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Andrew Milich / 5.30.2023Home / Email Security
Gmail vs. Outlook for business—which is better?
Not sure which email platform to integrate into your workflow? Read our Gmail vs. Outlook for business comparison to make an informed decision.
An average business user sends and receives 126 emails per day. With this in mind, your chosen email provider can make a significant difference to your workflow. Among the numerous options, two services stand out—Gmail and Outlook.Both providers offer various features that can enhance your productivity, so choosing between them involves diligent research. To help you find the email service that suits your needs, this Gmail vs. Outlook for business comparison will show you what features to focus on and how the two options compare. You will learn about the benefits and drawbacks of each and discover another alternative worth considering.
Source: Gmail screenshotOutlook uses folders that you can create by right-clicking the Folders button in the left-hand menu. It also offers different-colored labels letting you categorize mail visually. Labels are separate from folders, and categorizing an email doesn’t move it to any folders you create, so there might be some confusion in terms of organizing your mail.
Source: Outlook screenshotAnother important feature is the email sending limit, and Outlook is far more generous than Gmail—it offers 10,000 emails daily compared to Gmail’s 2,000. This may not be a concern for smaller teams, but larger businesses might find Gmail too limiting.As for unique features, Gmail offers several useful tools unavailable with Outlook:
Microsoft’s plans come at a similar price, though the higher tiers are slightly more expensive:
Google Workspace also offers a custom Enterprise Plan, while Microsoft 365 has three specific enterprise tiers with obligatory annual commitment:
Upgrade your business privacySkiff's end-to-end encryption and robust security features prioritize safeguarding your business communications
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What to look for in a business email service
When exploring email providers, you should assess four aspects of their solutions:- Features
- Accessibility
- Pricing
- Security
Features
Gmail and Outlook offer similar email management features, though the user experience is different. Outlook comes with a slightly outdated user interface that can make navigation more complex.Email categorization is a good example. Gmail uses labels you can create directly from the inbox. To label an email, all you have to do is click the tag icon in the upper menu and select the label.- Confidential mode—Lets you protect sensitive messages by setting an expiration date and requiring two-factor authentication (2FA)
- Smart Reply—Autocompletes messages to let you compose them faster. While convenient, this feature has been tied to significant privacy concerns
- Large attachments—Sets the attachment limit to 10 GB if you integrate with Google Drive
- Built-in calendar—Lets you stay organized without switching apps
- Custom message alerts—You can customize message alerts according to various criteria to ensure you don’t miss important emails
- Quick Parts—You can save blocks of text and insert them into new messages to streamline your communication
Accessibility
Gmail and Outlook support most browsers and major mobile platforms, so there’s not much difference there. Both solutions also have various accessibility options ensuring people with disabilities can have a pleasant and productive emailing experience.Outlook’s Accessibility Checker scans the email to identify issues that might make it hard to read, such as:- Problems displaying tables
- Low-contrast text
- Object and image alignment issues
Pricing
You can’t buy Gmail or Outlook for business separately—both providers include these services in their comprehensive workplace solutions, Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. This makes sense because email is only a part of a typical online workflow, so you need a robust productivity suite to perform daily tasks.Google Workspace offers three standard business tiers:| Plan | Cost |
| Business Starter | $7.20/user per month ($6 per month billed annually) |
| Business Standard | $14.40/user per month ($12 per month billed annually) |
| Business Plus | $21.60/user per month ($18 per month billed annually) |
| Plan | Cost |
| Business Basic | $7.20/user per month ($6 per month billed annually) |
| Business Standard | $15/user per month ($12.50 per month billed annually) |
| Business Premium | $26.40/user per month ($22 per month billed annually) |
- Microsoft 365 E3—$36/user per month
- Microsoft 365 E5—$57/user per month
- Microsoft 365 F5 (for frontline workers)—$8/user per month
Security
