention to third-party inbox management tools that are designed around the IMAP protocol, which allows them to work with virtually any email service.

Getting Started With Sortd for Gmail

Setting up the Sortd app required more steps than I expected. First, I had to install the Sortd for Gmail Chrome extension from the Chrome Web Store. This is the only way to access Sortd's features, as there's no standalone web interface. Once I installed it, a small icon appeared in my browser toolbar.

Next, I opened my Gmail inbox and was greeted with a "Sign in with Google" pop-up window that required me to agree to Sortd's terms of service and privacy policy before I could proceed.

Sortd requested extensive permissions to:

• View and manage my Gmail emails
• Create, edit, and delete labels
• Compose and send emails on my behalf
• Access my Google Drive files (for attachments)

I understand why these permissions are necessary for Sortd to function properly, but I'll admit I paused before granting such significant access to my Google account.

After accepting the permissions, I went through a brief onboarding sequence where I customized my first board, chose my workflow style, and decided whether I wanted to use Sortd for personal productivity or team collaboration.

The entire process took me about 5 minutes, which wasn't much, but it still stood in contrast to when I set up Clean Email.

With Clean Email, I simply visited their website, entered my email credentials (from any provider, not just Gmail), and I was ready to start organizing my inbox. Since there was no browser extension to install, the entire setup took me less than 2 minutes.

My Experience Using Sortd for Gmail Management

As a freelance writer juggling multiple clients and deadlines, I'm admittedly not Sortd's ideal user (the tool truly shines for small teams managing shared workflows), but I'm certainly someone who can still benefit from it greatly, which is exactly what my experience confirmed.

My Board structure

I created five main boards to mirror my workflow: TODO, URGENT, IN PROGRESS, WAITING ON, and DONE. This structure helped me visualize exactly where each client project stood at any given moment.

📌 My TODO list became the default landing spot for new client inquiries and project requests. Whenever an email that required action arrived, I'd drag it from my inbox to this column. The visual nature of the board meant I could instantly see my workload.

📌 The URGENT column served as my priority zone. Here, I placed time-sensitive revisions, rush projects, and anything with a looming deadline. Having these items visually separated from my general todo list helped me focus on what truly needed immediate attention.

📌 IN PROGRESS housed my active work. I could attach notes about word counts, research links, and draft locations directly to each card, creating a comprehensive project hub that went beyond what email alone could offer.

📌 Finally, WAITING ON became invaluable for tracking projects where I needed client feedback or approval before proceeding further or moving the item to the DONE column, where the sight of accumulated completed projects gave me a sense of accomplishment while keeping a record of delivered work.

Of course, you can (and are encouraged to) create any structure that matches your workflow, and that's really the magic of Sortd's board system. You might prefer stages like "Prospecting → Negotiating → Active → Invoicing → Paid" for a sales-focused approach, or "Backlog → This Week → Today → Review → Complete" for a more time-based system.

Features that made my workflow click

After using Sortd for several weeks, certain features emerged as MVPs for my email-based project management.

One of the first things I customized in the email organizer was the color-coding system. Each card can be highlighted in red, yellow, green, or blue, creating an instant visual hierarchy. I developed my own system: red for urgent client revisions, yellow for projects approaching deadlines, green for completed work awaiting payment, and blue for ongoing retainer work.

This visual organization worked hand-in-hand with Sortd's deadline management system. When I set a deadline on a card, it appears prominently on the card face. As deadlines approach, the date changes color, letting me know that you don't have much time left.

Another feature I quickly started relying on was the ability to add notes to individual items (messages). For example, I would attach client brief details, project specifications, and even draft snippets directly to the relevant email card. This meant I never had to dig through old email threads to find that one detail the client mentioned three weeks ago.

If I wanted to, I could have created my own custom fields for things like word count, publication name, or invoice status, but honestly, the default options – assignee, reminders, deadlines, notes, and next steps – covered 90% of my needs.

Team collaboration and automation capabilities

While my solo freelance setup gave me a taste of Sortd's organizational power, I discovered that the app truly comes alive when you add team members to the mix. To properly test these features, I invited two colleagues to join me on a shared "Content Projects" board where we could coordinate on collaborative articles.

The team collaboration features allowed me to assign a todo item directly to my colleague, who then added her comments about specific changes needed and set a deadline. All these actions were visible to everyone on the board, which eliminated the usual back-and-forth of "did you get my email?" and "what's the status on that piece?".

