Proton Review: Can It Compete With Google?

If you’ve lived in the Google ecosystem, you’ve gotten used to having a set of apps that are seamlessly integrated with one another. You can move from email to calendar to tasks and back without ever missing a beat. After signing up on the free plans of a few different providers, I realized that I wanted to maintain that level of integration as far as possible. This factor, more than any other, led me to choose Proton as my replacement for Gmail and Co.

Now, after transferring all of my mail, calendars, passwords and more into this new ecosystem and using it on a daily basis, the question is: Can it compete with Google? Or does it feel like an expensive imitation? Read on to find out…

What Proton Offers

Proton has grown from a privacy-focused email service into a comprehensive suite of tools designed to replace much of what Google provides. Their ecosystem now includes:

• Proton Mail: Encrypted email with a clean and familiar web interface along with mobile apps
• Proton Calendar: Basic calendar functionality with event scheduling and sharing
• Proton Drive: Cloud storage with end-to-end encryption
• Proton Pass: Password manager with auto-fill capabilities
• Proton VPN: Virtual private network service
• Proton Docs: Basic document creation and editing (relatively new)
• Proton Wallet: A cryptocurrency wallet that currently only supports Bitcoin

Compared to the Google universe of apps, the most crucial bases are covered here (email, calendar and drive) along with a few things unique to Proton (VPN & Bitcoin wallet). What I currently miss from this lineup (or as a feature in the existing apps) is a task manager (like GTasks) and a basic notetaking app (like Google Keep). There are some fairly simple workarounds for this, but they aren’t as elegant as dedicated apps or features. Hopefully, these will be added in the not too distant future.

Pricing

Obviously, you can’t beat Google for the price. Many of its apps can be used for free and their feature set is robust. But if that was all you were interested in, you wouldn’t be here. Using Google’s services may not cost you money, but it does have a cost. I’ll leave it at that for now.

Proton’s pricing structure revolves around several tiers, starting with a limited free plan and scales up through Plus, Unlimited, Duo and Family plans. The Duo plan is meant (as you might expect) for two users while the Family plan can support up to six.

The Plus plans (available for Mail, Drive, Pass, VPN) provide individual apps at a reduced price – often bundled with other apps in a limited mode. For instance the Mail Plus package offers the full Mail and Calendar experience, but also provides limited functionality for VPN, Wallet, Pass and Drive. Unfortunately, this overlap between the various Plus packages means one cannot mix and match these packages to create a custom plan. It seems if you want more than one Plus package, you need to subscribe to the Unlimited plan or higher. This is slightly annoying – mainly because this isn’t made clear anywhere until trying to complete the purchase of a second Plus plan. This attempt simply fails and gives you the error message you wish you would have known earlier.

However, despite the odd pricing structure anomalies, the prices seem in line with most competitors in this space and compare closely to Google’s paid offerings.

What Proton Gets Right

Support That Actually Supports Let’s start with something that’s become depressingly rare in tech: good customer service. When I had a problem with my calendar app, the Proton Support team was responsive, knowledgeable and genuinely helpful. No chatbots, no endless loops – just real people solving real problems. Also, this was before I signed up as an affiliate – so they had no idea who I was or that this website would ever exist.

It Just Works This might sound like faint praise, but in a world where privacy-focused alternatives often feel like beta software, Proton’s core features work reliably. Emails arrive when they should, calendars sync properly and I haven’t encountered the kind of frustrating bugs that would make me want to crawl back to Gmail move to another competitor.

Migration Made Simple Importing my Gmail (over 9,000 emails!) was surprisingly painless. Proton’s import tool handled it without a hiccup. So far, I haven’t noticed anything missing or any compatibility issues. My calendar transition was equally smooth. Apart from one time my calendar app seemed to hang early on after importing my calendars (the aforementioned support case, which was quickly resolved), everything has worked as you would expect.

Universal Compatibility Whether you’re on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, or iOS, Proton has you covered. As someone who runs different operating systems on different devices, that kind of cross-platform consistency is a real breath of fresh air. Proton’s compatibility with Linux was particularly important to me, as that OS will play a much larger role in my near future.

Where Proton Falls Short

Pricing Confusion As mentioned above, Proton’s pricing structure feels a bit too complex and opaque – particularly for those working on a budget. They do offer a limited free plan and the Mail Plus plan includes more than just Mail and Calendar features, so I can’t knock Proton too much for this, but it made for a less than ideal start to my transition to Proton.

Calendar Limitations Coming from Google Calendar, I expected basic task management functionality. Proton Calendar handles events well, but if you need integrated to-do lists or task tracking, you’ll need to look elsewhere. For me, this wasn’t a deal-breaker, but more of a minor annoyance. I wound up creating my own task manager in Obsidian that does the trick for now, but it certainly is a feature that Proton should prioritize adding soon.

Docs: Early Days Proton Docs exists, but calling it a Google Docs competitor would be generous. It’s functional for basic document creation and editing, but the feature set is sparse. If collaborative document editing is central to your workflow, you’ll likely need supplementary tools.

No Spreadsheet Solution Similarly, there’s nothing available here if you are looking for a Google Sheets or Excel replacement in the Proton ecosystem. I imagine it will be added somewhere down the road, but that road may be a long one… We will see.

Pass Performance Issues Proton Pass works, but it’s not always snappy. There are occasional delays in recognizing login fields and auto-fill doesn’t always trigger when expected. This might be partly due to my choice of browser (Waterfox – a Firefox fork), but it’s an issue that I have noticed on more than one occasion.

Graphene OS & Mail This one is a fairly niche complaint, but its worth mentioning. It seems that the Proton Mail app needs Google Play Services in order to provide timely notifications about incoming mail. If you don’t use Graphene OS on your phone, this likely won’t apply to you. But for those trying to fully degoogle, this little quirk can be a bit frustrating. Workarounds exist, but it would be nice if it would work flawlessly on a degoogled phone right from the get go.

The Verdict

Switching to Proton was a mostly seamless experience. It offers about 90% of what I regularly used with Google, plays nice with my various devices and doesn’t leave a bad taste in my mouth every time I use it.

The frustrations are real but manageable. For most of these issues, I’ve been able to find workarounds and solutions that work well enough. Now that those are in place, hiccups are extremely rare.

I’m happy to have made the switch and I look forward to seeing how Proton develops down the road. I am also delighted to be supporting a company that – as far as I can tell – is trying to do things the right way. I can only hope it stays that way.

Is Proton perfect? No. Is it a capable replacement for the standard Google suite? Yes, and it is improving/expanding at a notable pace. Do I recommend it? Of course!