Business email providers compared

The one thing that separates these eight more than any feature is how the bill grows. Per-user providers charge for every address, so hello@ and support@ cost as much as a person. Flat providers charge for the account. For one mailbox the prices look alike. For ten, they are $6 a month at one end and $70 at the other.

Ours, so weigh this paragraph accordingly. One price for unlimited mailboxes on your domain, the DNS records placed at your registrar for you, and newsletters, transactional mail and an API on the same account from $12. Storage is the modest part, 10 GB on the entry plan and 200 GB on the next. If your company has more addresses than people, this is the cheapest reliable option by a wide margin and the least setup. If you need a document suite, it is not one.

The cheapest real mailbox anyone sells, with a proper web client and a free tier for up to five users on one domain, though the free tier is app and web only with no IMAP. For a single person or a family business with two addresses it is hard to argue with. The DNS setup is manual, and the wider Zoho suite is enormous in a way that some people love and some find heavy.

The nicest mail client of the eight, fast and thoughtfully built, with excellent calendar and contacts. It is priced per user, so a team of ten pays $50 a month, and it does its own DNS guidance well but does not place the records for you. If you are one person who lives in email all day and wants the best tool, choose this.

Gmail plus Docs, Drive, Meet and an admin console, at $7 a seat on the Business Starter plan. Ten people is $70 a month, and every role address you add is another seat. If your company actually works in Docs and Meet, the price buys a lot. If you only want email on your domain, you are paying for a suite to get a mailbox.

Exchange, Outlook, Teams and the web versions of Office, at $7 a seat. The same logic as Google applies: superb if Teams and Excel are how you work, expensive if they are not. Setup is the most involved of the eight, and shared mailboxes are the trick for role addresses if you go this way.

End-to-end encryption, Swiss jurisdiction, and a company that has staked everything on privacy. It costs about as much per seat as Google, and the encryption means ordinary IMAP needs Proton's bridge app on the desktop. If encryption is a requirement rather than a preference, this is the only one of the eight that truly delivers it.

A clean, modern mailbox sold mostly through web hosts and registrars, which is why it often appears as an add-on at checkout. Per mailbox, so ten addresses is $24.90 a month. Good if you are already buying hosting from a partner that bundles it, less compelling bought on its own.

Aimed at very small businesses, with a free .co.site subdomain if you do not own a domain, which is convenient and also the catch: you never own that address. On your own domain it starts at $2.49 a mailbox, so ten is $24.90 a month. Pleasant to use, and honest about who it is for.

So: one person, Zoho for price or Fastmail for pleasure. A company with more addresses than people, Faivelo. A team that lives in Docs or Teams, the suite it lives in. A company for which encryption is non-negotiable, Proton. Whichever you pick, count your addresses before you count your people, and make sure the host will set your DNS records for you or at least tell you exactly what to paste.