Free Boomerang Alternatives for Gmail Follow-Ups

You didn't start searching for free Boomerang alternatives on a normal Tuesday. You started when a scheduled send failed to fire, or when the follow-up reminder you counted on never showed up, and Gmail told you Boomerang Basic uses one "message credit" for scheduling, one for a follow-up, one for a read receipt — and you get ten of those a month. That cap is the whole reason this page exists.

The short answer: for scheduling and inbox reminders alone, Gmail's own Schedule Send and Snooze are free with any Gmail account and have no monthly cap — those two features together cover what most people are trying to replace. For genuine follow-up automation that watches for a reply and re-surfaces the thread if one doesn't arrive, Right Inbox, Mailbutler, Mixmax, Streak, Gmelius and FollowUpThen all keep a real $0 tier with their own monthly caps, and each trades a different limit for a different strength.

One honesty note up front, because it changes how you should read this page. We build AI Emaily, and AI Emaily has no permanent free tier — only a 7-day trial on the paid Pro plan. So this list ranks the actual free tools first, and treats what we do as an adjacent paid option at the end, for readers who work out mid-page that what they actually want isn't a follow-up counter at all. Skip that section if free is the whole point; the free tools below are still the right recommendation.

How we compared these#

Each vendor's own live pricing or help page was the source of truth here, not review-site aggregators, because Boomerang-adjacent tools change their free-tier caps regularly and the third-party lists lag. "Free" on this page means a tier that stays $0 with no expiry — a trial that hides the paywall behind a countdown didn't qualify, because that is the same decision Boomerang Basic is already asking you to make.

The comparison sorts on the axis Boomerang users actually hit first: the monthly cap. A tool with a generous cap on scheduling but a stingy one on tracking is a different product from a tool with the reverse shape, and both are different from Gmail's own free features which have no cap at all but also don't do follow-up detection. Where a tool's free plan gates a feature entirely (mobile app, sequences, CRM), that's called out too.

One feature that most free tiers do not do at all is genuine reply detection — the thing Boomerang calls "Boomerang if no reply." It is the expensive feature to run, because someone's server has to watch your Gmail thread continuously, and it is the first feature to disappear when a tool cuts costs on its free plan. Read the shape column on the table with that in mind.

Free Boomerang alternatives at a glance#

Gmail native — the free option most people miss#

Before any extension, Gmail itself covers a real slice of what Boomerang Basic charges credits for. Schedule Send is built into the compose window on both web and mobile, with no monthly cap and no separate app; you write the email, click the arrow next to Send, pick a time, done. Snooze does the inverse — it hides a thread from your inbox and drops it back at the time you choose, which is the exact behaviour of Boomerang's "boomerang this message back to me" credit.

What Gmail's native features do not do is watch a sent thread for a reply and bring it back if none arrives. That is the specific feature Boomerang built its brand on, and no free Gmail setting replaces it. If the only reason you use Boomerang is to schedule an email for 7 a.m. or to snooze an FYI thread until Monday, you can uninstall Boomerang today and lose nothing — the credits were paying for features Gmail has since shipped for free.

Right Inbox — Boomerang shape, low monthly cap#

Right Inbox is the closest structural copy of Boomerang's model — same Gmail extension shape, same feature list, same idea of gating monthly usage on the free tier. The free plan gets you send later and follow-up reminders at a low monthly volume, which is a real match for the Boomerang Basic use case if you send only a handful of scheduled or tracked emails a month.

The gap on the free tier is the same one Boomerang has: heavier features (unlimited tracking, recurring emails, sequences) live on paid plans, and if your real complaint about Boomerang Basic is that ten credits is not enough, Right Inbox's free tier is not going to solve that — it just renames the cap. It is a genuine alternative for very light use and a lateral move for anything heavier.

Mailbutler — free across Gmail, Apple Mail and Outlook#

Mailbutler's free "Tap" tier is worth naming separately because it is the only free option on this page that also runs inside Apple Mail and Outlook, not just Gmail. If your working day switches between Gmail on a laptop and Apple Mail on a phone, Mailbutler is the free tier that follows you across both — a real differentiator that generic "best free Boomerang alternative" lists tend to blur.

On the Gmail side specifically, the free tier includes send-later and manual reminders at a low monthly action cap. Automatic follow-ups — the version where Mailbutler watches for a reply and pings you if none arrives — sit on paid plans. It is a good free tier for the cross-client user and a mediocre free tier for the heavy-follow-up user.

FollowUpThen — no extension, just an email address#

FollowUpThen works in a completely different shape from every other tool on this list, which is why it survives on a free plan where others charge. There is no extension and no Gmail permission — you BCC or CC an address like `[email protected]` on any outgoing email, and if the recipient does not reply in three days, the service resends the thread back to your inbox with the original context attached.

The free plan covers a modest number of reminders a month plus a small allowance of "tasks" (persistent reminders that keep pinging you until you mark the thread done). Because it never touches your Gmail account directly, it also works on any email address you own, not just Gmail — the same trick works from Outlook, Fastmail or a work address without configuration.

