Proton for Business review

What Proton for Business actually does

Proton for Business is a workplace suite built around encryption rather than around collaboration. A team gets Proton Mail on its own domains, a calendar, Drive with Docs and Sheets, Meet for video calls, Pass for shared credentials and Proton VPN, all administered from a single panel and billed per user. The technical distinction from the mainstream suites is that content is encrypted end to end, so the provider holds ciphertext it cannot read, the company states plainly that not even Proton can see user data.

That design choice comes from the company's origins and its jurisdiction. Proton is Swiss, operates under European privacy law, publishes its clients as open source, holds ISO 27001 certification and has completed a SOC 2 Type II audit, and supports customers with GDPR, HIPAA and CCPA obligations. It reports more than 100,000 organisations on the business product, concentrated in law firms, healthcare providers, newsrooms, financial advisers, nonprofits and technology companies protecting source code, buyers for whom a subpoena to the mail provider, or a vendor training models on customer content, is a live concern rather than a talking point.

Key features

The suite is deliberately narrow, and each app assumes the encryption model rather than working around it.

• Encrypted mail with custom domains and unlimited addresses per user, plus migration tools from other providers
• Calendar, Drive, Docs and Sheets sharing the same encrypted storage allocation
• Proton Meet for team calls, with participant caps that differ by tier
• Proton Pass with shared vaults so credentials leave the spreadsheet, and Proton VPN for staff on untrusted networks
• Admin controls for access, permissions, storage and SAML single sign-on via Okta, Entra ID or Google
• Data retention policies and the Lumo AI assistant on the premium tier

Who it's for

The clearest fit is a team of five to a hundred people whose product is confidentiality: a law firm handling privileged correspondence, a clinic under HIPAA, a newsroom protecting sources, a consultancy holding client intellectual property. For those teams the calculation is not feature parity with Google, it is whether a provider can be compelled to hand over readable content, and here it cannot. Consolidating mail, storage, passwords and VPN into one vendor also removes three separate renewal conversations.

It is the wrong choice for a team whose day runs through shared spreadsheets, third-party add-ons and heavy real-time co-editing. Proton's document tools work, but they do not yet match what Google Workspace users take for granted, and the encrypted model means the long tail of integrations, CRM sidebars, e-signature plugins, analytics connectors, mostly is not there. Compliance-heavy organisations should also check their e-discovery obligations before migrating, because the visibility administrators normally have into mailbox content is intentionally absent.

How it compares

Google Workspace remains far ahead on collaboration, admin tooling and the ecosystem around it, at the cost of a provider that processes content to deliver features. Microsoft 365 wins in organisations already standardised on Windows, Teams and Entra, and its compliance and retention tooling is deeper, though its privacy posture is the same as Google's in substance. Tuta is cheaper and also encrypted, but it is mail and calendar rather than a suite, with no VPN, password manager or document editing. Against those three, Proton's position is that it is the only one offering a full encrypted stack a small team can actually run its week on.

Verdict

Proton has turned a privacy product into a credible business suite, and the bundle, mail, storage, meetings, passwords and VPN under one admin panel, is better value than assembling the same protections from separate vendors. The caveat is that encryption sets the ceiling: document collaboration lags, integrations are scarce, and administrators give up some of the visibility they are used to. Teams that need those things will resent the trade; teams that chose the product because of it will find the trade fair.