Business Gmail vs. personal Gmail—a concise breakdown

Thinking about signing up for Gmail’s paid plan? Read this business Gmail vs. personal Gmail comparison to learn if it’s worth the investment.

Gmail’s free account comes with a decent set of features suitable for casual to regular users. It may be too limiting if you need a comprehensive email service for work, in which case you might consider upgrading to a paid plan.To help you decide whether Gmail’s business tiers are worth switching to, this business Gmail vs. personal Gmail comparison will show you what you get if you upgrade. You’ll also learn about an alternative to this popular provider that might be more suitable for your needs.

Elevate business security with Skiff MailSkiff Mail's end-to-end encryption ensures sensitive business data stays private and secure

Gmail—personal vs. business account compared

Gmail is a part of Google Workspace, so you can’t buy it separately—you must subscribe to one of the plans encompassing all of Google’s collaboration tools. There are three fixed plans to choose from:

Plan	Cost
Business Starter	$7.20/user per month ($6/ month with annual billing)
Business Standard	$14.40/user per month ($12/ month with annual billing)
Business Plus	$21.60/user per month ($18/ month with annual billing)

There’s also the custom Enterprise plan, for which you can contact Google’s sales team.Each plan offers different features, so we’ll compare paid options to the free account from four perspectives:

Features
Storage
Customer service
Security

Personal vs. business Gmail—feature availability

The first notable feature you get with every paid Gmail plan is a custom email address. Instead of your email ending with @gmail.com, it can include your company name. This might contribute to your business’ reputation and trustworthiness.All business tiers also remove ads from your inbox, which are quite obstructive and invasive in the free account. They’re also based on your activity—which Google tracks to target you with personalized ads—so this raises some concerning privacy questions.

Source: Gmail screenshotIf you subscribe to a business account, you’ll get access to the Admin Console—an account management platform unavailable with the free plan. Among various options, it lets you set specific account permissions for other users in your organization to limit information sharing. For instance, you can restrict file sharing to ensure sensitive data can’t be sent outside certain departments.There aren’t many feature differences besides the above when it comes to Gmail specifically. Note that other Google Workspace tools will get expanded usability if you upgrade, increasing the plans’ value for money.

Business vs. personal Gmail—storage

A free Google account comes with 15 GB of storage shared across all platforms, including Gmail. This likely isn’t enough for an average business user because Google Drive files might fill up the space quite quickly.Each business tier comes with expanded storage:

Starter—30 GB per user
Standard—2 TB per user
Plus—5 TB per user

Once you commit to a plan, you can’t change the storage separately. Only the Enterprise plan allows you to request additional space as needed.Overall, storage isn’t Gmail’s strong point, especially since many competitors are more generous with it. For instance, Outlook’s lowest-tier business account gets you 50 GB of dedicated email storage alongside 1 TB of drive storage for the same price as Google’s Business Starter.

Gmail for business vs. personal account—customer support

With a free Gmail account, you get 24/7 support for emergency technical assistance. Support is available through several channels, most notably by phone and chat. The average response time is around four hours with standard support, so you’ll need to upgrade to shorten it.The problem is priority support isn’t included in any of the fixed business plans. You must buy it separately, in which case you can choose from two options:

Enhanced support
Premium support

The following screenshot shows what you get with each option:

Source: Google Workplace supportOnly the Enterprise plan comes with Enhanced support included, so even if you upgrade to it, you’d still face additional costs to get access to the highest support tier. There are no fixed prices as the cost is calculated based on your needs, so you can contact the sales team for detailed information.

Business Gmail vs. personal account—security

Gmail isn’t a particularly secure email provider, especially if you use the free version. You get a few basic protection measures, most notably:

Two-factor authentication
Spam and phishing filtering
Malware protection
Confidential mode letting you password-protect emails and set an expiration date for them

Paid plans offer some additional security layers, such as group-based policy controls allowing you to limit access to sensitive information. If you choose the Enterprise plan, you also get advanced measures like data loss prevention and a dedicated security center.Even with all of the above security layers, Gmail might not provide adequate security because of the weak encryption it uses. The platform relies on the TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocol by default, regardless of whether you’re a free or paid user.TLS protects your emails in transit but doesn’t shield them while they’re idle on Google’s servers. Such partial protection can be quite dangerous, especially since Google has been a target of many cyberattacks.Your email provider must offer end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to ensure comprehensive protection of your correspondence. E2EE encrypts a message before it leaves the user’s device, ensuring only the recipient with a private decryption key can decipher it.Gmail doesn’t offer E2EE with any of the standard business tiers. You must upgrade to the Enterprise plan to get optional S/MIME encryption. You’d have to buy an S/MIME certificate for each user in your organization and configure it in Gmail, which is neither cost-effective nor convenient.This is why Gmail is far from the best option if data safety and privacy are your priorities. If you want to safeguard your emails and minimize the chances of confidential information being stolen, you need a privacy-first email solution.

