# DaySurface vs Composio Gmail

> A Gmail product, not a Gmail endpoint in a 500-app gateway. Composio's strength is breadth: one managed endpoint and hosted OAuth across hundreds of SaaS apps, with Gmail exposed as a generic search / read / draft / send toolkit. DaySurface trades breadth for depth on email - an interactive composer and ranked-inbox dashboard rendered in the chat - and it's open source, so you self-host with your own credentials instead of routing mail through a proprietary gateway.

Composio Gmail (Aggregator gateway): Gmail as one toolkit inside a managed 500+ app MCP gateway with hosted OAuth.
- Composio Gmail: https://composio.dev/toolkits/gmail
- DaySurface: https://daysurface.com

Accurate as of June 2026. Comparison reflects publicly documented capabilities as of June 2026. The MCP ecosystem moves fast - if something here is out of date, open an issue and we'll fix it.

## Which to choose

- Choose DaySurface if: email is the job: you want an interactive in-chat inbox, full control of your own deployment, and the ability to run the same tools over CLI and HTTP.
- Choose Composio Gmail if: you need one managed endpoint spanning many SaaS apps and you don't want to run any infrastructure yourself.

## Side by side

| Capability | DaySurface | Composio Gmail |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Interactive in-chat UI (MCP Apps) - Composer + ranked-inbox dashboard rendered inside the chat client. | yes | no (JSON only) |
| Built-in inbox triage & ranking - An importance-ranked inbox out of the box, not just raw search. | yes | no (raw search) |
| One codebase → CLI + MCP + HTTP - Identical tools across every interface, no duplicated logic. | yes | no (hosted endpoint) |
| Zero-install (remote streamable HTTP) - Connect by pasting a URL - nothing to install locally. | yes | yes |
| Open source & self-hostable - Run the full server on your own infrastructure. | yes | no (proprietary) |
| Minimal scope + encrypted tokens - A single Gmail scope with tokens encrypted at rest. | yes | yes (managed) |

## What makes DaySurface different

### Interactive UI, not just JSON
DaySurface renders MCP Apps - sandboxed UI that lives inside the chat. Review and edit a draft in a real composer, then triage a ranked inbox in an embedded dashboard, all without leaving your agent. The inbox ranking and triage flow exist because the interactive surface makes them useful; other Gmail MCPs return raw search results and stop there.

### MCP, CLI, API interfaces
Every tool is a pure function in a shared registry, exposed identically over a CLI, an MCP server, and a plain HTTP API. Build once and call it from your shell, any MCP client, or a script - behavior never drifts between interfaces. Most Gmail MCPs are single-transport: stdio-only, or a hosted endpoint you can't run locally.

### Open source and self-hostable
The whole server is open source and ships with a Dockerfile and deploy config, so you can run it on your own infrastructure with your own OAuth credentials and encrypted token storage. Aggregator gateways route your mail through a proprietary service you don't control.

## More

- All comparisons: https://daysurface.com/compare.md
- Get connected: https://daysurface.com/connect.md
- Full description for LLMs: https://daysurface.com/llms-full.txt