Beyond team collaboration, Sortd also boasts useful automation capabilities that you can use to automatically sort emails in Gmail based on specific criteria. For instance, any email from our regular clients automatically appeared in our "New Projects" column. Emails with "URGENT" in the subject line got moved to our priority list and assigned to a relevant person.

Other potentially time-saving features that are worth highlighting include the ability to create shared mail templates and the Sortd AI, named Eva. Based on ChatGPT, Eva functions as an AI Sales Assistant that can draft follow-up emails, suggest when to check in with clients, and even research potential leads on LinkedIn.

For my content business, this meant Eva would remind me to follow up with editors who hadn't responded to pitches and suggest personalized re-engagement messages for clients I hadn't heard from in a while. While somewhat useful, Eva felt like a middleman adding a layer between me and the superior AI capabilities I could access by visiting ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini directly.

Clean Email vs. Sortd: Using the Right Tool for Your Inbox

During my testing, I discovered that while Sortd brilliantly manages active tasks and projects, it completely lacks the inbox cleanup and bulk email management capabilities that most of us desperately need. That's why I recommend complementing it with another third-party tool.

While innovative email clients and possible Sortd alternatives like Shortwave and Superhuman have their place if you're looking for a complete Gmail replacement, most users will find it more practical to combine Sortd's task management strengths with a dedicated inbox cleaning tool, and Clean Email is my top pick because it provides all the tools I need to achieve and effortlessly maintain inbox zero.

Sortd vs Clean Email feature comparison:

	Clean Email	Sortd
Free trial	Manage up to 1,000 emails + 25 unsubscribes	Free forever "Starter" plan with limitations
Email providers	Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, iCloud, any IMAP service	Gmail only (Google accounts)
Multiple accounts	✅ Yes (up to 10)	❌ No
Interface languages	English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Ukrainian	English only
Bulk email actions	✅ Yes - delete, archive, label thousands at once	❌ No
Smart filtering	33+ Smart Folders for automatic categorization	❌ No
Unsubscribe feature	✅ Yes - one-click unsubscribe with tracking	❌ No
Auto Clean rules	✅ Extensive rule-based automation	❌ Limited automation
Privacy approach	Analyzes headers only, not email content	Full Gmail access required
Mobile apps	Full-featured iOS and Android apps	Limited functionality
Team collaboration	❌ No - focused on individual inbox management	✅ Yes - core feature
Task management	❌ No - pure email organization	✅ Yes - Kanban boards
Pricing	Multiple Clean Email pricing tiers available	Multiple Sortd pricing tiers available

As the comparison table above shows, Sortd isn't a direct Clean Email competitor. Instead, Clean Email is a comprehensive inbox cleaning and organizing solution that works across all major email providers (not just Gmail). Here are some of the main features it offers:

• Clean Email's Smart Folders automatically organize emails into 33+ intelligent categories like Online Shopping, Social Notifications, Finance, and Travel.

• The Cleaning Suggestions feature analyzes email patterns and proactively recommends which messages to clean based on factors like sender frequency, email age, and user behavior.

• The Unsubscriber tool provides one-click unsubscribe functionality, and users can also pause subscriptions temporarily.

• Auto Clean rules enable long-term inbox automation by running continuously in the background and taking action as soon as matching messages arrive.
• Clean Email's best email sorter capabilities allow users to organize messages by sender, size, date, labels, and read status.

📌 Additional features like the Screener (which quarantines emails from unknown senders), Privacy Monitor (which alerts users if their email appears in data breaches), and Read Later (which creates email digests) round out Clean Email's toolkit.

Sortd Review Summary

I can confidently say that Sortd excels at what it's designed to do: transform Gmail into a visual task management system. It's certainly worth using for teams managing customer support tickets, sales pipelines, or collaborative projects directly from their inbox. Even freelancers such as myself can benefit from its email-to-task conversion to create a unique workflow that traditional email clients can't match.

Its biggest downside is easily the focus on Gmail, but potential users should also be aware of the lack of bulk email management, no unsubscribe functionality, and absence of inbox cleaning features.

➡️ Who should use Sortd:

• Gmail-based teams needing visual project management
• Sales teams tracking deals through email pipelines
• Customer support departments managing ticket workflows
• Anyone who treats most emails as actionable tasks

➡️ Who should look elsewhere:

• Users of Outlook, Yahoo, or other non-Gmail providers
• Individuals primarily needing inbox cleanup and bulk management
• Those wanting comprehensive email organization across multiple accounts
• Mobile-first users who need full functionality on their phones