Safeguard your professional communication with E2EESkiff Mail provides robust privacy features and a user-friendly interface for all your business needs

The importance of choosing a secure email service

Cybercrime is on the rise, and it can have devastating consequences on a business—according to research from 2019, 60% of small businesses don’t survive longer than six months after falling victim to an attack.Even though Gmail’s paid plans offer some appealing features, they don’t matter much if your correspondence stays exposed to hackers and other malicious parties. That’s why you need a privacy-focused email provider capable of keeping your sensitive information safe.Such solutions use advanced security measures like end-to-end encryption and a no-logs policy to minimize the attack surface and give you full control of your data. Unfortunately, such protection often comes at the cost of user-friendliness and feature availability.To remove the need for compromising and let every user enjoy complete privacy while maximizing their productivity, Skiff came up with an innovative solution—Skiff Mail.

Skiff Mail—cutting-edge security paired with a rich feature set

Skiff Mail is an end-to-end encrypted service offering advanced protection to free and paid users alike. The platform uses two separate keys—public and private—to ensure nobody but the sender and recipient can access an email’s contents.The public key encrypts the message and is shared between the sender and recipient. The private decryption key is created by the user and stays on their device, so nobody else can decipher the message, including Skiff’s team.For additional protection, Skiff offers the following security layers:

Zero-knowledge login—You don’t need to leave any sensitive information to get started with Skiff, and your credentials aren’t recorded or stored on the platform’s servers
Two-factor authentication—Skiff uses the Authenticator app for two-factor authentication, so you can secure your account without leaving a phone number
Secure Remote Password—Used to encrypt sensitive account data, such as your encryption keys

Skiff’s whitepaper elaborates more on these security measures, so you can read it for additional information. The platform is open source to ensure all protection layers can be verified, and the codebase is available on GitHub.

Streamline your workflow with Skiff’s numerous features

Besides strong email protection, Skiff offers everything you need to stay productive—you can get up to:

1 TB of end-to-end encrypted storage
Fast email and text search
15 Skiff.com aliases and two short aliases
15 custom domains
Schedule, undo send, and autoreply features
Folders, labels, and filters
Custom signatures

Skiff Mail is also among the best email platforms for crypto enthusiasts—it integrates with numerous wallets, including Coinbase, MetaMask, and BitKeep.

You can sign up for a free account to explore everything that Skiff Mail has to offer and choose from three affordable plans based on your needs:

Plan	Cost
Essential	From $3/month
Pro	From $8/month
Business	From $12/month

Priority customer support is available with Pro and Business tiers at no extra cost, so you can rely on Skiff’s experts for any assistance you need.Skiff Mail is available on all major browsers, iOS, Android, and MacOS, so you can secure your emails on various devices.

Get access to Skiff’s E2EE workspace

You can create a Skiff account in three simple steps:

Visit the signup page
Choose your account name and password
Start using Skiff Mail

To ensure a secure workflow beyond email correspondence, Skiff offers three additional end-to-end encrypted platforms:

Skiff Pages—A secure document creation and editing tool that keeps your files’ contents and metadata fully encrypted. Skiff Pages offers numerous project management features like flexible task delegation, sharing controls, and real-time collaboration
Skiff Drive—You can store files of any type and ensure your confidential information is safe from unauthorized access. The platform also supports optional integration with the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) for decentralized cloud storage
Skiff Calendar—It automatically syncs with Skiff Mail to let you stay organized and schedule events. You can create shared calendars and hold private meetings with the built-in video conferencing tool

If you need a more secure alternative to Google Workspace, Skiff’s ecosystem can be an excellent option. You can transfer all your conversations from Gmail in a single click to safeguard them immediately. Unencrypted copies won’t be stored, so you’ll have complete privacy as soon as you migrate.

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