Boomerang vs Gmelius: Which is the better productivity tool?

Gmelius and Boomerang are popular sales productivity tools. As a matter of fact, both of them are similar in many ways, along with their own unique features. But how do you decide which one is suitable for you? 

Although both these products do have great reviews online, reviews certainly don’t paint a complete picture. Hence, you will need to understand how features between Boomerang vs Gmelius will particularly assist your productivity.

So in this article, we’ll compare the core features of Boomerang vs Gmelius, and how they fare in terms of pricing, customer support, ease of use, etc. 

1. Boomerang vs Gmelius: Features

Let us now compare common features and flows on Boomerang vs Gmelius to help you better understand which of these tools will cater to your needs better.

a) Email Tracking

Both Boomerang and Gmelius include email tracking built into their Chrome extensions, where you will see an option to add tracking in Gmail while composing emails. Gmelius only supports Gmail and G Suite platforms. There are slight differences in how they operate, which we’ll soon see as we proceed.

On Gmelius, tracking settings can be accessed from the menu drawer on the bottom left of the Gmelius toolbar. You’ll see a double-tick icon which then opens tracking options. Note that Gmelius attaches it’s branding with “Sent with Gmelius” text. This will intimate your recipient that their email is being tracked, and you’re sending mass emails. This is a limitation and might hurt your chances of getting a response and apart from getting your emails reported as spam.

As shown, Gmelius can track links, clicks, and responses. Once your email is opened by your recipient, you will see a blue-colored double tick on the email thread in your sent folder

You can access all tracked activity across your sent emails on Gmelius web application, or on the Gmelius app inside Gmail. It shows you open, clicks, and response activity.

It also shows you device and location information where the event was performed, fetched from your recipient’s browser.

Boomerang supports email tracking for Gmail, G Suite and Outlook platforms. The email tracking option in Boomerang inserts an opt-out link for the recipient to click in case they don’t want their activity to be tracked. 

This is what it looks like on the recipients’ end –

While this might be ethical to do, it also intimates the recipient of the fact that their emails are being tracked.     

You can view the activity on tracked emails by accessing Boomerang’s web application. You’ll also be able to see open and click activity inside tracked emails from your sent folder.

If your outreach heavily relies on email tracking and you don’t find either of these tools ideal, you can check out SalesHandy. It works on both Gmail/Gsuite and Outlook platforms through plugins. SalesHandy offers lifetime unlimited email tracking for Free with real-time activity notifications not available on both Boomerang and Gmelius on link clicks and opens. Apart from this, SalesHandy doesn’t’ brand your tracked emails, even on the free version. Email tracking on SalesHandy works like you intend it to work, without bothering your recipients about it.

b) Outreach

When comparing outreach functions on Boomerang vs Gmelius, the former lacks mass outreach capabilities. Gmelius does have a campaign and sequence feature that helps send out customized emails to multiple recipients at once.

In Gmelius, you can simply log into the web application and navigate to create > New campaign. It offers to send out emails to a list of recipients you can upload via a CSV. 

Once inside the editor, you can also switch to a visual editor to help you add mobile responsive, graphical content in your email.

Multi-stage campaigns can also be created this way, but you will have to first create and save a sequence with all the stages drawn out using its graphical user interface.

You can choose to automatically add an email to a board, add or remove labels from the email, snooze, archive, add a note, or send another email based on your set conditions.

 It is to be noted, that sequences only support common variables to be added while drafting, which need be substituted for merge fields on your CSV when added to a campaign. This limits Gmelius’ capacity to add custom personalization fields in follow-up stages.

Recurring messages can be substituted for short-chain follow-ups (since the message stays the same) or sending periodic reminders to team members spaced out at regular intervals. 

If you wish to use a simpler version of Gmelius’s campaign feature, you can try out SalesHandy. You can create multi-stage automated campaigns without having to leave the editor and also verify your recipients’ email addresses using the add-on email verification feature. 

You can also personalize your email endlessly, using merge fields on your CSV as variables and not having to substitute them while drafting multi-stage campaigns.

c) Scheduling

While Gmelius can schedule and send multi-stage mass emails to a list of recipients, it can’t do so for individual recipients. This was a feature available in the past, but Gmelius discontinued it since Google added “Send later” functionality within Gmail.

Boomerang can schedule individual emails using its own “Send later” feature. You can schedule a message to go out in a few hours, days, or weeks. It has a calendar widget that you can use to pick your own date and time.

If the ability to schedule emails is important to you, Boomerang is the better option out of the two. However, if your recipient happens to reside in a different time zone, you will need to adjust these timings to match their time zone. 

If you need a better alternative to schedule your emails, you should check out SalesHandy. SalesHandy has an option to set the timezone for your scheduled email to go out, so you don’t need to adjust your email schedules per your recipients’ timings. 

d) Email templates 

Boomerang doesn’t support adding templates. Templates on sales productivity and outreach tools might be essential for a lot of salespeople. Gmelius does have an option to save and share email templates among team members. These templates can be used to quickly insert pre-saved emails into a new campaign, or a follow-up email. 