Privacy and security are by far the most important aspects of email services, especially those geared toward businesses. If your provider cannot keep your correspondence from being stolen or eavesdropped on, no feature can make it worth the commitment.Gmail and Outlook have similar security features, and both options are somewhat disappointing. You get standard safety measures like two-factor authentication and spam filtering, but these services suffer from the same issue as most Big Tech providers—a lack of strong encryption.Regardless of which service you choose, your emails will only be protected by the TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocol. This is a basic encryption standard securing your emails while they’re traveling between servers, which has been tied to numerous breaches and vulnerabilities.As for privacy, Google is infamous for its invasive data-mining practices, which extend to Gmail. Outlook may not be as problematic, but the issue of weak security remains. To ensure full protection of sensitive business information, you need a privacy-first email solution.Enhance business productivity securelySkiff's encrypted ecosystem protects your business data, letting you enjoy a seamless collaboration experience
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How privacy-focused email providers safeguard your data
Business information is highly valuable—IBM’s report shows that U.S. businesses lose an average of $9.44 million to data breaches annually. As email is the most common vector for cyberattacks, you must choose an email service that will keep your data secure.Unlike Gmail or Outlook, privacy-first platforms protect your data with end-to-end encryption (E2EE) by default. Email contents and metadata are encrypted on the sender’s device and can’t be seen by anyone besides the recipient with the decryption key. As the key isn’t stored on the provider’s servers, even they can’t decipher your messages.Gmail and Outlook offer the same E2EE standard to business users—Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME). The problem with this protocol is that you must buy an S/MIME certificate separately and configure it for each team member. This can be costly and time-consuming, especially if you have a large team.An even bigger concern is that S/MIME is also prone to vulnerabilities, so your business information might be at risk even if you use it.If you need a simple, cost-effective way of ensuring your correspondence is safe and private at all times, Skiff Mail can be an excellent option.Protect your data with Skiff Mail
Skiff Mail is a trusted partner of privacy-conscious business users. It ensures complete confidentiality and control over your data by safeguarding each email with two separate keys.The public encryption key is shared between the sender and recipient to cipher the message and make it unreadable to all other parties—including Skiff’s team. Only the recipient has the decryption key stored safely on their device, so nobody else can see the email in plaintext.Skiff offers various additional security measures to safeguard your correspondence and account, explained in the following table:
| Security feature | How it works |
| Zero-knowledge login | You can sign up for Skiff without leaving any personal information, and your login credentials won’t be stored on the platform’s servers |
| Two-factor authentication | Skiff enables two-factor authentication with the Authenticator app, which is a more secure alternative to standard options involving a phone number |
| Secure Remote Password | It end-to-end encrypts critical account information—like other encryption keys—to provide an additional security layer |
Maximize your efficiency with Skiff’s numerous features
Unlike many privacy first-solutions, Skiff Mail doesn’t sacrifice usability for security. The intuitive user interface is easy to navigate and features a modern design, eliminating clutter and letting you focus on impactful tasks.The rich free account offers various features typically reserved for paid users, most notably:- Fast email and text search
- Four Skiff.com email aliases letting you manage multiple inboxes in one place
- Schedule and undo send functions
- Custom signatures
- Folders, labels, and filters for convenient mail browsing and organization
Collaborate in a secure environment
When you create a Skiff Mail account, you’ll get access to three end-to-end encrypted products besides Mail:- Skiff Pages is a secure alternative to Google Docs that keeps your files’ contents and metadata encrypted for complete privacy
- Skiff Drive gets you up to 1 TB of end-to-end encrypted storage to safeguard all your sensitive documents, reports, and other files
- Skiff Calendar integrates with Skiff Mail to sync all your events and let you stay organized. It also comes with a built-in video conferencing tool for hosting secure meetings
You can use all four platforms on browsers, iOS, Android, and macOS to make remote work efficient and secure.
Sign up for free and scale as your business grows
You can get started with Skiff in three quick steps:- Visit the signup page
- Choose your account name and password
- Start using Skiff Mail
- 1 TB of storage per user
- Unlimited Pages version history
- 15 custom domains
- 15 Skiff aliases and two short aliases
You can visit the pricing page for the complete overview of features available with each tier. Choose the plan that suits your needs, and protect your correspondence and files with Skiff.
