Choosing an email provider for your small business

At some point every small business outgrows a personal Gmail address or the free mailbox that came with its website. You want mail at your own domain, you want it to not go down, and you want it to stop being one more thing you worry about. So you start looking, and within about ten minutes you’re staring at a wall of plans, tiers, and add-ons that all sound the same.

Here’s the good news: for most small businesses and practices, this is a smaller decision than it looks, and there are really only three answers worth considering. Let’s walk through them the way we’d walk through it with a client, plainly, and with an honest recommendation at the end.

First, one thing to get out of the way, because it’s the most common mistake we see.

Your email provider is not your email app

You can read your mail in whatever you like, the Gmail app, Outlook, Apple Mail on your phone. That’s the app. The provider is the company that actually runs your mailboxes, stores your mail, and keeps it flowing. Those are separate choices. You can use Google Workspace and still read everything in Outlook if that’s what your team is used to. So don’t pick a provider just because you like a particular app’s look. Pick the provider on what matters underneath: reliability, security, price, and how much of a headache it is to run.

Now, the three real options.

Google Workspace

This is what we run our own business on, and it’s what we recommend first for most small businesses and practices. Not because it’s trendy, but because it does the boring things well and gets out of your way.

You get mail at your domain through Gmail, which most people already know how to use, so training is close to zero. It’s browser-first, meaning everything works from any device with a web browser, no software to install, no “which version am I on.” Shared calendars, video calls, and shared documents all come in the same package. The entry plan, Business Starter, runs about $7 per user per month on an annual plan (roughly $8.40 if you pay month to month), which for a small team is genuinely affordable.

Where it shines is simplicity. If your team lives in a browser, works from a mix of laptops and phones, and doesn’t want to think about their email system, Workspace tends to just work. Setup is straightforward, the admin controls are clear enough that a non-specialist can manage them, and outages are rare.

The honest limitation: the cheapest plan gives you 30 GB of storage per person, shared across mail and files, which a document-heavy office can fill faster than you’d expect. Stepping up to the next plan (Business Standard, about $14 per user per month) raises that to 2 TB and adds a few features, and for a lot of businesses that’s the tier that actually fits.

Microsoft 365

We set this up for clients too, and for the right business it’s the better answer. We’re not going to pretend otherwise.

Microsoft 365 gives you mail through Outlook and Exchange, plus the desktop versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams. If your business already lives in those programs, if you have people building heavy spreadsheets, working in Word all day, or running everything through Teams, then Microsoft 365 fits the way you already work, and pulling your team off those tools to save a couple of dollars a head rarely pays off.

Pricing is close to Workspace’s. Business Basic (web and mobile apps, no installed desktop programs) is about $7 per user per month as of mid-2026; Business Standard (which adds the installed desktop apps) is about $14. Microsoft raised these prices in July 2026, so check the current rate before you budget.

Where it’s genuinely stronger: deep Office document work, Windows-heavy offices that want tight control over company computers, and teams already standardized on Teams for calls and chat. Where it costs you: it’s a more complicated system to administer. The admin side has more knobs, more licensing tiers, and more ways to get confused, which is fine if you have IT support and a real reason to be there, and less fine if you just want email that works.

Proton Mail

The third option, and a more specialized one. Proton is a privacy-focused, encrypted email provider based in Switzerland. Most small businesses don’t need it, and we’ll say that plainly. But it comes up in one specific place worth knowing about: healthcare.

Some medical practices choose Proton because it’s built around strong encryption and, on a paid business plan, will sign a business associate agreement, the contract a provider needs in order to handle protected health information under HIPAA. Because it’s privacy-first by design, it tends to need less hands-on setup to use safely for sensitive mail. A handful of practices we’re aware of use it that way, and a few run it alongside Workspace, Workspace for the everyday business mail, Proton routed in for the specific mail that needs the extra protection, with rules directing messages to the right place. That’s a more advanced setup, and it’s the kind of thing worth designing deliberately rather than stumbling into.

For a typical small business with no special privacy or compliance need, Proton is more than you need, and its tighter, more secure design can feel less convenient day to day. But if you’re a practice weighing how to handle sensitive mail, it belongs on your list.

A word on HIPAA, since practices always ask

Here’s the part worth being clear about, because it’s widely misunderstood: all three of these can be used in a HIPAA-compliant way, and none of them is automatically compliant just because you paid for it.

With Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, a paid business plan plus a signed business associate agreement gets you the legal foundation, but that’s only step one. Both still require deliberate setup: turning on the right protections, restricting which built-in services are allowed to touch patient information, and training your team. Out of the box, both are built for general business use, not healthcare, so the default settings leave gaps. (With Google you sign the agreement yourself in the admin console; with Microsoft it’s already part of the commercial plan’s terms.) Proton reaches the same place with less configuration, because it’s built privacy-first, but you still need the paid business tier and the signed agreement, and you still have to use it correctly.

The short version: HIPAA compliance is never a checkbox you buy. It’s a signed agreement plus real setup plus how your team actually works. If you’re a practice, that setup is worth getting right the first time, and it’s exactly the kind of thing we help with.

So which one?

Here’s how we’d actually advise you.

For most small businesses and practices, start with Google Workspace. It’s affordable, it’s simple, your team already knows how to use it, and it stays out of your way, which is exactly what you want from email. That’s our honest first recommendation, and it’s what we chose for ourselves.

Choose Microsoft 365 instead if your business genuinely runs on the desktop Office programs or on Teams, or if you’re a Windows-heavy office that wants tight control over company computers. In that case, matching the tools you already use is worth more than a small difference in price.

Consider Proton if you’re a healthcare practice or anyone with a real need to handle sensitive mail under strong encryption and a signed HIPAA agreement, either on its own or alongside Workspace.

And whatever you pick, a few things are true across all three: get it on your own domain, turn on the extra sign-in step (two-factor authentication) for every account, and set up the behind-the-scenes email records (called SPF, DKIM, and DMARC) that prove your mail is really from you and keep it out of spam folders. That last part is where a lot of do-it-yourself setups quietly go wrong, and it’s worth getting right the first time.