Fastmail vs Gmail (Google Workspace)
Fastmail and Gmail (Google Workspace) are both email server software. Fastmail is a commercial product from Fastmail Pty Ltd. Gmail (Google Workspace) is a commercial product from Google.
Which to pick
- Pick Fastmail when
- An individual, family or small business wants fast, private email on its own domain without Google or Microsoft.
- Pick Gmail (Google Workspace) when
- A business wants reliable hosted email with strong spam filtering and works mostly in the browser.
Side by side
Paid, ad-free email hosting with calendars, contacts, custom domains and masked email addresses, built on open standards (IMAP, JMAP, CalDAV).
Business email on your own domain using Gmail, with spam filtering, shared calendars and admin controls through Google Workspace.
No office suite or file storage included, and data is held in Australia and the US.
Moving away later is a chore, and shared mailboxes and delegation are weaker than in Exchange.
Production-ready (both)
Cloud service and mobile app (both)
Not published (both)
Closed source, sold by Fastmail Pty Ltd
Closed source, sold by Google
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code. (both)
586 Wikipedia readers a month on phones
90k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Other comparisons
More email servers and webmail
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.