Business Email That Isn't Google or Microsoft

For most small businesses I work with, business email comes down to two defaults: Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. Both are good products. Both are also American tech giants whose business model heavily involves data collection. If that bothers you — or if you handle genuinely sensitive client information — there's a third option worth knowing about: Proton.

What Proton actually is

Proton is a Swiss company that started with end-to-end encrypted email (ProtonMail) and has since expanded into a small suite of privacy-focused products: mail, calendar, cloud storage, password manager, and VPN. The pitch is consistent across all of them: your data is encrypted in a way that even Proton themselves can't read it.

For a small business, the relevant pieces are:

• Proton Mail — Email at your own domain (you@yourbusiness.com.au), with encryption that goes beyond what Gmail or Outlook offer
• Proton Drive — Cloud storage equivalent to Google Drive or OneDrive
• Proton Calendar — Encrypted calendar that syncs across devices
• Proton VPN — A respected VPN, useful for testing how your website appears in different countries
• Proton Pass — Password manager

The whole bundle is offered as a single business plan, similar in price to Google Workspace.

When Proton actually makes sense

It's not the right answer for everyone. The clearest cases where Proton wins:

• You handle sensitive client data. Lawyers, accountants, healthcare professionals, anyone bound by professional confidentiality requirements. End-to-end encryption isn't just nice-to-have — it's a compliance argument.
• Privacy is part of your brand. If you sell to customers who care about how their data is handled, using Google to send your customer emails is a quiet inconsistency.
• You want out of the Google/Microsoft ecosystem. Some small business owners are quietly tired of having every part of their business tied to two American advertising companies.
• You're starting fresh. It's much easier to begin a new business on Proton than to migrate an existing 50,000-email Google Workspace account.

Where it falls short

Honest comparison:

• It's not Microsoft Word. If your team already lives in Word and Excel, Proton's office tools won't cut it. Worth noting: you can run Microsoft 365 alongside Proton if you want — they're not mutually exclusive.
• Calendar and contacts integration is fiddlier. Especially if you're booking meetings with people on Outlook or Google. Things mostly work, with rougher edges than the dominant platforms.
• Migration from Google or Microsoft is real work. Years of email, contacts, files, and calendars don't move themselves.
• It's not free. The free tier is limited — for business use you're paying.

Where it fits in your hosting setup

Email hosting is separate from website hosting, even though they share the domain. PHAS (the hosting I recommend) doesn't offer email — they leave that to specialists, on the basis that email is a different and harder problem than website hosting. So your domain might be registered with one company, your website hosted with another, and your email handled by a third — Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Proton, Fastmail, or someone else. I help clients pick whichever fits their situation, then handle the DNS records that make it all hang together.

The bottom line

For most small businesses, Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 is the path of least resistance, and there's nothing wrong with that. But Proton is a real third option — particularly if privacy matters to you professionally, or if you'd just rather not have your email going through US servers.

Get in touch if you'd like a hand picking an email setup that matches your business, or migrating from one provider to another.