Why I Switched Back from Proton Mail to Google Workspace

A little over a year ago, I moved my business email from Microsoft 365 to Proton Mail. The pitch was exactly what I wanted to hear: strong privacy defaults, European hosting, and a bundle that included a VPN and password manager. I’ve also been guilty of the lifelong quest for the “best email provider” and “best email client,” so the promise of a coherent, privacy-first suite was irresistible. Proton stores business data in Switzerland or Germany and wraps it in end-to-end and zero-access encryption — a clear, values-based alternative to Big Tech.

Setup Is Simple—Until Bridge

Getting set up was simple. If you stick to Proton’s own apps on desktop and mobile, everything works as designed. But the moment you want to keep your favorite desktop client (Apple Mail, Outlook, Thunderbird), you add Proton Bridge — a background app that decrypts mail locally and exposes an IMAP/SMTP account to your client. It’s clever, but it’s another daemon to babysit, with certificates to install on macOS and occasional sync hiccups when clients and Bridge disagree.

When Reliability Falters

Then there was reliability. Twice this year I ran into outages right as I needed to file or confirm interviews. One was brief; another wasn’t. In January 2025, Proton Mail had a global incident that took services down and was still recovering hours later, according to BleepingComputer’s blow-by-blow. Crowd reports flagged a separate, roughly hour-long interruption on February 4. Proton does publish a status page, but in my case I learned faster from colleagues and social posts than from an in-app banner.

Support Lag and Mobile Search Gaps

Support didn’t help my patience. Replies arrived a day later and leaned heavily on macros. That’s survivable when everything else is frictionless. It wasn’t. Search on mobile often felt constrained, and hunting for older threads became a detour to the desktop. Proton’s own docs explain why: true content search happens against a local, device-specific index; historically, the mobile apps didn’t offer the same depth. Proton says rebuilt iOS and Android apps are rolling out with “advanced message search” and offline improvements — welcome news, but it arrived after months of working around the gap.

Calendaring Without CalDAV

Calendaring was the bigger daily papercut. Proton Calendar is thoughtfully encrypted, but there’s still no official CalDAV/CardDAV support to plug it into the OS-level calendars and contacts that my workflows rely on. Proton’s own guidance focuses on subscribing to external calendars by URL or importing/exporting ICS rather than syncing via CalDAV. That design choice keeps encryption strict — but it walls you into Proton’s apps and away from the universal glue that makes mixed environments painless. Meanwhile, Google exposes a documented CalDAV interface that every platform understands.

Bridge Fragility and Mobile Lock-In

Bridge itself was… fussy. It mostly worked, but when it didn’t, the fix was often “reset the cache and re-add the account.” Proton’s support pages are long on Bridge troubleshooting for SSL, timeouts, and client quirks — exactly the kind of “works until it doesn’t” complexity I don’t want between me and an editor on deadline. On mobile there’s no Bridge at all, so you must use the Proton Mail app; that’s fine in theory, but it means your iPhone’s default Mail app can’t pull your Proton inbox.

Bundle Value and Early AI

The bundle value also felt uneven. Proton Drive has been racing to catch up with performance and cross-platform parity (notably a Linux desktop app), and the team’s summer roadmap reads like a focused push on speed, photos, and collaboration — all good signs, but again, it’s in flight. Proton’s new AI bets split in two: Scribe (a writing assistant inside Mail) and Lumo (a separate private AI chatbot). Scribe is positioned as an add-on for business plans, and Lumo only launched in July — already at version 1.1 with promised leaps in speed and reasoning. It’s encouraging, but the day-to-day feels early compared with the deep, native AI in Google’s stack.

What I Gained Returning to Google

Which brings me to the other half of the decision: what I got the moment I returned to Google Workspace.

Uptime That’s Predictable

First, the plumbing. Google’s uptime commitment is a plain-English 99.9% SLA across core services. That’s table stakes for a newsroom-adjacent life. Proton, to its credit, now advertises a 99.95% business SLA — but a higher SLA on paper doesn’t erase how fragile my setup felt when Bridge, mobile, and calendar all had sharp edges at once.

Interoperability by Default

Second, interoperability. I can add or share calendars with anyone and expect them to land where they live — Apple Calendar, Outlook, Fantastical — because CalDAV is the lingua franca. Contacts sync without drama. I can swap devices or clients at will with no glue code in the middle. That’s the boring, reliable convenience you only miss once it’s gone.

AI Where the Work Happens

Third, the AI that actually saves me time. Since January, Google has been rolling Gemini features directly into Workspace subscriptions. In Gmail, “Ask Gemini” now summarizes long threads, extracts action items, and drafts replies in context; summary cards even appear automatically atop sprawling conversations. The upshot is less copying into a separate bot and more finishing work inside the tool where the work lives.

Pricing, in Context

Price wasn’t decisive but it mattered. Workspace Business Starter/Standard/Plus runs roughly $8.40 / $16.80 / $26.40 per user on monthly “flex” billing in the U.S., with annual discounts. Proton’s business tiers vary by bundle, with Mail Professional at $9.99/user (annual) and suite pricing generally in the ~$7–$13/user range for mail-centric plans. If you want Drive, Pass, VPN, Scribe, and priority support, the sticker can climb. In my case, the cost difference didn’t outweigh the workflow friction.

Not an Indictment of Proton

None of this is an indictment of Proton’s mission. If your threat model demands end-to-end encrypted mail, calendar, files, and passwords under European jurisdiction — and you’re happy to live inside Proton’s apps — it’s a coherent, steadily improving suite. But if your day depends on universal protocols, plug-and-play clients, and AI that’s tightly woven into email and docs, Google still feels like the shortest path between idea and sent. For me, journalism deadlines beat my inner privacy absolutist.

The Trade-Off I Chose

So I switched back.

Rooting for a Better Proton

And yes, I still want Proton to win. A healthy market needs a credible privacy-first vendor pushing the big platforms to do better. I’ll keep an eye on their roadmaps — and if CalDAV shows up, mobile search feels as strong as desktop, and Bridge becomes invisible, I’ll happily try again. For now, I’m choosing boring reliability, deep integrations, and AI that saves me an hour a day. That trade-off is worth it.