Mixmax — scheduling and templates on the free tier#

Mixmax's free plan positions itself around tracked sends, templates and calendar scheduling more than around follow-up reminders, and that shapes what you get: send later works, open and click tracking works at a monthly cap, one-off templates work. The sequences feature — where Mixmax sends a follow-up automatically if no reply arrives — is a paid feature.

For a Boomerang refugee whose real use case was "a scheduled email plus a note to nudge me if they don't reply," Mixmax's free tier covers half the job (the scheduling) and asks you to do the other half manually (the nudge). That is honest, and it is not a criticism of Mixmax — reply detection is expensive to run and every free tier here handles it the same way.

Streak — a CRM disguised as a free scheduler#

Streak's free Personal tier is unusual on this list because it ships a lightweight CRM in the same extension: pipelines, mail merge, tracking and send later all live behind one install, and the free plan gives you a small monthly allowance on each. If you were using Boomerang and separately keeping a spreadsheet of "people I need to follow up with," Streak's free tier collapses those two into one place.

The trade-off is scope: automated sequences with reply detection are paid, and the free tier's monthly caps are low enough that you'll notice them quickly if you send more than a handful of tracked emails a week. It is a good free tier for a solo user with a pipeline of a dozen open threads, not a scale answer.

Gmelius — free tier aimed at small teams#

Gmelius is the free tier on this list built for two or more people rather than a solo user — the paid plans centre on shared Gmail inboxes, kanban boards over threads and team-visible sequences, and the free tier is the on-ramp to that shape. You still get send later, templates and reminders on the free plan, at a monthly cap, so it works fine as a solo Boomerang replacement.

But if you are one person, you are getting the on-ramp to a feature you will never turn on, and one of the more focused single-user tools above is a cleaner fit. Gmelius makes real sense when the follow-up problem is actually a "whose turn is it to reply" problem across a small team, which is a different question from the one this page mostly answers.

AI Emaily — the adjacent paid option, disclosed plainly#

We build AI Emaily, so the honest scoping first: this is not a free Boomerang alternative. There is no permanent free tier. The 7-day trial on the paid Pro plan requires a card, is $0 if you cancel before day 7, and is designed to let you decide whether an AI assistant is worth what it costs — not to let you get 30 free scheduled sends and disappear. On the specific axis this page ranks by, we lose to every tool above.

What we do differently is worth naming so you can decide whether it is what you actually want. Every free tool on this page — including Boomerang itself — solves the follow-up problem by counting: you get ten credits, fifty reminders, five scheduled sends, and when you hit the cap the workflow stops. AI Emaily solves it by drafting. Copilot mode writes the follow-up in your voice from your Personal Context brain and per-client profiles, waits for your approval, and sends when you click; every action lands in an audit log and undo exists for the ones you'll want to walk back.

The reason to consider paying instead of picking one of the free tiers above is not "more credits" — it is that the manual step ("remember to write the follow-up") disappears. If what you actually hated about Boomerang Basic was the counter, one of the free tools above just gives you a bigger counter. If what you actually hated was writing the same follow-up email over and over, that is the different job we do. The client runs across Gmail, Outlook and IMAP, not just Gmail, which matters if your Boomerang problem is really a multi-account problem.

The concession, plainly: for someone who sends a handful of scheduled emails a month and wants zero recurring cost, none of that matters and FollowUpThen or Gmail's native features are the right answer. We would rather you use the right free tool for a light workload than pay us for a workload the free tools already cover.

How to choose for your situation#

Match the tool to the workload, not to the brand of the tool you're leaving. "Free Boomerang alternative" describes six different problems, and each one has a different best answer on the list above.

• You mostly schedule sends and snooze threads: Gmail native does both, free, no cap, no extension. Stop paying for credits.
• You need reply-triggered follow-ups and only send a handful a month: FollowUpThen is the cleanest fit because the whole product runs by email — no extension, no permission scopes, works from any address.
• You want the Boomerang-shape extension at zero cost: Right Inbox is the direct copy of the model and the free tier is Boomerang Basic's ceiling under a different name.
• You switch between Gmail and Apple Mail during the day: Mailbutler is the only free tier here that covers both.
• You want the free tracking and templates as much as the scheduling: Mixmax's free tier weights toward those features.
• You keep a spreadsheet of who owes you a reply: Streak collapses the spreadsheet into the inbox on its free Personal tier.
• The follow-up problem is actually a two-person shared-inbox problem: Gmelius is built for that shape and the free tier is the on-ramp.
• You realised mid-page you want the follow-up drafted for you, not counted: AI Emaily on the 7-day trial is that shape, and it is paid — see /pricing.

What happens if you do nothing#

If you stay on Boomerang Basic past the 10-credit cap, the practical outcome is silent — Boomerang stops scheduling new sends and stops setting new reminders that month, and your existing scheduled emails still fire. The failure mode is a follow-up you thought was set and wasn't, which is exactly the failure mode that made you search for this page in the first place.

Switching is lower-stakes than it feels, because none of these tools own your mail. Your messages stay in Gmail either way; picking one of the free tiers above is a matter of installing an extension (or, for FollowUpThen, using a new BCC address) and letting your existing inbox stay put. It is worth testing one for a week before you commit, because the cap you'll actually hit is workload-shaped and no comparison table can predict which one that will be for you.