Apart from being able to create your own templates, there are a bunch of existing templates pre-saved in your templates folder within Gmelius. You can create, edit, and delete folders within this section for better organization of templates across your team. These templates can be quickly accessed within your Gmail compose box on clicking the templates icon on the toolbar.

e) Extras

Let’s now compare some extra bunch of features you get on Gmelius and Boomerang.
In Gmelius, you get a built-in meeting scheduler widget that can be added to your emails. It adds available time slots from your calendar and enables your recipients to book a slot in a single click.

Gmelius can also be used as a project management tool as it has built-in “Boards” – it’s very own Kanban style task management system which can be used across teams and functions.

In case you’re using Gmelius for customer support, you’ll have access to the ‘Tickets’ system on the Gmelius app. It lets you create and assign tickets to team members with email threads attached to these tickets, which will help in better coordination between the support team.

Boomerang gives you additional features like Inbox Pause, which will temporarily halt incoming emails. You can stop all emails from coming in, or set up filters for only important emails to go through. You can also set autoresponders for all incoming emails with an appropriate message

Boomerang also offers you ‘Gmail Snooze’ which will let you temporarily ignore an email by marking it read and moving it down. On hitting the ‘snooze time’, i.e. when you would want to address the email again, this email will automatically pop in the top of your inbox marked unread. This feature can be accessed by simply clicking on the boomerang icon on the top of your message body.

2. Boomerang vs Gmelius: Ease of use

Both of these platforms have web apps and chrome extensions. Boomerang being heavily centered towards email productivity, retains more of its operations within its Chrome extension for Gmail. 

Boomerang might take an average person more time to grasp since a lot of its functionality is crammed into the Gmail extension. It also uses fairly unheard terms to define its unique features, which might make it slightly tricky to adapt to in the beginning.

Gmelius limits functionality on its extension to tracking settings and adding templates and calendar slots. It also opens a new window within Gmail when it’s accessed from the menu on the sidebar. The sidebar app shows you tracking activity, along with having shortcuts to creating campaigns, sequences, etc., which will redirect you to the Gmelius app

The campaign feature on Gmelius is not very easy and intuitive. If you were to quickly set up an entirely new, multi-stage campaign, it makes you jump through several hoops.  You first need to set up the entire campaign as a sequence first, add variables from the available list, and then go back to your campaign to add this sequence. Your variables then need to be replaced with merge fields on the CSV file you uploaded.

3. Boomerang vs Gmelius: Integrations

Gmelius integrates with your Gmail or Gsuite account to be able to access and send emails on your behalf. Apart from that, Gmelius also integrates with Slack, using a Slack app which provides you updates on tracked emails, tickets, and responses directly into slack channels of your choice.

Gmelius also has BCC to CRM feature, which essentially makes it compatible with any CRM that allows copying emails into its system using a unique BCC email address.

Boomerang doesn’t have any native integrations apart from Gmail and Outlook, used to sync and send emails. Like Gmelius, Boomerang also supports BCC to CRM features.

4. Boomerang vs Gmelius: Pricing

Boomerang Pricing

Gmelius Pricing

If you’re looking for an alternative to both these apps that cover email productivity, sales engagement, and outreach features, do check out SalesHandy. It is more cost effective compared to Gmelius and Boomerang, with free email tracking. 

A much simpler, more intuitive version of Gmelius’ outreach on SalesHandy is available starting at $7/mo. You can also try SalesHandy’s Paid features for 14 days as part of the free trial, instead of just 7 days on Gmelius.

5. Boomerang vs Gmelius: Analytics

Since Boomerang is purely about email tracking and productivity, it offers a variety of information on your emails and your writing style, in the form of Insights on its web app. Afterward, you’ve granted boomerang access to your emails, it provides you an overview of your Inbox patterns (how many emails you receive, how often you check emails, etc), top contacts and writing style. If you’re looking to improve your inbox productivity and etiquette, the data on Boomerang Insights will be of great help.

Gmelius has a reporting feature, meant to provide you with analytics and insights on your entire team’s performance. It chiefly focuses on outcomes, like the growth of total new conversations, closed conversations, time to close, and assigned conversations across a certain board or team. All things considered, Gmelius’ reporting is a great feature for managers who wish to keep up with the entire team’s performance and productivity across different boards.

6. Boomerang vs Gmelius: Customer support

So in terms of customer support, Boomerang has Live chat for all users and Live chat + Priority email support for  Premium users. Comparatively, displays the chat support option throughout the website and app and was noticeably quick to respond to chat requests. 

Both tools have fairly comprehensive topic coverage on their help page resources. Additionally, Gmelius has a community section where users can interact with each other.

Hence, Gmelius is slightly better equipped in terms of customer support, since it has open channels like the community and easier access to live chat. Moreover, Gmelius was rated higher than Boomerang for its customer service in G2 reviews as well.

7. Conclusion

All things considered, we believe both Boomerang and Gmelius are fairly valuable overall. So if you’re only focusing on email productivity for your sales operations, Boomerang makes for a great choice and is appropriately priced for what it does.

And adding to our Gmelius review, we think it’s a great choice for professionals and teams that rely on email productivity and mass email outreach for their day-to-day.  

Have you tried out either of these tools? Let us know about your favorite features in the comments.