Proton Mail vs StartMail Comparison

Feature	Proton Mail Visit →	StartMail Visit →
Overview
Rating	8.5	6.4
Pricing	$4.99/moMail Plus (individual, annual) $12.99/moProton Unlimited (individual, annual) Show billing detailsHide billing details Mail Plus (individual, annual): $59.88/year at renewal ($47.88 first year with the introductory rate) Proton Unlimited (individual, annual): $155.88/year at renewal ($119.88 first year with the introductory rate)	$4.99/moPersonal (annual) $6.99/moBusiness (annual) Show billing detailsHide billing details Personal (annual): $59.88/year Business (annual): $83.88/year
Free tier	Limited free tier Show detailsHide details 1 GB storage, 1 email address, 150 messages/day, 10 hide-my-email aliases, no custom domain	Paid only
Established	2014	2013
Platforms	WindowsmacOSLinuxAndroidiOS	Not specified
Privacy
Jurisdiction	Switzerland Show detailsHide details Proton AG, Route de la Galaise 32, 1228 Plan-les-Ouates, Geneva. Since June 2024 the primary shareholder is the non-profit Proton Foundation, also based in Geneva. Proton Europe sàrl (Luxembourg) is the designated EU GDPR representative.	Netherlands Show detailsHide details StartMail B.V., registered in Zeist, Netherlands. Servers are company-owned hardware in locked cabinets inside Dutch data centers — not third-party cloud infrastructure.
Independent security audit	Securitum 2021 Show audit detailsHide audit details Source-code security audit of the redesigned Proton Mail web client and Proton Calendar, prior to release	None on record
Source code	Fully open source	Closed source
Zero-access encryption	Yes	No
Intra-provider E2EE	Yes	No
External PGP	Manual import	Native
Past data breach	No	No
Telemetry	On unless you opt out	On unless you opt out
Features
Hosting	Cloud	Cloud
Custom domain support	Yes	Yes
Aliases	Unlimited	Unlimited
Anti-spam approach	PhishGuard flags spoofing and phishing using sender authentication (SPF/DKIM/DMARC) and metadata such as headers, link URLs and attachment hashes, not message content, since encryption prevents Proton from reading it; a machine-learning model retrains on user feedback (marking spam/phishing or rescuing a message from spam).	Personal, per-user Bayesian spam filter (SpamAssassin) trained by the user marking mail as spam or not; the training data is stored inside that user's own encrypted vault rather than pooled across the service.
Bundled services	CalendarDriveVPNPass	Not specified