FAQ

To unify everything you do into a single system. There are a few main benefits of this:

1. **For you:** access everything with one login, from one interface that's super fast with keyboard shortcuts. Basically, just making everything centralized for you personally, so you don't have 27 tabs open, and can search across everything.
2. **For your agents:** the ability to access everything in a unified way. Yes, you can connect all your tools via MCP, but we've devoted a lot of time to creating a nice "UI" for your agents so they can be most useful, with the least number of tokens, and not suffer from recall issues (failing to find things); for example if you ask "what's the latest status of \[project alamo\]" your Claude has to search Slack, Notion, Email, Drive, etc., and it might fail to understand the latest status due to conflicting messages and docs, and not know which is latest. And after all of that, Claude still might not have access to a Zoom recording (or was it not recorded 🤦‍♂️?) that holds the actual true latest status of project alamo. This is the benefit of Kuuumba: unified context.
3. **For your team:** having everything in one place. This is actually why we built Kuuumba in the first place: as our last startup scaled to 20 people, the sales team lived in HubSpot/Salesforce, the engineers in Linear, and Notion became abandoned ground. I call this the Notion Balkanization... it was good to start, but when we need to get serious, we wanted best-in-class systems for each team not a bunch of markdown files, databases and custom integrations. But the problem with the balkanization is that we then had multiple sources of truth, siloes between teams, and just chaos. Kuuumba is the first platform that gives you both (i) dedicated, best-in-class CRM, ticketing, email, messaging, docs and also (ii) a single integrated platform. This is only possible because it's designed under one roof concurrently, not sprawled over years or pieced together via acquisitions and half-baked integrations. It's built like an iPhone, as a single ecosystem.

Kuuumba is a replacement for Notion, and we've been inspired by Ivan and the Notion team. They built a great product, but our belief is that they got some core premises wrong.

Notion is based in markdown and databases vs. Kuuumba has purpose-built modules. Yes, you can sort of build a CRM in Notion. Yes, Notion has email, but it's a separate app that they got through an acquisition of the Skiff team. Notion doesn't have messaging or traditional file storage. Notion promises that you can build arbitrary software out of databases and markdown files, but this is the wrong level of abstraction. In reality, you need to go to the code level; and with agents now, that's what you want anyways. Notion is the worst of all worlds: limited customization, rate-limited API, closed-source, worst-in-class for each specific team vs. domain-specific tools (e.g. Linear for Engineering, HubSpot for sales, etc.) and for note taking it's bloated vs. Obsidian. We are inspired by them and without their 2010s efforts the productivity category wouldn't be the same, but we believe the world looks different today and we've made fundamentally better/different decisions.

See our comparison video here: [https://youtu.be/hyU1XYmxkYM?si=iGPivxvZpQ13oig4](https://youtu.be/hyU1XYmxkYM?si=iGPivxvZpQ13oig4).

You can still **integrate** your Notion with Kuuumba if you want, so that agents in Kuuumba can access your Notion via MCP. Go to Settings -\> Connectors -\> Notion.

To **import** your Notion content and migrate away from Notion to Kuuumba, just connect it using the above and then ask a Kuuumba agent to import your Notion docs as Kuuumba docs. You could also use Kuuumba MCP.

Before Kuuumba, we used to be Superhuman users. In designing Kuuumba's email block, we were heavily inspired by Superhuman. Kuuumba is like Superhuman but better. We support multiple email accounts in the same inbox. We have a shared inbox ("omni-box") between messages, email, @mentions and tasks. One thing to check, not four or more.

The same <kbd>j</kbd> <kbd>k</kbd> <kbd>e</kbd> shortcuts you're familiar with are available in Kuuumba. Kuuumba does not integrate with Superhuman, because Superhuman is just a wrapper on Gmail; we integrate with Gmail instead. There's no reason you can't use both, but most Kuuumba users find they no longer need Superhuman.

Channels in Kuuumba are designed to be quieter and more focused on technical conversations vs. Slack. Replies are shown inline for the first few, so every time there's a reply you don't need to open the thread. It looks more like Reddit, more organized, unlike Slack which makes it quite difficult to remember which channel or thread-in-which-channel a certain conversation happened in.

