Looking for a Paubox alternative?
Paubox facts were verified on their public pages on July 17, 2026. If you need a BAA, this comparison has a one-word answer: them.
Facts verified 2026-07-17 — corrections: hello@emailfast.dev
Start with the disqualifier: Paubox includes a BAA with every account and is HITRUST CSF certified first-party, and Email Fast does not offer a BAA today — if HIPAA governs your email, choose Paubox, full stop. For general senders outside healthcare compliance, one line in their security docs frames the rest: master encryption keys are held in their cloud KMS. Provider-held. Ours can be yours.
The comparison
| Paubox | Email Fast | |
|---|---|---|
| Healthcare compliance | HITRUST CSF certified, first-party; BAA included with all accounts | No BAA offered today — if you need one, choose Paubox |
| Key custody | Master encryption keys held in their cloud KMS — provider-held | organizations can bring their own encryption keys — enroll, rotate, suspend, or revoke — and revocation fails closed: new sends are rejected and stored secrets become unreadable, to us included |
| At-rest message content | — | BYOK organizations can additionally enable at-rest message encryption: recipient, subject, and body stored as ciphertext under per-recipient keys wrapped by the customer's key — revoke the key and the stored content is unreadable everywhere, instantly |
| Recipient experience | No-portal delivery — recipients read mail as mail, credit where due | Standard email delivery; no portals either |
| Pricing | Per-sender, with 5-seat minimums | Volume-based; contacts and subscribers are never billed — we price sending, not the size of your audience. (pricing) |
| Developer surface | Strong SDK, MCP, and llms surface — credit where due | SDKs for the browser (EmailJS-compatible), Node.js, Python, PHP, Go, and Ruby, plus a zero-dependency CLI and a published OpenAPI specification |
encrypted sends give up click-tracking, send-time optimization, and per-recipient analytics — that is what “we can't read it” costs, and we say so.
Custody is the axis
Their security docs are candid enough to answer the only question that matters here: who can decrypt. Master keys in their cloud KMS means the provider can. That answer is the industry's answer — as of July 2026, none of the twelve competitor platforms we surveyed offers customer-held encryption keys for message content — the closest, a healthcare email provider, documents that its master keys live in its own cloud KMS. We built the other one: organizations can bring their own encryption keys — enroll, rotate, suspend, or revoke — and revocation fails closed: new sends are rejected and stored secrets become unreadable, to us included. And when delivery itself needs proving, delivered messages can mint an Ed25519-signed delivery certificate — receiving mail server, TLS details, the server's SMTP response, and timestamps, with the recipient stored only as a keyed hash — chained into a tamper-evident ledger and verifiable without trusting us. More for security teams: enterprise.
Where Paubox is the right choice
- HIPAA applies to you. A BAA on every account, first-party HITRUST CSF, and a healthcare-specialist product — this isn't close, and pretending otherwise would say more about us than about them.
- You want the no-portal recipient experience with healthcare compliance behind it.
- Per-sender pricing fits a defined clinical team — a bounded set of senders may cost less that way than by volume.
Switching
Only if you don't need the BAA — we won't help you talk yourself out of a compliance requirement. For general senders: start with a sandbox key — sandbox keys (ef_sandbox_…) that run the real pipeline dry: real validation, real rendering, real events, a hosted capture inbox — and no email leaves. Live delivery opens at launch.
Paubox is a trademark of its owner; Email Fast is not affiliated with or endorsed by them. Facts about Paubox were verified on their public pages on the date above — corrections: hello@emailfast.dev.
Questions, answered plainly
Does Email Fast offer a HIPAA BAA?
No. If you need a BAA, choose Paubox — they include one with every account and hold first-party HITRUST CSF certification. We'd rather lose the comparison than blur that line.
Who holds the encryption keys at each?
Paubox's security docs state master encryption keys are held in their cloud KMS — provider custody. Here, organizations can bring their own encryption keys — enroll, rotate, suspend, or revoke — and revocation fails closed: new sends are rejected and stored secrets become unreadable, to us included. And you can go further — BYOK organizations can additionally enable at-rest message encryption: recipient, subject, and body stored as ciphertext under per-recipient keys wrapped by the customer's key — revoke the key and the stored content is unreadable everywhere, instantly — and encrypted sends give up click-tracking, send-time optimization, and per-recipient analytics — that is what “we can't read it” costs, and we say so.
Is Email Fast SOC 2 or HITRUST certified?
Neither. We hold no third-party attestations today and list exactly that on our open security page, alongside what we ran instead — a 19-stage adversarial security review, run to zero confirmed findings. That review was internal and adversarial — a documented find→refute→fix→re-verify loop — not a third-party audit. We say exactly which one we have.
Who is each product for?
Paubox serves healthcare senders who need compliance included; Email Fast serves general senders who want key custody, proof of delivery, and owned infrastructure. Different jobs, honest boundary.