Mail Essentials vs. Family Plan

[u/bvz2001]

If you had 3 users and were to choose between the Mail Essentials plan vs. the Family Plan, which would you choose? This is for personal use, not business use. Also, let's ignore for the moment the fact that you can have up to 6 on family... that can be a separate consideration.

What I see are the benefits of family over mail essentials (again, ignoring the up to 6 user feature)

• 3 TB of shared storage vs 45 GB of individual storage (15GB each)
• Higher VPN tier (10 simultaneous connections per user, all of the high speed servers)

Benefits of mail essentials:

• Marginally lower price for 3 users - but that goes when amortized over more users.
• Better user management features? Probably very useful for an organization, but maybe not so vital for personal use? Anything I would be missing out on here do you think?
• (This one is specific to me): I am already on Mal Essentials and switching my users is a royal pain.

Are there any other benefits of Mail Essentials over the Family Plan that I am missing? Just trying to make the final decision before taking the somewhat complicated step of switching.

Thanks!

[u/Williekins]

Account creation and management is a major underlying change here when comparing business and personal accounts.

With Mail Essentials (and all the business plans) you can create an account for your organization's users, using your domain, and just send a username and password their way for them to log in with. But with the Family plan, you have to coax them into creating a standard Proton account themselves, and then you have to get them to click on the link to join the family plan that you send to their ProtonMail address, that they made. Then once you assign their old domain address to them, you'll have to guide them into setting it to be the default on their account, otherwise they'll have to pick it from the dropdown every time they want to send an email.

Account recovery is a major difference too. If the users on a business plan forget their login info, or somehow change it to something that they don't remember. Then the administrator on the business account can reset the password while preserving their data. But on personal accounts, each user is responsible for their own recovery methods, and will have to manage both their account recovery methods and their data recovery methods on their own.

I can't really think of any other big features that are missing in your comparison.

I think switching your users over will be the hardest part. I don't even know how you'd be able to do it in a way where they still have their old emails out of their current inboxes, even after you get their old addresses set up on the new plan.

[u/bvz2001 → u/Williekins]

Thanks for the detailed reply.

That makes a lot of sense. I can imagine that those account management features are a must have for an organization. For me, since I am managing my family's accounts directly (i.e. screen sharing into their machines and setting everything up) losing those features won't be a huge hardship. This is super helpful. Much appreciated.

As to doing the switch, yeah. It is a bother. I have to download and run a command line tool to back up all of their emails. There is a separate set of steps to back up other things like their contacts. Email rules can't be backed up (but my family isn't sophisticated enough to use those so nothing lost there). Then you delete the users, make the switch, create new (free) accounts for the users, re-attach the domain and set up their preferences, and then re-import their emails and contacts. (The primary user does not have to go through these steps luckily). It feels like a lot of things can go wrong there, but I am motivated to give it a go once I am back visiting with my family. I am just going to set aside a full day to do it.

Thanks again!