Other than making it less noisy, Kuuumba doesn't change much about chat compared to Slack or Discord or any other chat client. The main benefit is that it's deeply integrated with the rest of your workspace so you can @mention anything. **When you mention something it is shared with all members of the channel.** If somebody is added to the channel, they gain access to everything shared in it; if they are removed, they lose that access. This **"channel-based sharing"** prevents footguns that occur with Notion and Slack, or Notion and Docs, etc. where people don't have access to things and need to request access. In Kuuumba, it works like magic.

If you're not ready to migrate off Slack, or if you need to maintain Slack for archival reasons or Slack Connect, etc., you can integrate Kuuumba to Slack via MCP. Settings -\> Connectors -\> and add the custom MCP for Slack.

Kuuumba is not an email server, it's just an email client. We integrate with your existing Google Workspace or Gmail account. Outlook and custom IMAP/SMTP email have been a popular request and we plan on adding them soon.

Yes, you can under our AGPL license, but as of June 2026, this hasn't been our primary focus.

The hosted version is the one that works with the iOS app and has necessary Apple approval, Google Mail approval, and GitHub approval to integrate your PRs. We're hosted on AWS and maintain a SOC 2 Type II audit. We sublicense LiveKit for video calls, FusionAuth for authentication, PostHog for analytics, and so on, so you'd have to maintain licenses to those services or disable them.

Our main focus right now is on making Kuuumba great, but we also want to make it easier to self-host. We hope to turn our attention to this later this year (2026). For FedRAMP and other clients who need Kuuumba on their own infrastructure, please contact [self-host@kuumba.dev](mailto:self-host@kuumba.dev) and we can work with you to get it running. Note that self-hosting isn't a prerequisite for HIPAA or EU data residency — we sign BAAs and host in the EU on the managed version too, see [Security](/security).

Yes, you can open a PR on our monorepo at https://github.com/kuumba-dev/kuumba if there's something that catches your eye and you want to improve. If you want to help but you're not sure where to start please email teo@kuumba.dev.

Kuuumba is fully open source. Not "open core." We were previously source-available under the BSL but on May 31 2026 we moved to a fully open-source model under the AGPLv3. The AGPL is a copyleft license meaning derivative works also need to be open source. That means that if you build on top of Kuuumba, you need to keep your code open source under the AGPLv3. If you want to build on top of Kuuumba and not use the AGPLv3 (i.e. closed-source or an incompatible license), you need to obtain a different license from us. Contact licensing@kuumba.dev to discuss with us.

1. From our hosted version, like any other SaaS or AI product.
   2. From people who build on top of Kuuumba and do not want to use our AGPLv3 license, and thus pay us money for a different license.

We are in the business of making a good product and charging you money for our hosted version of that product. We are not interested in your data. We don't train models on your content, and we hold zero-retention agreements with the model providers we route to. Security covers encryption, certifications, and retention in detail; see our privacy policy and terms of service for full information.

Kuuumba is designed for solo and team use. Of course, everything is better with friends. Teams exist to help you collaborate better as a group. Teams give:

1. Auto-shared emails, tasks and calls, without having to explicitly share everything. For example, when you're working as a team you want all emails to be shared in our CRM module, engineering tasks should be visible by everyone, and having all calls transcribed and stored to the Team gives you a nice team-level memory of all of your conversations.
2. Team-level memory for your agents. Agents remember not just your personal chat history (like with Claude or ChatGPT's memory system), but everything going on across tasks your team is working on, emails, docs, and calls that the team has had recently!

To create a team, head to "Team" in the bottom left.

We designed Kuuumba for ourselves, for our personal use, but mostly for our Series A tech startup. There are many types of companies using Kuuumba today other than tech startups: consultancies, agencies, small and medium sized businesses, large tech companies, consumer brands, students, and individual teams at all kinds of companies.

Yes, we have raised ~$30M led by a16z with participation from BoxGroup, 3kVC and others.