What is Narlo?
Narlo is a shared business-context workspace that connects to the email account you already have. It is not an AI email assistant, and it is not a traditional CRM. This page answers the questions people most often ask about what it actually does.
What is Narlo?
Narlo connects to your existing email account (Gmail today, most IMAP-capable providers generally) and gives your team a separate, shared workspace for the business context that matters: customers, organisations, quotes, and sales opportunities. It captures and organises that context as you work, links it to the right person and company, and makes it easy to find again — without exposing your inbox to anyone else.
Who is Narlo for?
Small, relationship-driven teams — roughly 2 to 30 people — who run their business substantially through email: independent and emerging brands, distributors, wholesalers, foodservice suppliers, small sales teams, founder-led businesses, and account managers. Narlo's account and pipeline fields are currently built most specifically for brands selling through independent retail, grocery, specialty retail, and foodservice, but the underlying problem and privacy model apply to any small team that needs to remember customers together.
What problem does Narlo solve?
Important customer knowledge gets trapped in individual inboxes — who said what to a retailer, what was quoted, what's still open, what needs to happen next. A shared team inbox fixes the visibility problem but exposes everyone's email to everyone with access. A full CRM fixes the record-keeping problem but creates a second system that needs constant manual upkeep. Narlo is built for the gap between those two: your inbox stays private, and a separate layer holds exactly the business context your team should see together.
Does Narlo replace Gmail?
No. Narlo connects to your existing Gmail account via Google's own sign-in — you keep your address, your provider, and your existing inbox. Narlo adds a shared business-context workspace alongside it; it doesn't ask you to migrate your email anywhere.
Does Narlo replace Outlook?
Not fully, today. Narlo can connect to many IMAP-capable email accounts generally, but there is no native Microsoft 365/Outlook connection yet, and some Microsoft 365 organisations disable basic IMAP access in favour of their own modern-auth login — in that case, a direct connection may not currently work. Native Outlook support is a planned improvement, not a current claim.
Does Narlo replace a CRM?
It replaces the need for one on a small team, more than it replaces a specific product. Narlo has a real underlying data model for customers, organisations, quotes, and a fixed opportunity pipeline — but it ships with no configuration, no custom fields to build, and no workflow to design before your team gets value. If your business already depends on a full CRM's reporting, automation, or integration depth, Narlo is not trying to replace that.
Does Narlo use AI?
AI exists in the Narlo codebase but is off by default and is not part of how Narlo is positioned or used today. Narlo's current value — capturing, organising, and surfacing business context — does not depend on AI at all.
What does Narlo do without AI?
Everything it does today: deterministic contact identity (the same email address always resolves to the same person — never silently merged), a shared customer/organisation/quote/opportunity layer, workspace-wide search across that business data, and "Retail Guru" — a set of fixed, fully explainable rules that surface things like accounts gone quiet, quotes with no follow-up, or overdue next actions. Every one of those insights can be traced back to the exact data that triggered it. Nothing is AI-generated or scored opaquely.
How does Narlo handle mailbox privacy?
Message bodies and attachments are visible only to the person who connected that mailbox. Being a workspace owner or admin never grants access to anyone else's mailbox content — there is no "view all employee email" permission in Narlo's design, by architecture, not by policy. The only way anyone else gains access to a specific mailbox is an explicit, revocable grant from the person who connected it. See the security & privacy page for the full model.
Can employees keep their email private?
Yes. That's the default, not an option to configure. A teammate's inbox stays theirs unless they choose to share access to it.
Can teams share selected business context?
Yes — customers, organisations, quotes, and opportunities are shared across the workspace today, visible to any team member with business-record access, independent of who created them. What Narlo does not yet have is a per-record privacy dial (for example, "share this one account with my team but not the rest of the workspace") — today, sharing a business record makes it visible workspace-wide. Finer-grained, per-record sharing is a planned direction, not a current feature, and this page will be updated if and when it ships.
How is Narlo different from Front?
Front is a shared-inbox platform — a mailbox you connect becomes visible to everyone on the team with access to that channel. That's the product working as intended; it's just a different privacy boundary than Narlo's. Narlo never shares a mailbox by default, to anyone, including a workspace admin. What's shared instead is a separate business record you deliberately create or link.
How is Narlo different from Missive?
Missive, like Front, is built around shared team inboxes with internal comments and chat on top. Visibility is granted at the mailbox level. Narlo's mailbox connection stays private to the individual who connected it; the shared layer is a separate set of business records, not the inbox itself.
How is Narlo different from Superhuman?
Superhuman is a fast, individual email client with no shared inbox at any tier — in that respect it's closer to Narlo's privacy stance than Front or Missive. The difference is the shared layer: Superhuman has no built-in business-record system for customers, organisations, or opportunities — it integrates out to a separate CRM like HubSpot or Salesforce instead of providing one. Narlo's shared business-context layer is native and included.
How is Narlo different from Shortwave?
Shortwave adds team features — shared threads and labels — on top of your own Gmail, which is architecturally close to Narlo's "connect your existing account" approach. The difference is the same one as Front/Missive: Shortwave's sharing happens at the thread/label level once a teammate is invited in, rather than through a separate, deliberately-created business record with its own privacy boundary.
See it against your own inbox.
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